Instinct is a 2007 First-Person Shooter developed by Digital Spray Studios (who also made You Are Empty) and Newtonic Studio and published by Noviy Disk (in Russia; it was later released in North America by Wild Hare Entertainment), one which is Very Loosely Based on a True Story (emphasis on very, artistic license be damned), notably from what was supposedly a nuclear blast from a faulty weapons test in North Korea, circa 2004. note
Mere hours before a mysterious, mushroom-cloud spawning explosion rocked the mountainous regions of North Korea, a team of elite Spec-ops soldiers were sent to the region to investigate after receiving reports of possible illicit experimentations involving biological weapons and viral warfare.
Infiltrating a top-secret North Korean weapons facility, they are met with opposition from North Korean soldiers and further into the site's interiors... zombies?
Notably, the English version of the game doesn't bother to have English dialogue, instead retaining the original Russian dialogue with subtitles. While the marketing for the game claims this was done "to honor the cultural authenticity" of the game, it's pretty clear it was done to save money because it's a budget title.
No relation to the TV series, the 1999 film or the 2019 film.
September 8th, 2004. 16:03.
Yangado Province, North Korea.
12 Hours and 20 Minutes before the Explosion...
- Air-Vent Passageway: A few stages see you crawling through vents to sneak around the facility.
- Anachronic Order: The cutscenes are flashbacks which aren't played in chronological order, so they can be set in the present, decades in the past, or weeks before the explosion. There's also the fact the game switches perspective between the 3 different spec-ops soldiers, reseting to the start of the incident from their perspective each time.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: The game switches perspective between the 3 different special forces soldiers, starting with team leader Eighth, then infiltration specialist Action Girl Arrow, before concluding with The Lancer White.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: In the final stage, you escaped the facility as everything blows up behind you. But in the last minute, the camera pans before your character, showing you bearing the same visage as the undead creatures and that you've been infected. And you're heading for the nearest human city... The scientist you were sent to collect did give you an injection that might let you keep your cognitive faculties after turning, but since he was pretty nuts at the time and your character was royally pissed at the world at the end anyway, it's a coin toss as to what happens next.
- Automatic Door Malfunction: A lethal version; one of the areas has a malfunctioning, automated sliding door covered in blood, which crushes everything that tries crossing and turning zombies coming from the other room into a pile of red stuff. You'll need to find a control panel to stop said door momentarily before dashing through, but take note that said door can suddenly reactivate and squash you.
- Bare Midriffs Are Feminine:
- Arrow is only wearing a sleeveless camouflage tank top and armored cargo pants. Given she's an Action Girl it's more of a Tank-Top Tomboy look.
- In one cutscene, a woman is injected with the zombie virus by the scientists. As she transforms, she shreds her office shirt until it's just a torn tube-top.
- Battle Strip: You perform one in the final cutscene, effortlessly ripping off your armor and shirt... to expose your bare chest that contains the same veins and skin color as seen on the infected. At least you seem to be turning into a super-zombie.
- BFG: In the last few levels you acquire a crossbow that fires impact grenades. It can send groups of enemies flying, but ammo is relatively scarce.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: You can collect a vest that acts as a second layer of health; it absorbs hits from enemies partially and reduce the damage you're taking to the point where a single shotgun blast only deals 2% of damage!
- Bowdlerise: In the 2024 digital distribution re-release of the game, the enemy nation was changed from North Korea to a generic "R-Nation" (but they forgot to censor the fact the enemy base is in Yangando province, which is in North Korea). While the game is unlikely to ever be sold in North Korea anyway, North Korea is a long-standing close ally of Russia (which does buy Steam video games), with North Korean soldiers currently participating as reinforcements to Russia in the conflict in Ukraine.
- Came from the Sky: The zombie-creating virus the scientists are studying was apparent found inside an advanced storage device that was recovered from the site of what seems to have been a meteor or comet explosion some time prior to the 1950's. Although not outright stated, from context clues it likely came from the Tunguska Event and was buried in the ice for several decades before being dug up by the Soviets.
- Crowbar Combatant: Interestingly enough, despite being some kind of Russian special forces, Eighth's default melee weapon is a crowbar. It's surprisingly effective in smashing out the skulls of zombies and North Korean soldiers alike to save ammo. In comparison Arrow carries a more practical combat knife, and White has no melee weapon and is limited to smacking things with the butt of his shotgun.
- 11th-Hour Superpower: White gets Regenerating Health, a higher jump, and the ability to wield weapons one-handed (but not to duel-wield, so the effect is purely cosmetic) in the game's last couple of levels, as a result of being infected with both the regular zombie virus and a protovirus intended to create zombie Super Soldiers.
- Elite Zombie: Zombies with axes are faster and more aggressive than the normal ones. Zombified commandoes have shotguns and body armor, allowing them to withstand more damage (requiring 2-3 shotgun blasts to kill) as well as attack from range.
- Five-Token Band: Besides Arrow, the 6-person Russian special forces teamnote you are a part of inexplicably includes both Danny Glover and Billy Sole (the Native American soldier from Predator). However, everyone else either dies or gets separated from the alpha team after the helicopter gets shot down, leaving just the 3 main characters.
- Flesh-Eating Zombie: The undead enemies enjoy feasting on human flesh. There are several areas in research labs where the player can come across groups of undead chewing away at humans restrained on beds and operating tables, where they're mostly too busy eating to notice the player.
- Gang Up on the Human: Most of the time, if there are zombies and still-surviving North Korean soldiers onscreen, they'll immediately target the player for no reason. That said, there is an area where you can raise an alarm attracting some North Korean soldiers into a zombie-infested morgue and let them fight it out.
- Gatling Good: The mini-gun, which comes with clips of 500 rounds at a time and can fire away without reloading until it's dry. What's even better is that you obtain it as early as the first stage. Unfortunately, you can only use it while it's mounted on a truck you're riding, since it's too heavy to carry.
- Improperly Placed Firearms: The Russian special forces team you play as is oddly primarily equipped with NATO weapons, including G36C assault rifles and Beretta 92 pistols. This is possibly justified by them not wanting to identify as Russian due to attacking a North Korea base, a country which Russia was trying to re-establish an alliance with in the early 2000's under the leadership of Vladimir Putin after Gorbechev and Yelsin had distanced Russia from North Korea following NK's repeated You Have Failed Me failings. The North Korean soldiers using Mossberg shotguns, however, is much less explicable.
- Mole in Charge:
- The Coordinator of the project, Mr. First, a Krushchev-era Soviet officer, decides to sell out and sell off the project's research data, likely causing the outbreak to cover his escape.
- Your team leader, Eighth, turns out to have sold out to Mr. First prior to the start of the mission, agreeing to steal the protovirus for him for a big payout. Eighth tries to extract the virus from White's blood, but White uses his Psychic Powers to melt Eighth for his betrayal.
- Mooks, but No Bosses: Not a single boss fight the whole game. A "successful test subject" super-zombie called "N" is mentioned in one cutscene, who possesses Super-Strength, a Healing Factor, and the ability to destroy anything carbon-based by thought, but is never actually encountered in the game despite possibly being hinted at having had a role in starting the outbreak. His only plot relevance is the fact that White begins to manifest similar powers in the last couple of levels.
- Psychic Powers: The project's sole successful test subject, "N", is mentioned as having gained the ability to destroy carbon-containing objects remotely by thought. After starting to mutate, White gets Psychic Powers, which he uses to melt Eighth (who was a Double Agent for cash) and also force the Big Bad to rip out his own heart.
- Rodents of Unusual Size: More than one section of the facility contains gigantic, white lab rats which attack by gnawing at your legs.
- Sentry Gun: A few areas in the research facility have gatling turrets which drop from the ceiling upon activation, and blast away at the player on sight. Those areas are, unsurprisingly, devoid of zombies.
- Shoot the Television: In the opening credits, White - a soldier who's apparently in the aftermath of a failed relationship - angrily hurls his beer bottle at the television broadcasting news of the stray nuclear explosion in North Korea, destroying the whole television screen in the process.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: The shotgun is very ammo efficient and can kill most zombies (including the axe-wielding ones) with a single point-blank blast. However, it's too much of a Short-Range Shotgun to be effective against actual soldiers, nor is it a good choice against the zombies with shotguns (their high health means you'll just be trading damage). Also, some normal zombies randomly have double health (they mostly seem to show up in the final level for each character), which means you'll take a whack when you blast them at point blank range and they don't die right away.
- Synthetic Plague: The zombie virus, a top-secret North Korean project, is made in a lab before it inevitably leaks and spread out of control.
- Tempting Fate: Photos you can find on bulletin boards in the labs seem to imply the scientists threw a zombie-themed Halloween costume party before the actual zombie outbreak happened. (Realistically, these are probably photos of the developers goofing around that got thrown into the game).
- Whole-Plot Reference: The game was originally supposed to be based on the Russian action film Paragraph 78, which was essentially a Russian version of the W.S. Anderson Resident Evil films, which also involved a 6-person special forces team infiltrating an isolated lab developing zombies. The movie license fell through on the tail end of development, so the story was changed just enough to be legally distinct (moving the lab from Russia to North Korea, and dropping the love triangle plotline between the 3 main characters - originally, "White" was angry at "Arrow" because she had left him to marry "Eighth").
- Zombie Infectee: You can come across a scientist who used to be one of the facility's researchers (and a Russian, surprisingly - how he ends up in a North Korean biolab is beyond anyone's guess) who details you on the outbreak's backstory, that he's one of the last survivors and by entering the area you're already infected, due to the virus being airborne. He'll give you an antidote that suppresses zombification before blowing his own brains out, but from what the final cutscene shows, it didn't work...