- When you make a character, one is randomly generated for you—there is no main character. You give it your playertag, but it gets a name of its own—I say "it," because it can be a man or a woman.
- If you die (and you will die), you respawn as a new character.
- Each game begins in a central hub, but the world is largely open. You can go anywhere, and objectives that you complete with past characters are still completed.
- Best of all, when you die, your past character becomes a zombie, so you can go find them in your next game and kill them and reclaim the gear you got on your last playthrough.
- It saves your stats, so you can always tell how long you've lived, for example. There will be an achievement for finishing the game entirely in one life, since of course there will be people who pull that off.
- There can only be one of your past-life zombies in the game at a time, but as you play online, your online friends' zombies will also enter your game. You'll see their playertag over their zombies. Ha!
- When I played, I had to go get some medicine for a character named Vikram—I almost made it out, but right at the door I finally got killed. My next life, a female character, then hopped right in the door, killed the zombie and the zombified version of my past character, picked up the medicine and was able to finish the mission. That? Is cool as hell.