While nosing around the submissions for an Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising mission design contest, I came across a zombie mission. Naturally, I had to try it. I mean, zombies. What am I gonna do? Not try it?

At a whopping 131kb, it's an almost instantaneous download. There are no fancy new art assets. There's no whizz-bang over-the-top scripting. You're simply dropped into the countryside where soldiers who are supposed to pass for zombies come after you. Your goal is to reach a distant extraction point. If a zombie touches you before you get there, you're dead. You get to sit through an interminable helicopter ride intro again if you want to play again.

But the modest scope of this project leads to unexpected surprises. Videogame zombies are ravening snarling moaning creatures. After all, you have to give the sound guy at your development studio something to do. So you make fantastically noisy creatures and, in the process, you probably lose track of one of the most effective elements of horror: silence. I didn't really appreciate this until I was being chased by the zombie guys in this Operation Flashpoint mod. They make absolutely no noise. They are entirely quiet, and even slightly bored looking, as if they know they're going to get you eventually, but, oh, all right, they'll chase you. The only sound you hear is the shuffle of their feet in the grass. When you die, they gather around and blandly watch you rise into heaven.

The Operation Flashpoint engine offers something you don't get in any zombie games, and it's important. Iconic, in fact. Zombies as we know them shuffled up from the middle distance in the form of a single slightly weird guy out in a field. Night of the Living Dead opens with a brother and sister who see this lone guy. He's not particularly menacing. Just a lone guy standing out in the middle of nowhere. What's he doing?

Later, there were more iconic images of the zombies converging from distant points on the horizon, closing in gradually. The idea is that even though they may not be clawing at you now, they're out there. They're everywhere. And they're coming to get you, Barbara.

So it is in Operation Flashpoint's zombie mission. You're in wide open terrain dotted with single zombies, slowly moving in. That one weird guy just standing out in the middle of nowhere is slightly disconcerting.

I don't mean to talk this mission up too much, because it's ultimately as modest as it is clever. But it's wonderfully creepy for a couple of important reasons. If you're in the cross section of people who like zombies and have Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, get the mission Operation Flashpoint Zombies here and give it a spin.