If I can add my 2 cents to this:
I probably won't be afraid of the zombies, since the entire point here is that you can avoid them altogether by running away, and just staying out of their sight. This game isn't about being afraid of zombies though, it's being afraid of people, about what they'll do to you. It's about competing with people for survival, about making decisions that people will hate, about not being able to support people and so on. This is the kind of game you should expect, this is the kind of stuff you see in movies and books, and it's about damn time someone made an effort to bring this into a videogame. This is the pie in the sky version of a game I wanted to make, where the problem isn't zombies, they just happen to be in the way, but people. As far as I'm concerned, if you find the zombies worrying, then you aren't really paying attention to what this game is trying to be. A zombie isn't that challenging an obstacle to face unless it's in a group, and to fight a group of them, you need a group of people, but people here are not reliable. It's about getting people to help you out, getting people who oppose you out of the way, and stopping people from going against you. Zombies serve as the backdrop, as the cause of all this, but ultimately they are the weakest and have already culled the weakest, least useful, people off the planet. And now you have to ally and contend with these survivors, fight tooth and nail over resources, and once in a blue moon, hold out against the horde of zombies you attracted.
Again, if you think the focus is about zombies, either killing them or running from them, you are dead run. It's about people, whether that's helping them, killing them, or hiding from them. The zombies just serve as the backdrop.