DayZ’s basic premise - to survive brutally difficult conditions - would be difficult enough in a perfect game. That’s just one of the spontaneous, unpredictable situations you might find in DayZ: an early release PC game that’s not even half finished. He steals your pants and runs circles around your corpse, laughing hysterically. As you turn around to leave, a stranger plants an axe in your chest. He suddenly falls to the ground, followed by the distant crack of a sniper’s rifle. Against your better judgement, you carefully approach him, thinking maybe you can free those survivors somehow. He’s flanked by two kneeling men in handcuffs, while holding up a bible and shouting about Jesus and hellfire. You enter the town square of Elektrozavodsk, an abandoned city in a parallel Czech Republic, and see a man surrounded by several dead, naked bodies.
