When my wife looked over my shoulder and saw Dead Pixels by CSR Studios, she remarked, "Wow, you're actually playing a zombie game?" It's true, I'd gotten very tired of the zombie trope package, to the point where I told Steam to hide games with the "Zombies" tag. But sometimes you want to play a game that doesn't ask much of you, something where you can zone out and charge up some dopamine and log off satisfied at the end, and it's hard to find a lower common denominator than a 1.5D zombie shooter/brawler.
I say "1.5D" because while you can move in two dimensions, you can only shoot or punch to the right or the left, and levels scroll exclusively right/left. The basic goal: progress as far to the right as you can*. The tools at your disposal include a comical panoply of handguns, shotguns, rifles, grenades, flares, medkits, vials of stinky ooze... Where there's strategy to consider, it's in deciding when to conserve and when to deploy these various resources, to carry you through to the next restock opportunity. There are even three different scenarios or game modes, each of which puts a slightly different spin on the resource-management cycle.
And that's it, really! Shoot zombies, march rightward, get rewarded with bouncing coins and more goofy zombie models and bigger shootier loot. Need that as a break from doomscrolling? You could do worse than this $3 Itch diversion.
* kinda like the whole xenophobic zombie metaphor amirite?? dammit I said I was trying not to think here
