His gift is the ability to create rich characters, meaningful events, and clever dialogue that ride the fine line between absurd and believable. The balance is so perfect that any one of your neighbors could be these characters under the right circumstances. That was where he drew out the humor. By creating something completely ludicrous in a realistic setting. Characters whose quirks you just want to get to know better, see them over-react to new situations, and listen to the unbelievable foolishness of their past. Feeling it all weave together into a single completely unconventional but perfectly-threaded person that could anyone you work or go to school with.
The reason we praise this so highly is because not many writers can do it. Maybe we doubt his ability to make a good zombie comedy just because no one has done it yet. I'm sure it will be fine. Might take a few updates for him to get into his groove (ILD was the same).
I'm confident he will make it work. My only skepticism is the decision to use 1st person instead of 3rd. I mean, if ILD was in 1st person, we wouldn't be here talking about the game right now. Changing the perspective would destroy the quality of the storytelling. Frankly, I think it's a big mistake and he is under-estimating how important it is to keep it in 3rd person. Most of the people voting probably haven't read enough to be able to describe how that perspective affects how they interpret the story. Or, more importantly, how they are forced to interpret the story through a static viewpoint and inner-monologue telling them how to feel. Like I said on his patreon, there's a reason trashy 3DCG devs mostly use first person - it's stupidly easy to write since you have total control over the reader's aspect, and just uncreative and lazy as fuck.