At this stage in the App Store, I feel like I’ve played practically ever iteration of zombie games. I mean, we’ve done everything from shoot zombies from an AC-130 in Zombie Gunship (Free) to, well, making zombies pizza in Zombie Pizza ($0.99). The just-released Zombie Town Story (Free) has you surviving in a zombie apocalypse in a way you might not have done before. (Or maybe you have, as mentioned, there’s a zillion zombie games.) …But, hey, it seems new to me!

The core gameplay loop in Zombie Town Story, aside from managing resources and making survival decisions involves hex grid puzzles to gather resources, salvage weapons, and other zombie apocalypse stuff. Playing these puzzles involves intelligently placing tiles on the board to combine tiles into bigger and bigger units until you can collect them. For instance, harvesting food involves dropping wooden boxes onto the grid, when three of them are next to each other they’ll combine into a can of spam, cans of spam combine into trays of multiple cans of spam, and so on until you’ve got a crate of food you can collect.

The other interesting thing about Zombie Town Story is the way combat works. Instead of being a dual stick shooter or handling combat in a way that has a ton of action, it plays closer to something like a super simplified version of Space Hulk, complete with action points and turns. All in all, Zombie Town Story feels… oddly unexpected. I’m curious to see what the game is like as I get deeper into it, but so far my first impressions are incredibly positive. I am, however, a huge sucker for any game that uses puzzle mechanics in interesting ways.