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It is a staple of zombie fiction that, in amongst the crush of bodies, the hands that grasp, the roots that clutch, a person may discover who they truly are. The landscape changes and a shopping mall becomes a battlefield, a coffee shop in a food court becomes a safe haven. There is a lovely moment in the Dawn of the Dead remake when a heroic character reveals that they were previously just a guy who sold TVs. Yes, zombies want to get at what's inside you, but sometimes, in the process, they also get at what's inside you. In the darkest hour, you find reserves you never knew you had.I have never been ravaged by shambling and reanimated corpses, but a few years back I reviewed the original Dead Island off of debug code for a magazine, and so I feel, in a way, that I know what that experience might be like. The original Dead Island was charmingly buggy even when it hit the shops, but I played it in a pre-release state and, reader, it was so much zanier. Now that the game occupies a space in which people feel a distinct fondness for it - and now that an HD re-release is here - it feels like the right moment to share my most terrifying and unexpected experience from that review process. I fought against horrors, and I was engulfed by them.
Let's start off by saying this: Dead Island on debug was hopelessly broken at times. It was a melee game that had such severe clipping issues that my lunges with a baseball bat would often pass politely through the people whose bones I was trying to break. It was a complex navigational challenge in which the GPS marker on the mini-map would often tangle itself up in knots or disappear entirely. More importantly, it had a handful of missions with trigger points that were comprehensively borked. One of them was even entertainingly borked.
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