About Zombienautics

zom·bie·nau·tics /ˌzɒmbiːˈnɔːtɪks/ noun

1. The (fictional) science of crewed spaceflight using reanimated crews. From zombie and Greek nautēs, “sailor”.

2. An independent game studio and publisher, founded in 2019.

Zombienautics develops its own games and publishes games from independent partner studios. We run the place a little like a space agency — releases are launches, our news feed is called Transmissions, and the coffee machine is labelled Mission Control — but at heart we are a small team that loves dark, atmospheric sci-fi.

The universe

Our in-house games share one setting: a near future in which space agencies stopped sending the living into space and started sending the dead.

The logic is cold and simple. A reanimated crew needs no oxygen, no water and no food. It shrugs off radiation, tolerates temperatures from −80 °C to +60 °C and never needs a ride home. Strip out the life support and you can go further, cheaper, with a lot less paperwork.

“We spent sixty years and several trillion dollars keeping people alive in space. Nobody asked whether they needed to be.” — Director Ingrid Vasquez-Holm, Mission Control

What could possibly go wrong is the subject of every game we make.

How we work

Small crews, long missions

We keep our teams small and our projects focused. And no crunch — we leave the undead work ethic to our characters.

Dark, but never joyless

Our games draw on the claustrophobic sci-fi of Aliens, Prometheus and Pandorum. The dread is real; the jokes are deadpan.

Partners, not payloads

When we publish a game, its developers keep creative control. Our job is to get it off the ground and keep it flying. See Publishing.

Mission timeline