According to the Zombie Research Society, May is “Zombie Awareness Month,” so SiliconAngle’s gamer staff started looking into zombie-related video games that could help you up your game when the zombies come for your brains.

After some colorful language, shouts, stomped feet–and a few DVDs featuring George Romero films thrown–we came to a consensus of five video games that can do exactly that. The list comes out to: Deep Silver’s Dead Island, Valve Corporation’s Left 4 Dead, Telltale Games’s The Walking Dead, Capcom’s Dead Rising, and The Indie Stone’s Project Zomboid.

Keep reading for a treatment of each of these games, the platforms you can play them on, and why you should play them…

That is, if you at all desire keeping those delicious brains in your head come the inevitable zombie pandemic that will end all live on Earth as we know it. Of course, it might be difficult to play video games after the zombie outbreak, so you’ll want to get to playing now. Might as well set aside a three day weekend, get these five games, and get cracking.

You may find this especially useful if you happen to own a smart home, see “How to survive the zombie apocalypse in a smart home” and you might also want to get fit with your smartphone, so read “How to stay fit and in charge with your smartphone during the outbreak.”

Number 1: Dead Island

The game of Dead Island best described as an action-based RPG with a strong emphasis on survival horror and melee combat. Amid zombie survival games, one of the things that made this game stand out happened to be a focus on players crafting their own weapons out of found items–although some of the end results are a bit absurd, such as attaching 9v batteries to make electrified clubs–the game did bring along with it a sense of involvement in cutting down the living dead.

Dead Island is developed by Techland and was published by Deep Silver in 2011 in a release for PC ($17.99 on Amazon), Xbox 360 ($19.27 on Amazon), PlayStation 3 ($24.51 on Amazon) and OS X. A Dead Island 2 is planned for release in 2016.

In the story of Dead Island, a zombie outbreak occurs on an island resort where tourists and vacationers have descended in order to escape the rigmarole of their everyday lives. Of course, a zombie horde ruins the idyllic surrounds and sand does not mix well with the brain-eating dead.

The player controls a character who is immune to the zombie disease–unlike the survivor NPCs that the player must aid and contend with, player characters cannot be “turned” by a zombie scratch or bite.

Number 2: Left 4 Dead

The Left 4 Dead series has two main games Left 4 Dead, unleashed in 2008, and Left 4 Dead 2, released in 2009, as well as a large slate of downloadable content (or DLC.) As a game the Left 4 Dead series gave players a mission-oriented, survival horror zombie game that runs as a first person shooter. Left 4 Dead and its sequel are available for PC, Xbox 360, and OS X and runs around $20 to $24 on Amazon.

It’s easy to notice that the number “4” is prominent in the title and this is because the games follow four survivors. Each of whom have their own personalities and capabilities. In multiplayer this sets the maximum number of players who can play one one side, but if less than four players are playing the other survivors are run by the game’s AI.

Left4Dead posits a zombie pandemic that includes the usual zombie trope of “walker” zombies that arrive as a horde and harass the players; but also has horrible mutated infected monsters that the player (or players) must learn to overcome. Since nobody knows exactly how the end-of-the-world zombie pandemic will happen, the idea that some zombies will be horribly mutated ghouls may give some semblance of preparedness for whatever may happen.

Amid the mutated zombie horrors are a number of the “infected” who have special abilities. Boomers are bloated zombies that can spit bile on survivors that can attract zombie attackers–as well as explode, as the name suggests. Hunters are agile, clamber over objects, and can leap onto survivors and must be beaten down to detach them. Smokers are a weird mutated zombie that produces a vision-obscuring cloud of smoke upon death, but more problematically, they have long tongues that can latch onto survivors and drag them out of defensible perches. The Tank is a juggernaut behemoth mutated infected monstrosity that ploughs through everything in front of it, swinging bloated and muscled appendages; getting hit by the Tank feels like being run over by a tank indeed.

In one multiplayer mode four players can play infected themselves and torment the four survivors. As a result, Left 4 Dead has an excellent player vs. player replayable value, because suddenly the very environmental landscape of the game from single player becomes the sport of play. Perhaps this could be seen as a way to “get into the heads” of the infected zombies so that a would-be eventual survivor of the actual zombie outbreak will know how to think like a zombie–and therefore better survive the zombies.

Ah right, maybe not. Still, it’s a highly recommended game. Left 4 Dead ranks 89 on Metacritic, and a user score of 9.2, and Left 4 Dead 2 ranks the same 89, but with a lower user score at 8.4–still pretty good.

Number 3: The Walking Dead

Telltale Games produces excellent narrative-based storytelling video games that follow well defined stories and The Walking Dead is one such episodic series that takes place in the zombie-overrun world based on Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic book series.

The Walking Dead is a graphic adventure video game portrayed in a third-person perspective. Players get to control the actions of the protagonists through mouse motions and conversations as well as some interactive environments.

The game is available for virtually every console (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4) and PC. It is available right now on Amazon.com for prices ranging from $25 to $40.

According to Robert Kirkman the game is designed around telling a story and the devices of character development, as opposed to zombie action game tropes such as the previously mentioned Left 4 Dead series.

Players will find themselves in an emotional drama that exposes the nature of survival in the zombie-burdened aftermath. The Walking Dead provides a way for players to explore the human psychological impact of surviving in an undead wasteland. The main character, a  professor and convicted murderer, Lee Everett, finds a little girl named Clementine.

Through the developments in the story and the bond between Lee and Clementine, the storytelling of The Walking Dead deals with the human side of a zombie outbreak more so than any other game on the market.

Knowing the emotional burden, the social ramifications, and the psychological turmoil of survival would be of great benefit to anyone preparing for the rise of the lurching hordes of the dead. So The Walking Dead is a good pick go-to video game to help with that preparation.

Number 4: Dead Rising

The Dead Rising series is a set of video games that began with Dead Rising in 2006, developed and published by Capcom. Dead Rising 2 published in 2011 and the most recent is Dead Rising 3, which Microsoft Studios published in 2013. The first two Dead Rising follow the zombie movie trope of a protagonist being trapped in a mall or a shopping complex; and the third installation in the series expands that to an entire city.

In each case, players find themselves in the role of a zombie outbreak survivor (or gutsy photographer) turned action hero.

In every case, players must contend with the requisite zombie hordes but the game features two elements that would be useful for any zombie outbreak: dealing with other survivors and building new weapons from obtainable items (although, like most video games, these become somewhat outlandish.)

Dead Rising, released in 2006, started the series by putting players in the position of getting photographs of the undead hordes but also making them band together survivors and help out (as a plot mechanic.) This release came out only for the Xbox 360 and netted a score of 85 on Metacritic.

Dead Rising 2 came out for PC, PS3, and the Xbox 360 and saw its ratings fall a small amount on Metacritic ending with 78, 80, and 79 respectively. This game puts the player in control of former motocross champion Chuck Greene in a weirder-than-reality “reality show” called Terror is Reality. In this game players still build their own weapons, but zombie survivors are more often a threat than the remnants of humanity.

Dead Rising 3 is available on the PC and Xbox One and managed a fair score on Metacritic of 70 and 78 respectively, falling still further from the other two in the series.

Number 5: Project Zomboid

The name of the game during the zombie outbreak is survival and Project Zomboid is perhaps one of the best go-to games when it comes to combining zombies, survival, and other people.

Developed and published by indie developer The Indie Stone, Project Zomboid is still in the early stages of development and changes month to month. The game was first released April 25, 2011 but gained enough fame and recognition to get added to the Valve Corporation’s Steam Early Access program on February 10, 2014. Currently the best way to get the multiplayer version of Project Zomboid is through Steam.

Much like the grim prospects of a world overrun with zombies, the aim in a game of Project Zomboid is not to win–it’s to survive as long as possible. Things can get even worse in multiplayer when players are pitted against other survivors for the scarce food, water, and other resources available on a zombie riddled map.

Players in Project Zomboid find themselves in Knox County, a suburban community overrun by zombies and quarantined by the government. The game is played primarily in a 2.5D perspective and players must contend with a number of human frailties such as hunger, thirst, exposure, and injury–and even infection from zombie bite. As a result, players must make forays out into the zombie infested city in order to replenish supplies and survive another day.

The game also plans support for the Lua programming language and custom maps. This will allow the community to use the game engine to produce interesting scenarios that could provide excellent training for any upcoming zombie outbreak.

Image credit: The Walking Dead (video game)  via Telltale Games and Dead Rising 3 (video game) via Capcom