Most zombie games hand you a shotgun. Zombie Slap hands you nothing. The city has fallen, the guns are gone, and the only way down the street is to run — for real, jogging in place in front of your webcam — and slap every shambling corpse that gets in your way with your bare hands. It is free, it runs in a browser tab, and after five minutes your shoulders will know about it.

How it plays

You run down an endless, ruined street in three lanes. Jogging in place moves you forward; the faster you jog, the faster you run, up to a full sprint. Leaning or stepping sideways steers you between lanes. The camera reads all of it from your upper body, so you only need your head, shoulders and hands in view.

The horde walks toward you out of the haze. When a zombie comes within reach, a dashed ring lights up around its head. Swing a hand across its face, fast and level, and it flies back down the street — the harder the slap, the farther it goes. Slaps are forehand only: your right hand sweeps across toward your left, your left hand toward your right, so a wind-up or a backswing never counts by accident.

  • Walkers shamble at a steady pace. One clean slap sends them flying.
  • Runners close the gap twice as fast. Slap early or lean out of their way.
  • Screamers stop in the middle of the street and scream, and the rest of the horde speeds up. Take them out first.
  • Brutes are huge and only go down to a double slap: both hands across the face within about a third of a second of each other.

What happens when you miss

A zombie you miss lunges at you and bites once as you pass, then it is behind you — nothing chases you down the street. Leaning into another lane during the lunge dodges the bite. Standing still is the real mistake: every zombie that reaches you gets its bite in. Burned-out cars, road blocks and buses block whole lanes, and running into one stops you dead and knocks a little health off, so you have to read the street ahead as well as the horde.

You start with 100 health and get a little back between waves. Each wave is faster and denser than the last. Your score is your slap points plus one point for every metre you run; slap points grow with how hard you hit, how tough the zombie was, and your combo. Chain slaps without getting bitten and the multiplier climbs to three times.

You can see yourself now

Zombie Slap opens in third person: you see your survivor from over the shoulder, running down the street with the horde ahead. Your character copies your real arms — the camera follows your shoulders, elbows and hands, so if you raise your hands by your head, so does your character, and a slap thrown at the screen goes at the horde. If you prefer the classic view, switch to first person in the settings menu and your arms reach in from the bottom of the screen instead.

A surprisingly good workout

A run is two to five minutes of jogging in place with explosive two-arm swings mixed in, plus constant side-steps to change lanes. That combination of steady cardio and short upper-body bursts is close to what a boxing or circuit class asks of you. Whether that counts as real exercise is a fair question, and we looked at the research in do active video games count as real exercise?.

Multiplayer survival

Open a room, share the code, and up to eight friends run the same street: everyone gets the identical horde and the identical wrecks in the same places, so nobody gets an easier run. The last survivor with health left wins. Each player needs their own screen and webcam, since one camera tracks one person.

What you need

  • A laptop or desktop with a webcam, and a modern browser. Nothing to download, no account needed to start.
  • About a metre of space in front of the screen, and room to swing both arms without hitting anything.
  • Light on your face rather than behind you. A bright window at your back is the most common reason tracking struggles.
  • No camera? You can still play by swiping across the zombies with a mouse or a finger.

Your camera picture never leaves your device. Pose tracking runs in the browser, and only game moves are shared in multiplayer — how that works is in how CamPlay tracks your body without uploading video. If slapping things is your style, Slap Derby is the one-strike arena version, and Pera nai, Chill! swaps zombies for nosy aunties and uncles.