>>44930
I was playing Planescape Torment rpg recently and the devs did something completely different in the game: they made zombies into NPCs, and they did a good job. They're still zombies so you won't have extensive conversations with them, but there's a lot of interactions you can have with them. In the first area, the Mortuary, they act as a menial workers for the Dustmen faction. They're all branded with a number and you can find some notes saying who that person was while he was alive etc. All of them got a rather extensive description of how he looks and smells and whatnot, what wounds he have that probably led to his current state etc. Really gives them a lot of character. You can retrieve some items from them, for example you can learn that one item is sewn inside a mouth of certain zombie so you have to find the guy and do a small operation on him. Or in other case you can do a little trolling and push one zombie who has a bit of a problem maintaining a balance but also a really bad case of rot and after he splashes to the ground and turns into a puddle you discover that his arm actually became as hard as stone and can be used as a weapon. Then after leaving the initial area you can quickly learn how do these zombies come to be: the dustmen faction offers a contract to any living person, offering money in exchange for a permission to raise the body as a zombie when the person dies.
Somewhere in the middle game you can meet another group of zombies that actualyl have some conciousness still in them and their leader is the most kind hearted zombie I met in any game. Once I was done with the quests in the area and gained their trust, I complained to the said leader that my companion got kidnapped by an evil warlock and I can only get him back if I give him a skull of an unique creature, and the zombie lady was ready to pluck out her own head and give it to me to save my friend.
Really unique approach to those creatures, I dont think I saw anything like that in any other game. Also I dont think there's a single moment in the game that you have to fight a zombie unless you specifically choose to do so.