“Sure don’t smell too pretty” – Dead Island

**Dead Island** (Techland/Deep Silver, Xbox 360, 2011)

Reading contemporary reviews of Dead Island, a lot of them mention the game’s trailer. I was paying attention to video games at the time, but perhaps not zombie ones, as I have no memory of it. Watching it now, I can see how it stood out. Combining violent action with slow sad music was no new thing for video game adverts, but telling a tale in reverse from a child’s zombie death to happy holiday photo opps adds an extra emotional punch. It aspired to the level of artistry of a Coldplay music video, and was mostly successful.

The trailer was developed completely separately from the game, in which the girl does not appear. Children don’t appear in general, despite the family holiday resort setting. That would be a boundary too far too push. Blockbuster games weren’t quite yet going to tackle looking after a child in the midst of a world that had turned most of its people into eldritch horrors. The trailer turns out to be almost perfectly ill-fitting to a game which has very little interest in messages or exploring emotion, as opposed to just giving you a first person view of surviving a zombie attack on a holiday resort .

You start off making your way to a first group of survivors whose base you will help them to build up over time. At the character choice screen you can read a backstory, but other characters not only don’t care about that but don’t even always get the right pronouns for your character, at various points clearly being set up to react to people playing in co-op groups. The assortment of people you meet (with almost as large an array of accents, mostly Australian) spend a lot of time sitting around on base in their swimwear, but very little time talking about anything other than the next quest. You are there to fulfil the individual and collective needs of the people.

There is a general trend to these needs. Men are in charge and want you to go and do practical things like starting generators, fetching food, and burning corpses. Meanwhile women are not part of any such organised effort, and want you to go and fetch things for them personally, including their missing necklaces and teddy bears. The choice to play as a female main character does help offset the message of helplessness a little, but it’s still there.

Fulfilling tasks is rarely smooth. I picked up one quest to help deal with a crashed car, and during the long wait for its details to load onto the map I found myself stuck in a hole in the scenery, seeing nothing but rough plant textures up close. On another mission to bring boxes of juice to the survivors, I drove my newly juice-filled truck up to the garage door at the base and expected that to be enough. It wasn’t and the door stayed closed. I lugged a juicebox up the stairs to the leader, waved it at him, and put it down in front of him. He continued to make suggestions as to where I might find some juice. I eventually resorted to looking up this issue online, and got my answer on an old Steam post: I specifically needed to carry the juice round and drop it on the other side of the closed door.

Dead Island’s various parts often hang together about as well as a lurching zombie. It frequently turns that into a strength. Combat is quick and brutal, with a button press to swing whatever you’re holding, and often zombies just charge at you and need one carefully timed whack. Your weapons degrade quickly, leaving you wielding a series of increasingly desperate last resort knives, oars, and whatever else comes to hand. You can try throwing your weapons at stronger enemies from a safe distance, and then plucking them back out afterwards, but that obviously means reduced options until you win. Functionally it’s much closer to the freedom of a Dead Rising than a Resident Evil, but it has none of the absurd showiness that Dead Rising had. There are no giant lipstick skewers here and, outside of constrained vehicle rides, little of the same sense of even momentary power.

Instead the main feeling is one of attrition, of gathering your resources and bashing them up against a wall of darkness until you get a small win. Yet for all the imperfections, it manages that without really ever turning into the slow and dull work that suggests. This is achieved through both a carefully considered level of challenge, and combining it with a highly open world and structure. Having a generous enough set of things to do that you can frequently end up completing tasks on the way to other tasks really offsets the difficulty of getting across the island. Those small wins manage to come off as hard-won even as they are also abundant. Dead Island makes survival optimistic and does it through its mechanics, a peculiar kind of zombie procedural. It’s not a very arty trailer kind of success, but it’s something.