Post Script
Why Dead Island 2’s best-in-class gore is no small achievement
The crescent blades are classed as a Frenzy weapon in Dead Island 2. This means, as opposed to the Maiming-class weapons (useful for limb removal), the brute-force Bulldozer class and the Headhunter types (take a wild guess), you can mash the right trigger to swing away wildly, sacrificing power for speed. But it’s when we slow things down a little that they have their most devastating effect. Tapping L1 as a zombie reaches to grab us, we block the attack just in time, leaving it stunned as an icon over its chest encourages us to press the Square button. We duly follow the prompt, as we have many times before with other weapons, pressing R2 once, then again before we’re even asked, plunging the blades into the zombie’s skull in grisly close-up. But then, when they’re removed, we recoil from the screen. To our shock, there is now a huge, gaping hole where our attacker’s face used to be – and through that gap we can see another zombie approaching.
Since George Romero’s 1968 classic Night Of The Living Dead popularised the zombie movie, this particular subgenre of horror has been synonymous with gore. Horror fiction needn’t feature gore to shock us, of course – some of the scariest examples of the same are entirely bloodless – but whenever the undead are involved, the two tend to go hand in hand. Plenty of studies have explored the effect on such explicit violence on the human brain, such that there’s little point in us outlining why many find such gruesomeness so appealing – suffice it to say that it can even have a positive effect, not least in the way it allows viewers (or in this case players) to process horrifying scenarios in a safe, controlled environment.
The astonishing mainstream success of The Walking Dead franchise demonstrates both our voracious appetite for grisly thrills and how boundaries have been pushed farther and farther: the kind of flesh-ripping, eyegouging scenes enjoyed by millions of viewers in recent times would doubtless have fallen foul to the censors in the decades before. It’s rare, in other words, to be surprised or repulsed by zombie fiction in this day and age; you need only turn to p116 to find an example that left us distinctly underwhelmed, which casts Dead Island 2’s achievements in an even more favourable light. Indeed, though it’s disappointing that they’re all performed with the same combination of buttons, the game’s inventively horrible close-up kills serve as an incentive to mix up your approach in combat. And, for that matter, to seek out what’s hidden off the critical path: part of the appeal, after all, of getting your hands on a new weapon is the shiver of excitement as you wonder: ‘What might this do to a zombie’s face?’
Beyond the disreputable pleasures of its violence and the many creative expressions thereof, Dead Island 2’s detailed splatter taps into something fundamental about the appeal of videogames as a medium: the action/ response feedback loop. When we pick up a game, we all want to feel that what we are doing has a tangible impact. Though one of the complaints we have about Dambuster’s sequel is that we have relatively little effect on our environment – even if there is something pleasurably transgressive about spilling blood and guts in a once-pristine Beverly Hills mansion – there’s no denying the impact of our inputs on its undead inhabitants. (And, for that matter, in witnessing their response to the human presence; one of the game’s most entertaining cutscenes involves an obnoxious character getting a particularly nasty comeuppance.)
When we talk about videogames generating a strong emotional response, it’s almost exclusively in the context of what might make us cry. Perhaps it’s past time, then, that we acknowledged the games that make us flinch. With that in mind, the disgust – and, yes, the horrified glee – Dead Island 2 provokes is surely something to be celebrated.