It’s midnight, and the light of a full moon glints on the surface of the Pacific Ocean. You can see the ebbing of the shoreline, how the light scatters differently on the surface of the waves versus the sand. Alongside the wash of the sea, you can hear subdued, guttural groaning, the shuffling of Crocs through sand. There’s an undead woman – flesh hanging off her cheek in a clump – limping towards you. No urgency, no pressure. She could be drunk, in another time and place, and just off for a walk down Venice beach.
But this isn’t LA. It’s HELL-A, per an enthusiastic Dambuster rep, who is basically our tour guide for this unlikely excursion to a doomed west coast vacation. She told me to soak in the ambiance – the sights, the sounds, and *deep breath* yes, even the sweet rotting smells – of this doomed Los Angeles as we sat down to get about an hour’s worth of time with Dead Island 2. And her guidance was appreciated, because what a stunning game it is.
“We really want this to be a sort of personal journey, right?” says art director Adam Olson as I recount studying this undead woman – watching the way the skin moved independently of her flesh, watching how she twitched, and shuffled, and wobbled as she struggled against the sand. “We want you to get really up close and visceral in our game. So many games, developers just fill them out. We didn’t want to do just that – we wanted to really populate our spaces; there’s things to see everywhere, there are details in everything. It should feel like a rich world. I think when people get their hands on our game, they’ll see that everything has these fun little details and interesting things to see. It’s been meticulously hand-crafted.”