Terminus: Zombie Survivors 2 is an open-world zombie survival game set after the dead have won, and the sequel to the award-winning Terminus: Zombie Survivors. Ahead lie a town to strip bare, a winter to outlast, and nights when the only light for miles is the one in your hand.

What remains is a small town and the empty country around it – motels and diners gone quiet, supermarkets picked half-clean, churches and hospitals with dangers all their own. A railroad runs out of town, and somewhere far down the line waits the Terminus – the last safe zone at the end of the tracks.

Your past life shapes your second one. A firefighter, a teacher, a nurse, a bus driver, a cop: each survives the end of the world a different way. Who you become is decided out there, where hunger, cold, and dark will kill you long before the dead get their chance.

• Food has to be found before it can be cooked, and cooked before it's worth much. Keep the heat on through the long winter, and when the sun goes down, decide how far you trust a single flashlight beam. Everything in the dark can see it.

• Every search starts the same way: an empty street, an unlocked door, and a room that might hold a week of food – or the family that never left. Take what the dead no longer need, and watch for the lessons someone else paid for: a water-stained field guide, a hand-drawn map, a journal that ends mid-sentence.

The old world left everything behind – it just didn't leave it assembled.

• Craft the axe for the door that won't open, the coat for the month that won't end, and a hot meal for the day that almost ended you. If you need it to live, you can make it – if you live long enough to learn how.

• Build a place of your own, four walls the dead have to work for. Farm the ground behind it, fish the quiet waters, and live off the land instead of the ruins – until a home stops being shelter and starts being a reason to stay.

Some of what waits out there is dead. The rest is hungry, armed, and thinking.

• Sometimes it's one shambler in a dark hallway. Sometimes it's a street packed curb to curb. And sometimes it's something far larger out in the fog, something that shouldn't exist – and the only sane plan is to be somewhere else entirely.

• Marauders run these roads, and every survivor you meet wants to live as badly as you do. Trade away what little you can spare, or hold your breath until the convoy rolls past. Will you save your ammunition for the dead, or for the living?

Walk the rails to the Terminus alone, or bring friends along in online co-op and split the miles, the nights, and the risk. Someone cooks, someone patches the walls, someone watches the door, and every extra mouth to feed is another pair of eyes on the dark. There's room at the Terminus for everyone who makes it. Making it is the hard part.

Reach the Terminus, or die trying.