Wall Street Journal Review:Dead Island Riptide: As Fun As a Real Zombie Apocalypse

Dead Island Riptide is a first person hacking-and-slashing game about killing zombies. Like many video games that involve zombies, it uses well-worn tropes from the undead archive in its story. Every so often when I was exploring the vast, gorgeously rendered tropical archipelago that constitutes the game’s open world, for instance, I’d come across a hapless survivor.

“Help me!” they would always shout from atop some barricade as their less fortunate, brain-hungry brethren nipped at their feet from below. Post-apocalyptic stories inevitably prompt the question, “What would you do in the face of such horror?” and since I like to imagine that I’ll be on the morally defensible side of the zombie apocalypse, I would make sure to help. At least at first, because every time I did help one of them, something strange happened. One middle-aged man who looked like he hadn’t slept for days thanked me profusely, telling me that he needed to go find his family. Then he sat back down on the roof of the mobile home from which I just rescued him and stared blankly forward. Another barely finished thanking me before he demanded I go find his camera. When I returned with it, he took the staring blankly route too.

Eventually I stopped helping these people, but still they would appear. A blood red notification “Help Megan” popped up on the screen every time I accelerated my motor boat around a dangerous turn in the island’s river, hoping that none of the zombies noticed me long enough to divert their attention away from her. I felt bad about abandoning this virtual victim the first time I passed by her, and told myself all of the ugly rationalizations that befit me as a player. I was going to save an entire village, I reasoned, and getting trapped knee-deep in a murky river with nothing but a baseball bat and a slow-moving motorboat wouldn’t help either of us. The ugliness of Dead Island’s moral universe worked, in other words.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/04/23/video-game-review-dead-island-riptide/