Parasite

General#

The Parasite is not really a zombie, it is a silverfish riding one. It plays in two forms and it is the only class in the game that can take a survivor's body away from them and walk it around.

At 8,000 gold it is the most expensive class, and at one life and a four minute lockout it is the least forgiving.

Stats#

Host Form#

You spawn as an ordinary-looking zombie with a silverfish riding on top of it. That silverfish is your weak point: a survivor who hits it with a melee weapon deals triple damage. The body itself is heavily armored against normal hits, so whittling you down the slow way takes a while.

Guns cannot single out the rider. Bullets deal ordinary body damage, which makes melee the correct answer to a Parasite and is exactly backwards from every other class.

Losing the host body does not kill you. It leaves a corpse and ejects you into the crawler.

Crawler Form#

Once ejected you are a silverfish on the floor with a very low camera, 3 hearts, and almost no bite. You are also, for the first time, able to possess.

Lunge#

Costs 15 power, roughly 15 seconds between lunges.

A leap forward. Land it on a human and you burrow in.

Possession#

Take a survivor and you become them: their skin, their body, their inventory, their full health bar. The victim is locked into spectating their own body while you drive it. A silverfish rides the possessed head as the new weak point, so their friends can see what has happened if they are paying attention.

You hold the body for up to 6 seconds. It ends when:

• The timer runs out. The victim gets their body back, alive.
• A human strikes the silverfish on the head. Same result, the victim is freed.
• The victim breaks free. They are told to mash jump, and a struggle bar fills with every press while draining steadily on its own. Presses occasionally slip backwards, so it takes sustained mashing rather than a couple of taps.
• The body is killed. The victim dies for real, and turns.

Either way you scurry back out into the crawler with the health you had before, and there is a 20 second lockout before you can lunge again.

A survivor wearing a Gas Mask cannot be possessed at all.

Playing It#

Everything before the possession is setup. The host body is a shield with legs whose job is to get you into the middle of a group and die there, because you want to be a crawler at the survivors' feet rather than a zombie across the room.

Possess to break a defended position rather than to kill. Six seconds is enough to walk a survivor's body out of their barricade, into a corridor, and into your team, and enough to make everyone else in the room hesitate about shooting.

With one life, a wasted lunge is close to a wasted round. Wait until a group is fighting something else.