Browser game · Free
Commie vs Zombies
Novyy Mir, 1987. The last socialist city is still standing, the dead are at the wall, and the people inside are still running the trams, the clinic and the radio station. You are one of them.
Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. No ads, no analytics, no cookies, no email field, no launcher, no storefront, no “early access” and nothing to buy. It opens in this tab and it is the whole game.
What this is
A first-person shooter set in Novyy Mir, a socialist city that never got the collapse it was promised. Housing blocks with the lights still on, a commissary where the shelves are posted and counted, a library, a clinic that does not ask what you can pay, a collective farm outside the gate — and past the perimeter wall, the dead. You hold the line, you fetch what the city needs, you fix the tractor, and you talk to the people who live there, because they are the reason the wall is worth standing on.
It is not a neutral game and it is not pretending to be. The zombies are the easy enemy. The thing this game actually has an argument with is the logic that says a place stops deserving to exist the moment it stops turning a profit — that a hospital, a tram line, a block of flats are worth keeping only while somebody is making money out of them. Novyy Mir is a city where that logic lost. The rations are fair and posted where anyone can check them. The radio keeps broadcasting because someone volunteered for the shift. People defend the city because the city belongs to them, which is the entire difference between a home and an asset.
The people in it are not scenery either. Everyone has a name, a job and a place to be at a given hour: the painter at his easel, the clerk at the commissary counter, the barber who wants five labour vouchers for a heroic haircut, the kid who dropped his toy tank outside the gate when the sirens went. Conversations offer you a tone — patriotic, stern, cynical, compassionate — and the city remembers which one you took.
Built the stubborn way, in a text editor: low-poly, PS1-era, plain JavaScript modules with no build step, no engine licence, no launcher and no publisher. Every sound effect is generated in code as it plays. The one thing that is not synthesised is the People’s Radio, which broadcasts six real public-domain recordings, because a station that plays computer-generated music is not a station.
Screenshots
Ten captures from the running game, untouched. Click any of them for a closer look.
Details
- Controls — keyboard and mouse
- WASD to move, mouse to look (click once to capture the pointer). Shift sprints, Space jumps, C crouches. Left mouse fires, right mouse aims down the sights. R reloads, V is melee, Q or the scroll wheel changes weapon, H holsters, X inspects the weapon. E interacts and talks, F is the flashlight, B pushes the motorcycle and G is its horn, Tab opens the PDA of the People, Escape pauses. All sixteen of those are rebindable in Options.
- Controls — controller
- An Xbox or PlayStation pad works throughout, and the on-screen prompts relabel themselves to that pad — A/B/Y and the bumpers on an Xbox controller, the cross, circle and triangle on a DualSense. Plug it in or pair it over Bluetooth, press any button, and it takes over. Stick sensitivity and an off switch are in Options.
- Controls — on a phone
- Touch controls are built in and turn themselves on when a touchscreen is detected: a floating stick under your left thumb, drag anywhere on the right to aim, tap to fire a round, hold to keep firing, plus on-screen USE, JUMP, RELOAD, PUSH and PAUSE buttons. On Android it goes fullscreen and locks to landscape; on iPhone the browser will not allow that, so it asks you to turn the phone sideways yourself. It is genuinely playable on a phone — it is still a shooter, so a keyboard and mouse will always beat a thumb.
- What it runs on
- Any current browser with WebGL2 — Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Edge or Safari — on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS. Integrated graphics are fine. There is no WebAssembly and no plug-in; it is ordinary JavaScript modules and one copy of three.js, served from this domain.
- How long a session runs
- A full day in Novyy Mir is twenty-four real minutes — one real second is one minute on the city clock — and the light, the shifts and the people's schedules move with it. Half an hour gets you a day, an errand or two and a turn at the wall. You can stop mid-sentence; it keeps your place.
- Does it save?
- Yes. Named save slots and an autosave, with a screenshot on each slot, held in your own browser's storage on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no save server to go down or get sold. Clearing this site's data in your browser deletes them, so treat a browser clean-up as deleting your saves.
- Download size
- Nothing to install. The whole game is about 112 MB across roughly 200 files, and most of that is character models and the six radio tracks, which arrive as the city needs them rather than all at once — the code itself is under 6 MB. Your browser caches it, so coming back is quick. On a metered connection, know that going in.
- Does it need an account?
- No. No sign-up, no login, no email field anywhere in the game.
- Does it track you?
- No. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party scripts, no cookies. The game could not phone home even if it wanted to: this domain's security headers only let it load files from itself, and there is not a single request to any other host in it.
- Is it finished?
- It is playable from start to end of what is written, and it is still being worked on. Things will get added; nothing you can already do is going behind a price.
Play it
That is the whole pitch. It is free, it opens in this tab, and it asks you for nothing first.
Support
This stays free
Commie vs Zombies is free, has no ads and does not track you. It is made by one person, between feeds and naps with a newborn. If you got an evening out of it, that is worth something.
The Ko-fi link opens in a new tab. There is no Ko-fi widget script on this site — nothing third-party runs on this page.