Cataclysm is this crazy roguelike-in-progress that aims to do much of this. It presents a world with more than just regular zombies to kill (presumably because that would just get boring), but it's still pretty awesome already.
Here's a link for Windows version downloads.
Here's a description and a story from a reddit thread about the game:
So what is it all about? I have not gotten very far, and my eyes still gleam with learning a new universe, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
The surface world is open, continuous and everyone can use stairs. You've got no item ID minigame to deal with. Inventory management is HUGE though. NPCs are bugged out of the game currently, so it is even more lonely that you'd expect. The world is fully persistent across sessions. The physics are pretty nice (buildings can catch fire) or pretty silly (store water in cardboard boxes). Food is more complex than any roguelike I've seen and you have to sleep. While there is no magic, there does seem to be Spoiler.
The crafting system is superb, and pretty much every item in the game can be broken/used to create something else. For example, I smashed open a floating police robot, took the bits, grabbed a soldering iron from my (character's) basement, headed to the library to learn what to do with the wires and such, and was mauled. Most of my crafting adventures end that way.
I am still figuring out which items are the most important. Backpack, certainly. Hammer and nails are very important. Flashlight seems optional (but useful, mostly in the sewers). A lighter is pretty essential. Molotovs are probably the most cheap/easy/effective weapon in the game. Don't hold one while lighting it, the game will crash. The first day is vastly easier if you find these in your starting house.
The Bay12 thread suggests the next step is to establish a permanent safe house on the edge of town.
I know this is an old post, but I would just like to tell you how frustrating this game can be sometimes. I was on maybe day six. I had constructed a base consisting of two houses, with a six-wide area of pits around it, with the only entrace being the alleyway between the two houses, which was accessible only by climbing over the holes and through the window. I was fairly badly wounded (average health maybe at around 70, man HP at 84) and wanted to look for some bandages or first aid, but it was around 7:50. Sun sets at 8:00 in the game, so I just decided to go to sleep.
At around 4:00 AM, a thunderstorm started, and I saw a message about hearing a noise. It woke me up. I grabbed a flashlight from my dresser and went looking around my two houses for a zombie, thinking that a hoard of them had somehow gotten in through a window I forgot to board up or something. I didn't see anything, so I went back to the other side of my base and went back to sleep. Thirty minutes later (but still night: the sun rises at 6), my room starts filling with smoke. I turn the flashlight on and go into my house's hallway and bam! A corner of my house is on fire! Luckily for me the former occupants of the house had left a fire extinguisher behind, so I grab it and start spraying madly, trying to put out the flames while I keep getting messages about inhaling lungfulls of smoke and coughing.
I thought I could grab all the stuff in the house I was in and run across the alley to my second house, but that house was on fire, too. I'm guessing leaving the piles of dead giant worms in those pits was a bad idea. I don't know if the fire spread from the corpses to the other house or they were just too close together, but that wasn't what was on my mind at the time. I desperately tried to fight the flames, but it was no use. Before long I caught on fire myself and badly injured my legs. My shoes and pants had burnt away as well. So, in absolute agony lungs full of smoke, melting rubber on my badly burned feet, and with the lower half of my charred body completely naked (in a downpour of acidic rain, mind you) I run down the street towards the nearest house.
An interesting part of this game is that if you're seriously injured, even if you heal yourself back to full health, you'll die. You can be moving along doped up on oxycodone and looking almost like a mummy with all your bandages, and your breathing will just stop and you'll die. I thought that's what would happen, but I still held a bit of hope. Since my legs were the worst off (probably around 20hp between them), I thought I might be okay. I might be permanently cripped maybe, with a severe speed reduction, but still alive, at least. As I was running down the street with nothing but a backpack full of oxycodone and a machete, what do I see coming towards me? No, not a zombie. I was skilled enough that I could chop one of those bastard's heads off if I was high on pot and drunk out of my mind. No, it wasn't a zombie. It was a fucking bear. They're fast, but their even faster when you have third-degree burns on your lower half, your high on oxycodone and you've got no shoes. I knew I couldn't fight it and that I couldn't outrun it, so I did the only thing I could thing of: I ran back towards my inferno of a base, towards the pits. I dive into one after another, the bear following me, injuring itself again and again in the pits. Well... it didn't work. The bear was behind me the whole time, and all it took was one swipe to the chest to disembowel me.
God damn that sucked so bad. But it's a hell of a story.
But yeah. The gameplay is very slow and dense (being a traditional roguelike, it's turn-based [not like JRPGs, but like, you press the left arrow key, you move left, and while you're doing that, time passes, other monsters take their "turn," etc.]), and it's somewhat buggy since it's still so early on in development. The wiki isn't even very well fleshed out yet, but it's getting there. It's probably not the best roguelike to start out playing, but it's pretty fun nonetheless.
EDIT: Just in case you're reading this and unfamiliar with roguelikes, I don't want to get you unnecessarily excited in case you're the kind of person who will find the genre boring. Here's a screenshot of me just starting the game out; still interested? :P
If you're still interested, but worried that it'll be impossible to play, don't worry, the game comes with a pretty alright tutorial room thing that teaches you the basics of the game.
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