If You Can’t Help Me, Just Die: Survival in Dead Island

Calling it “survival-horror at its finest”, the folks at Pop Matters have written an editorial on Dead Island, delving into the mechanics, narrative and themes of Techland’s zombie-infested open-world melee-focused FPS/RPG hybrid. I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs to get you started:

It’s a very bloody, very violent game, but its use of violence is never exploitative. There’s no super gratuitous shot of someone’s guts spilling out, as there might be in an action horror title like Dead Space. The specter of death is treated with serious fear, not glee, because the violence here has context and consequence. Those consequences are where the implied violence comes in, the blood stains and blood trails, the many bodies, the unattended luggage, and even the gory bodies of the zombies themselves. Clearly, something horrible happened here and you’re late to the party. We mostly just see the aftermath of a zombie attack, which leaves our imaginations free to write the scenario themselves, which will naturally be tailored to our individual fears.

The context is where the explicit violence comes in. Zombies are brutal, unrelenting enemies, and the only way to deal with them is to be brutal and unrelenting in return. Cutting off their limbs is gory but this gore isn’t exploitative because it has a tactical purpose. We’re disarming them (pun intended), taking away their weapons. We commit acts of extreme violence because it’s the best way to survive in this world. In this way, Dead Island weds horror and survival in a way that most games don’t consider, as two things intrinsically linked. To survive in the resort, we commit the very acts of horror that leave those disturbing blood trails across the world. There’s a cyclical nature to it, allowing us to be horrified by our own violent acts of survival. But if that’s what it takes, (so be it), says Dead Island.