Zombies have been everywhere on the Xbox 360 in the past few years, dragging their rotting bones through all styles of game imaginable, from Resident Evil 5 and Read Dead Redemption to Plants vs. Zombies and Dead Pixels. The undead parade isn’t letting up in 2012, either. We’ll mow down the undead as a high-school cheerleader in Lollipop Chainsaw and blow their heads off in the desert in Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. For some, the very idea of zombies in yet another game sounds as overplayed as another vampire drama. This is precisely what fuels the brains behind some of Xbox’s most shuffler-happy games waging World War Z in 2012…

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Just a girl, her chainsaw, boyfriend's talking severed head, and hordes of the undead in Lollipop Chainsaw.

“Everything can be boiled down to a cliché no matter what it is, especially if you’re a cynical person,” Sean Vanaman, lead designer on the upcoming Walking Dead game at Telltale Games, says. “The joy of getting to a saturation point is that people start making clever plays on that cliché.”

Concocting new ways to keep us entertained and engaged is a large part of what keeps the zombie game alive (so to speak). It’s also the make-or-break factor that determines whether or not we’ll care about a new title. “Our game offers a zombie experience in a pop-art style, which I believe players who are tired of serious zombies will love,” says Goichi “Suda51” Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture, the developers of the upcoming Lollipop Chainsaw.

According to Resident Evil 5 vet Tsukasa Takenaka, who recently produced the Nintendo 3DS’s Resident Evil: Revelations, developers don’t have many excuses for failure. “The sky’s the limit as far as creativity is concerned,” he notes. For him, this holds as true for the source of a zombie virus or how it mutates a person into...whatever. From there, he says, the game becomes about the enemies’ numbers, abilities, and intelligence, and what players are allowed to do with them. Suda agrees: “The logic behind zombies is very convenient for game creators,” he says. “While they’re slow and stupid, they’re also a threat in close range and if in a large group, they become an even bigger threat. Zombies allow the player to use a wide range of actions, so it’s easy for them to form their own preferred patterns of play.”

The factors and climate vary for each zombie game, which is the point — even when we see the same ol’ shambling post-human husk, where they are, what they’re doing, and how we approach them is almost always different. Takenaka asserts that “it’s only natural that we haven’t seen a bad zombie game for a while.”

True, the number of outright poor games starring the undead has been slim, but that hasn’t stopped grumblings of a backlash from gamers. The battle for developers, then, is to continue impressing with the unexpected.

A portrait of paranoia from the upcoming Walking Dead game.

Such a twist can be found in The Walking Dead, an adventure-game adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comic series set for a 2012 release. Its premise focuses on relationships and conversations between characters, testing our morality over our reflexes. “We’re all super f***ing good at hitting zombies in the head,” Vanaman says, “but what does it mean for the person swinging the axe?”

Jake Rodkin, Vanaman’s co–lead designer, remembers people “freaking out (in a good way) about the Dead Island announcement trailer in 2011 because of its human element.” Since so many zombie games seem to fall back on action over expression, Telltale is banking on that shared empathy between humans for The Walking Dead. “Hopefully, because of our quieter stuff, the bigger moments where there’s action will have more meaning,” Rodkin says. “If everything’s big, then nothing is big.”

On the other end of the spectrum, a game like Lollipop Chainsaw will be full of hyperkinetic, blood-spurting action, but it also aims to set itself apart by giving zombies a voice. “You’ll see many different personalities with the zombies in Lollipop Chainsaw,” Suda says. “The quiet, silent killer types of zombies are important, but Lollipop Chainsaw needed talkative, expressive zombies who communicate with [protagonist] Juliet as well. The best examples are the boss zombies who are based on music genres; they’ve got the craziest personalities and you’ll enjoy hacking them in half!”