Zombie Mine Quest is a roguelike in which the player enter the Dungeon of Doom in order to retrieve an antidote for the Z-Virus. The 100 dungeon floors always span one screen (leaving on one side makes the character appear on the opposite site) and are randomly generated (but have a general theme depending on the floor number). The basic gameplay is roguelike standard: walking around in turns, fighting enemies when bumping into them (the results are automatically calculated without player input), collecting items and searching for the stairs to the next level (sometimes a key has to be found first). Fighting enemies rewards experience points and eventually level-ups which rewards automatic rises of the character’s statistics. Additional improvements can be bought with gold after every level-up. The player can (and sometimes must) manipulate the environment by mining away blocks in the way and creating new barricades by placing them somewhere else.
The game has a significant amount of customization for various aspects of the game. The graphics can either be displayed in ASCII, with graphical tile sets or with a mix where only environment is in ASCII. The player character can have a variety of origins, genders (yes, more than two), social background etc. which in part have influences on the starting statistics. Difficulty options include permadeath (an attenuated only removes all items on death), vulnerability to environmental hazards (Z-Virus, lack of oxygen, temperature), the need to eat and/or drink as well as invulnerability to enemy attacks. General options include the frequency of enemy and item spawns or if the character can hold an unlimited amount of mined blocks etc. And if the player does not feel like playing, the game can play itself.
