Arizona Sunshine review: a sass-filled zombie apocalypse

A zombie apocalypse can be a lonely place; thank god for those voices in our heads. Or the voice, in the case of VR experiences such as Arizona Sunshine, which ask us to accept a fundamental paradox. We inhabit the virtual body of a character within the narrative universe, moving them around as we please, the core idea being that we are them, but we’re also clearly not, which we’re reminded of when we hear them speak.

This well-loved game—one of the earliest longform zombie-themed VR experiences—uses this voice, like most productions deploying the technique, to impart objective-defining information. For instance the unnamed protagonist (voiced by Sky Soleil) deduces at one point that “this door is locked, looks like I need a key.” This line reiterates what was pretty clear anyway—borne from the rather unassailable fact that locked doors do indeed need keys—while highlighting this particular door as narratively significant.

Use of voice-over in Arizona Sunshine imbues the experience with comedy and personality, the yee-haw!, zinger-making protagonist delivering vociferous running commentary and quips on his zombie-infested world. In the introductory moments, after waking up in a cave in the middle of the desert, he observes a corpse on the ground, one of its legs snapped off by a bear trap, and bleats: “break a leg, ugly!” Later, walking past a corpse dangling from a tree, he says: “how’s it hanging?”

You’d call these dad jokes if the scenarios weren’t so gnarly. At a push, this joshing and jiving is narratively justified, in the sense the character is desperately lonely and filling the silence. And the constant joking doubles as a message that comedy is a kind of survival tool. 

Here’s another survival tool in Arizona Sunshine: guns! Lots and lots of guns. Rehashing the ancient lone warrior and wandering hero trope, which is particularly common in dystopian stories, the basic quest involves trying to locate a compound where the protagonist (who learns about it through radio broadcasts) can start life anew. To get there we must go through familiar motions i.e. scavenging for ammo and weapons, gunning down countless undead, and navigating to particular spots; wash dry repeat. The sense of déjà vu is exacerbated by a small number of character designs repeated ad nauseam. The locations include various empty homesteads, underground mines, and highways clogged with abandoned vehicles.

The game’s aesthetics are caught in a state familiar to productions released around the same time—with a clumpy, cartoony appearance striving for an unachievable (given the era in which it was made) realism, unwilling to embrace more stylized visuals. With its graphic novel-esque, almost hand drawn-looking presentation, the superior FPS Fracked showed the power of redesigning reality from the ground up, complementing the sassiness of the writing with a kookier texture. I also prefer Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners (another popular zombie shooter from the same era). But Arizona Sunshine is still pretty good: lean, mean, and enjoyably grotesque.