Cordon Authority · quarantine dispatch · Fenwick
Vitalis Biotech skipped the trials, and now the dead get back up. The government has drawn a line around the town and called it containment. Suburban Dead is a text-based survival MMO set inside that line — a suburb that keeps moving whether you are watching or not, played from either side of the barricade.
Playable today: the Cordon Drill — one siege, seven nights, a few minutes a day for a week. The Cordon, the persistent world, opens when the first wave fills.
The game
Suburban Dead is a text-first MMO in your browser. No download, no account, no art budget spent on things that move. What it spends instead is on a suburb that behaves like a place: people you never met scavenging, barricading, arguing and dying in buildings you have not walked into yet.
Close the tab and Fenwick does not politely wait. Survivors search, barricades come down, hordes drift toward whatever is making noise, and a district changes hands. You come back to a report of what you missed, not a paused board.
Die and you can get back up hungry. The dead have their own game: feed on the fallen, break down doors, scent the wounded through walls, and groan to call every feral in earshot to your position.
Every run ends in a casualty report — days survived, what you put down, where you fell. Retire your dead to the memorial wall and 25% of their experience passes to whoever you send in next. The district remembers.
The main game, The Cordon, is a single shared world on a real-time clock — no fast-forward, no resets, every stranger a neighbour. It opens when the first wave fills; the Drill below is how you train for it.
Plate street · Cordon Row, looking north
District survey
Fenwick is twenty blocks by twenty, in four districts: the Works, the Vitalis Campus, Fenwick Green, and Marrowgate, where you wake up. It is not generated fresh for each player — every Fenwick is laid out identically.
Which means the second time you play you know where the pharmacy is, which approach the mall cannot cover, and how far the depot is from the hospital. That knowledge is the progression.
The map, and moving on it ▸
Plate hospital · triage discontinued day eleven
Casualty handling
Hit zero and you do not restart. You lie in the room it happened in, still banking action points you cannot spend, while the game goes on around you.
Getting up human takes a Vitalis reagent, or a stranger finding you and dragging you somewhere else. Getting up hungry takes six action points and is permanent — and the dead can buy skills too.
Dying, rising and lineage ▸Ways in
Everything here is the same suburb under the same rules. The destination is The Cordon — the persistent shared world. While its first wave musters, the Cordon Drill is open: one siege with a beginning and an end, and the best way to learn Fenwick before it stops having either.
Live from the district
Not a mockup and not a loop. Below is a Fenwick this server plays against itself — a standing demonstration of what a living Cordon looks like. Nobody is in it, and it is still going. The real Cordon starts empty, for the wave that fills it.
Recovered documents
Scattered through Fenwick's buildings: memos, patient charts, a triage whiteboard, a child's drawing. Sixteen turn up in the course of searching; the last one is not in a building at all. A Drill keeps you to one district, so a run turns up a handful — the rest are reasons to see the other three when The Cordon opens.
“Reanimation is not a malfunction. The therapy is doing exactly what we built it to do. There is simply nobody home.”
Before you go in
Thirteen pages in the order the questions actually come up, written because nobody inside Fenwick was given a briefing either. Every number in it is read out of the running game.
The main game is one shared Fenwick on one real-time clock — which only works with people in it. The first wave is mustering inside the Drill: hold your walls there, and the gate opens to those already inside.
No email required. The game is free and stays free.