Zombies vs. Bananas - ‘Deadly Days: Roadtrip’
October has traditionally been my favorite time of year, as it's when I ascend to my full power as a horror sicko. My plan had been to devote all my columns in October 2025 to horror and horror-adjacent gaming, which is why I picked up Deadly Days: Roadtrip. Then, suddenly, I didn't have a column anymore. Now that I'm trying this again, however, I might as well revisit the subject.
Now in Steam Early Access, Deadly Days is unusually bite-size even for a “bullet heaven” roguelike. As a nameless survivor of an unexplained zombie apocalypse, you wander down the highway in search of loot, scrap metal, and most importantly, gas for your converted school bus. Once the bus's tank is full, you can escape to the next map, and the cycle begins again.
That description might make this sound like this is a game that takes itself seriously, but I assure you, it does not. Deadly Days treats its zombie hellscape like a violent theme park attraction, complete with an up-tempo jazzy soundtrack, a few deeply silly power-ups, and a guy in a banana costume who’s inexplicably the best character in the game.
At the start of a run through Deadly Days, you pick a destination based upon the size of its map, the chance you’ll find loot there, and how hard it’ll be to find more gas. Once you’re there, you have to deal with a constant influx of hostile undead while you scrounge through nearby cars, tents, and dumpsters for whatever useful material you can find, primarily fuel.
Most of the enemies in Deadly Days are built around forcing you to stay in motion, such as big zombies that fire projectiles in a slow arc or charging zombies dressed in football uniforms. Standing still is death, but you can’t move and loot simultaneously. That sets up each level as a constant scramble for space control.
Once you’ve got enough gas to start your bus back up, you can leave. Before you do, you can grind zombies to level or keep searching for upgrade items, which include new weapons, passive buffs, and adding additional properties to your attacks like poison or fire. You’ll also need to use a sort of Resident Evil 4 “inventory Tetris” mechanic to keep your weapons and passives in sync, as you only have so much space in your backpack.
The longer you stay in a given area, the more dangerous the zombies get, so you’ve got to balance your chances of survival vs. your desire to grind. Each level has a hard limit of 12 minutes, but in practice, you’ll probably have to bail after 4 to 6.
Your goal in a run is to live through the next eight days until you can track down and destroy a “super mutant” and its nest. At that point, you can either enter Endless Mode and survive for as long as possible, or return to your camp to spend upgrade tokens and prepare for another run.
Deadly Days is an Early Access game, so it’s got its share of first-installment weirdness. It runs well and you can play all the way to the end of a run without an issue, but you can tell that the developers are still figuring out the math.
The zombie hordes ramp up insanely fast and inconsistently, while most of the available weapons aren’t worth much without the right combination of passives. In the version of Deadly Days I’ve been playing, the best build I’ve found revolves around picking up a baseball bat and infusing it with all the bonuses you can find. In a game where I could theoretically be dual-wielding shotguns, I keep going back to old faithful Excalibat. Nothing else in your arsenal has the crowd control you need once you get a couple of levels in.
This has partially to do with how your character build is limited by your hands. You can equip up to two one-handed weapons, but long guns require both arms to wield, and I’ve yet to find one of the latter that’s worth the tradeoff. For some reason, in a game that’s terminally silly the rest of the time, its one concession to realism comes from your weaponry. Sure, it’s always a little ridiculous in one of these games when one guy has a cloud of six guns hovering around him like that one scene in Sunset Overdrive, but that’s what you need to fight an incoming army.
In retrospect, now that I’ve written all this out, it’s probably a misnomer to call Deadly Days a bullet heaven game. It’s got a lot in common with something like Brotato, but deliberately limits your power curve so you’re always on the back foot. It takes a lot of successful runs or a couple of very rare drops before you can consistently reach a point at which you’re more dangerous to the zombies than they are to you.
All that aside, while I’ve developed some comments and complaints, I started this column because I wasn’t able to put Deadly Days down for about a week. It's easy to pick up, play for a little while, and jump back out. Traditionally, these have been the most dangerous sorts of games for me; they’re designed to not require that much of a commitment, but paradoxically, I end up burning a lot of time on them.
Deadly Days has a messy start, you’ll need a few permanent upgrades before it really takes off, and I cannot make up my mind about the soundtrack, but it’s well-animated, slick, and designed to be played in small doses. If you're in the mood for a weird little bite-sized roguelike, it's just the thing.
[Deadly Days: Roadtrip, developed by Pixelsplit and published by Sidekick Publishing, is now available for PC via Steam Early Access for $14.99. This column was written using a code sent to me by a Sidekick PR representative.
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