Escape Dead Island Announced; A Tropical Adventure Game Spiced Up with Madness and the Undead
Publisher Deep SIlver is not about to let the zombie infested gravy train that is Dead Island ride away into the sunset without taking a bite…out of…zombie gravy… All right, I don’t have a degree in metaphors. Screw it.
What I’m saying is Deep Silver is making a shitload of Dead Islands. From dipping into the MOBA genre with Dead Island: Epidemic to barreling at next-gen with Dead Island 2, it’s a lttle eye-widening to hear that a third release is imminent, heading for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 this Fall. With this horde of the digital dead shuffling after our wallets, it’s a fortunate thing for Deep Silver that Escape Dead Island looks so promising.
Forgoing the Action-RPG setup of the original Dead Island (which was heavier on the action than the RPG), Escape is actually a third-person adventure game where you have to mix up stealth maneuvering and advantages in the environment to bust some undead skull.
More mindful of story in this single-player narrative, you’ll control Cliff Calo, an investigator sent this doomed chain of islands to figure out why the locals are bitier than usual. Cliff’s noticeable shortcoming as an intrepid photojournalist would have to be his loose grip on reality. Throughout the game, you’ll hallucinate outlandish sights that even reshape the environment – or outright kill you, thus pushing you through a “time loop” to before you went all Hunter S. Thompson.
The result makes Escape Dead Island seem like a combination of Far Cry 3’s dream sequences with a Darksiders-ish adventure game where your surroundings play into gameplay much more than just scenery. Sure, they might be flogging the zombie horse cranking out these Dead Island titles. But they at least show the same imagination and promise Escape does, I say ride that undead gravy train of horse flogging.