Freeware Garden: Over My Dead Body

Noel Brody worked for the evil Mortiga Consolidated, but never suspected that protesting the weaponization of her research would lead to her being murdered. What she further failed to imagine was that her death would also transform her into both a zombie and a ghost and get her to star in her very own game: Over My Dead Body.

Noel must now fight her way through Mortiga's lovely-yet-deadly isometric corporate headquarters and exact horrible, bloody revenge on all the immoral bastards who killed her and are apparently about to kill more people for money. Finding a cure for her doubly-undead affliction, or possibly reclaiming her work for the good of humanity, should be considered an added bonus.

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But that's enough plot for you. The real reason for playing Over My Dead Body is experiencing the pretty fabulous idea of being both the zombie and the ghost, and unlike everything I have played so far, doing so simultaneously. One stick controls the zombie, the other the ghost and you'll have to be smart and coordinate your movements in order to progress.

Get those undead avatars too far apart from each other and your screen will split in two halves, which adds that extra bit of confusion. Of course, you can always choose to make things even harder by opting to use the WASD and cursor keys on your keyboard instead of the joypad, but that'd just be mad.

Coordination and reflexes are paramount in Over My Dead Body, as is the ability to solve straightforward puzzles. Your zombie and ghost forms come with different abilities, with one being an ethereal manifestation who can somehow operate terminals and the other being a very physical, very murderous moving corpse. Stunning a guard as a ghost and then eating him up as a zombie is only the most rudimentary of the many puzzle possibilities the dev has implemented.

Over My Dead Body is a varied, clever, charming, always-challenging and at times frustrating game. The only drawback is that things can get a tad slow towards the middle of the thing, as you methodically have to survey large levels and overcome too many obstacles. Oh, and herding panicked scientists towards consoles, though a fun little idea, can be frustratingly fiddly.

Then again, innovative games always come with stuff to be ironed out in later iterations and Over My Dead Body is both innovative and great fun. Highly recommended.