Dead Island Editorials

Teachland’s zombie-themed action-RPG has sparked mixed reactions from the press, but not exactly a lot of attention has been given to the writing, which I assume GamePro disliked, at least judging by this, I suspect satirical, editorial:

Initially I thought Deep Silver was being lazy in their character design, throwing together the worst kind of characters: an urban thug, a meathead athlete, a sexualized smart-ass woman, and a fetishized uniformed Asian woman. Boring.

But I kept playing, and I realized that these protagonists are actually satirical extremes of common video game tropes of excess, greed, sex, and violence. As the player, you’re not only playing the game through their cliched eyes, but forced to interact with these terrible people every waking moment of your game life.

Why would they do that? I wondered. Why make the game such a subtle satire? And then I realized that Dead Island’s overarching lesson is: “hell is other people.” This, of course, is the central lesson of Jean-Paul Sartre’s iconic absurdist play, No Exit. Like a light in my head, I suddenly realized every imperfection in this game fit, and there was a larger force at work here.

It is my belief that the characters in Dead Island are already, in fact, dead. What we’ve been playing is actually their personal versions of hell. This hell is populated not only by “living dead,” but also other terrible sinners who spout terrible secondary dialogue.

Meanwhile, GameFront argues that Dead Island has something in common with smoking:

Dead Island is similar to Dead Rising in a lot of ways in terms of the seemingly pointless things you’re going to be doing while you play the game. But Dead Island made me for the first time really appreciate Dead Rising’s hook. I’m talking about that game’s ticking clock.

As the other Phil discussed in his review of Dead Island, you’ll spend a lot of the game running around doing silly, non-urgent errands for random people you meet all over the island of Banoi, which is similar to what you do in the Dead Rising games. The difference, of course, is that the Dead Rising games put you on the clock, and so you can’t do everything and you have to focus on the most relevant objectives first.

Dead Island, lacking any sense of urgency that comes with the timer, feels utterly pointless. You can take as much time as you want to do anything in the game and nobody will care. Nobody is going to die because you’re slow.