Residence of Evil: Quarantine

So you start in the quarantine zone's outer district, called the Greenbelt, and right away the game throws you into a cramped apartment hallway. You've got a pistol with maybe 12 bullets and a crowbar you found next to a dead body. The first infected you meet are shamblers -- slow, predictable, but they come in groups. Your first real lesson is that ammo is scarce, so you learn to use that crowbar a lot. The sound of it hitting bone is gross but satisfying.

The loop is simple at first: clear a building, check every drawer and cabinet for ammo, health sprays, or weapon parts. You have an inventory grid, like a briefcase with limited slots, so you're always deciding what to drop. That never stops being annoying. Objectives pop up on a handheld radio -- someone named Dr. Chen keeps giving you directions to the next safe zone or research station. The story unfolds through audio logs and notes left on walls.

Around the halfway point, you hit the Subway Nexus level. That's where the difficulty spikes. New infected show up -- Leapers that crawl on ceilings and Spitters that blind you with acid. You'll find a shotgun here, which changes everything because it can stagger multiple enemies at once. The game introduces a crafting bench around this time too. You can combine gunpowder and scrap metal to make ammo, or attach a red dot sight to your pistol for better accuracy.

The satisfying moments are when you clear a whole floor without taking damage, or when you find a secret room behind a bookshelf that contains a suppressed SMG. Stealth actually works in some sections -- you can crouch-walk past infected if you avoid the broken glass on the floor. Later levels like the Hospital Ward have alarms that summon endless enemies, so you learn to shut those off first.

Upgrade system: you find skill points by completing side objectives, like saving a civilian or finding a hidden keycard. You spend them on perks: faster reload, quieter footsteps, or a chance to find rare loot in containers. The game never tells you which perks are best, so you just guess. I went with the one that increases crowbar durability and never regretted it.

There's a boss fight near the end called the Hive Mind -- it's this giant fused mass of bodies that spawns little infected. You need to hit the glowing sacs on its sides while dodging swipes. Took me like eight tries, and I was almost out of shotgun shells when I finally downed it. The game doesn't have a neat ending; you just escape in a helicopter and the credits roll over a map of the city still full of red dots.