This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of the Call of the Plaguebearer custom campaign by Dr. Jack Science for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
In Call of the Plaguebearer, the investigators wake up in a morgue in a strange science facility, only to find the facility - and Arkham - swarming with undead and brutal agents willing to shoot anything that moves. Their path ends up crossing with Dr. Herbert West, who might have something to do with all this. Through all this, investigators will continually have to return to the streets of Arkham to defend it from the spreading influence of the Plaguebearer.
Call of the Plaguebearer is a difficult campaign against the living dead that often makes you feel like a dead investigator walking. The scenarios are challenging, often with cascading effects, and while always mean, they never feel unfair. The campaign has a pattern of rotating between mad science facilities and the streets of Arkham, with the latter building upon themselves every time - giving a lot of character to the city that is often not present in other campaigns. It's truly a campaign for the hardcore, though - not just from the difficulty, but often from tricky mechanics it introduces in each scenario, requiring players to remember a lot and start fresh every time, rather than building and iterating on a base of mechanics each time.
The influence Call of the Plaguebearer wears on its sleeve the most is Resident Evil. Rather than the slow, shuffling zombies of Night of the Living Dead, Plaguebearer instead dives into the weird, mutating creatures of Resident Evil bosses, nonsensical secret bases, ridiculous door locks, unethical scientists, and the like. It leans into the lovely camp and ridiculousness of the games, well maintaining a dark horror tone. That's only half of the story it's telling, however - the other half is the defense of Arkham, and by continually returning to the same map in multiple scenarios, it builds familiarity and connection to these locations. The story of Plaguebearer ends up feeling both very epic, and very grounded in its location. It does this while keeping its length to a minimal - while there are some lengthier interludes, they often come with choices or effects for the players, and thus feel tied into the gameplay.
The variation is one of the places where Call of the Plaguebearer mosts excels. Even though you use the same map four times, it never feels "samey", and the repeated locations actually help matters - you don't need to completely relearn every location every time you play, and can instead focus on all the new mechanics each scenario is tossing at you. And there are plenty of new mechanics - while many campaigns are about iterating and exploring a set of specific mechanics, that connective mechanical tissue is much looser here, with the links instead being about the different ways interacting with locations (and tokens on them) can be used. It's also not as simple as picking up a scenario once done, as each of the Arkham scenarios has effects that carry over into the later ones - having the effects of your gameplay fundamentally alter the map.
There's few specific "scenario mechanics" that repeat from scenario to scenario that vastly change how you play, but as one might expect from a campaign about zombies, damage, horror, and difficult to kill enemies are major themes. Players will always have to be looking at their health and sanity nervously, and desperately wanting to avoid any stress in true survival horror fashion. Instead, the Arkham-centered locations latch onto pre-existing mechanics, rewarding leaning into certain archetypes. This is also where the campaign gets much of its replayability - playing skill focused character is going to be fundamentally different than playing an event focused character or a "big hand" character due to how the locations and encounter cards specifically reward or punish different strategies. This variability is player-initiated,
Of the scenarios, the ones that stand out most tend to be the ones that are the most straightforward, or the most unforgiving. Scenario 3 is the first - it's a very simple set-up, dealing with a manor of unkillable zombies, with more and more of them appearing as the scenario progresses - it's a pretty classic pitch, but one that is handled very well. Scenarios 6 and 7 are the latter - with 6 being where the campaign really goes crazy, with a tough scenario where you're having to balance putting out constant fires with actually progressing the Act. It's easy for a scenario like it to feel overwhelming in a bad way, but instead it just feels overwhelming in a good way, setting up major stakes in the story and paying them off. Scenario 7, meanwhile, is the emotional highpoint of the story - the scenario is once again a simple pitch done well and a twist on a classic Arkham scenario, but has some interesting twists - including my favorite encounter card of the campaign.
All this talk of new mechanics is also, unfortunately, where the campaign suffers most. There's often a feeling after reading the Act, Agenda, and cards in play of "Ok, so what are we doing?". When important mechanics are in the campaign guide in multiple scenarios, it's not surprising when players can't keep up. Scenario 2 can be disasterous if players don't understand how all the cadrs interact, and Scenario 4 requires going through it in a careful, methodical way. Scenario 5 has three different location quirks going on, each of which feels like it could easily hold up a scenario on their own. The finale suffers from this the most - with having some non-intuitive rules for its unique mechanic in the campaign guide, but introducing them in the scenario themselves after enough time that players might forget that they're there. None of these scenarios are bad - at no point do these mechanics ever feel "un-fun". But groups who don't have a good grasp of the rules may very easily struggle to keep up with them.
Overall, Call of the Plaguebearer is a great campaign for Arkham veterans - they're the ones most suited to handle the challenge the campaign provides, and to keep up with its plethora of mechanics.
More on Call of the Plaguebearer:
Call of the Plaguebearer: Spoiler-Light Review