Review: Night of the Zombie King
The month ahead marks something of sad rarity and (hopefully) vast fun for me – I’ll be picking up dice, pen and paper to roleplay not once, but twice. While one of these instances will be starting a fresh campaign as the storyteller, the other will involve reuniting with old friends with whom it has been far too long since I have gamed.
I’m confident in noting that I’m not the only person around these parts who roleplayed heavily in time gone by, but has found that the realities of Life have prevented that from being a frequent occurrence in the present. There’s a bit of romanticism to looking back on those past days, coupled with the occasional thought of: you know, wouldn’t it be great to hook up with the old gaming group now just once, and revisit the characters and adventures tied to those great memories? Perhaps we could pick up where we left off, for the sake of old times and good feelings? Night of the Zombie King is a web series that explores just that in an entertaining, cathartic way.
The recently completed Night of the Zombie King is a spinoff series from the creators of the award-winning show GOLD, which completed it’s first season in 2010. GOLD follows the exploits of members of the American Goblins & Gold professional roleplaying team as they struggle to overcome their personal issues en route to challenging the British team for the highest honor the World Wide Tabletop Role Playing Game Consortium can bestow – the gold medal. Season 1 plays this obviously comedic premise for laughs, but with natural scripting and strong dialogue, manages to work in some reasonable drama as well.
Night of the Zombie King dials back both the humor and the episode length, yielding a more polished and mature result. The story follows Jaz, a character from the first series, whose Goblins & Gold team has lost their professional ranking status. Frustrated by this, and life in general, he returns to his hometown after being away for 15 years, where he is pulled in to a surprise night of gaming with his old group. The resultant tale examines the joys and complexities of the idea of Coming Home, especially when one abruptly left it in order to run away in the first place.
Zombie King is played as a straight-up drama, where the comedic aspects of the world’s conceit are firmly in the background, and the humor comes naturally through human situations. The scripting is tight, the dialogue sharp, and acting is spot on. The greatest compliment I can give to any piece of entertainment is for it to feel real and stir genuine, sometimes conflicting, emotions in me; Night of the Zombie King manages to consistently do just that. Anyone who can identify having a former gaming group “back home” is going to find something something joyful, moving, and satisfying here.
Night of the Zombie King‘s six episodes, each of which are an easily digestible 5-8 minutes in length, can be found here alongside GOLD Season 1. I highly recommend it to anyone with a gaming background, or fans of lean, tightly paced, well-scripted entertainment. For my own part, I’m quite looking forward to Season 2, or whatever happens to come next.
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Thanks for the kind review, John
@Rick – Thanks for stopping by! You guys, as they say in the land of my birth, done good with NOTZK.