Look, we are just as surprised and disappointed as you, but after years of thinking horror and zombie games were just a distant memory for us, something changed. Maybe it happened when we realized we were completely and utterly desensitized: 2025 was and still is full of actual terror, with things like global fascism, televised genocide, falling planes, UFO’s, remote warfare, nameless killers… even the plague on the rise. We almost even had a rapture.
That’s not an inconsiderable amount of stressful things to be going through. But either way, this year we’ve been asked daily if not hourly to engage in psyop levels of kayfabe to suspend our collective disbelief in the sheer Stockholm syndrome of it all, so spooky season provides some much needed emotional cover. That is to say, now is a good time to enjoy horror as a genre while you still can.
Of course, there’s more to horror than blood and guts – horror’s brand of escape does provide cathartic bursts of adrenaline much harder to find at, say, your office job. Sometimes those simulated moments bring genuine relief to one’s chronically stored tension, and in a world that demands you take care of yourself before taking care of others, what better way to get a jump-start than diving headfirst into apocalyptic, hyper-realistic trauma?
“Obviously,” say most people reading this as they fondly remember years spent with the best of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. Sadly, we weren’t able to get into those games until much more recently. We grew up with a Nintendo 64, and the console’s library of horror games was sorely limited. Many existed as questionable ports, with the few we were able to get a hold of more accurately described as ‘vibe-y’ – Body Harvest, Armorines, Quake, and Shadowgate 64 for instance, which we actually hated, but it did effectively creep us out in mysterious, frustrating ways.
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We’d also casually enjoyed the first wave of PS2 horror gems like Extermination and The Thing, but we were somewhat spoiled at that point by 1999’s Alien vs Predator on PC. Keep in mind, we were roughly eleven years old, so we weren’t hip to stealthy contemporaries like System Shock, Thief, or Alone in the Dark – we bought our copy at an OfficeMax.
Technically the AvP franchise might be classified as something similar to those, like early survival-horror, action-horror, or even just an a stealth-action game with elementsof horror. But it also felt just ahead of the curve with its dynamic stealth / hunting moments, heart pounding chases, and granular, limb-from-limb gore. Depending on if you played as a Xenomorph, a Predator, or Marine, you would experience drastically different angles on all of these things, each resonating strongly with the average modern day horror experience. Sometimes it feels like that series never really got its flowers – the first one was even remade in 2010, but at that point games like Bioshock and Fallout 3 had shown us what could be done with story, pacing, and atmosphere. For better or worse, it was around then we were playing less games in general due to getting into more and more trouble in real life.
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By 2013, we’d moved to Oregon and serious gaming had all but released its chokehold on us. We missed out on a lot of good scares looking back, only catching glimpse of classics like Dead Space, The Last of Us, Left for Dead when hanging out in friends’ living rooms, but gaming was something we rarely thought about while writing, touring, working shit jobs, etc. Actually, we do remember playing Dark Souls for a solid twenty minutes one time, because our roommate Andrew aka a very important part of Muscle Beach Petting Zoo turned it into a drinking game – Drunk Souls. The next thing we remember, it was 7 in the morning and we were literally halfway on and off the couch and we were halfway through writing “Cyrodiillionaire.” It was far from a judgement thing, it was just we knew if we didn’t commit all the way to the important half of those moments and make some music, we would have never left that couch.
But much like an un-killable 80’s slasher icon, horror crept back into our lives. When the pandemic hit in 2020, we had just moved into a new apartment with our spouse, and we parked our asses on the couch for a solid year. We had gotten an Xbox to play Borderlands 2 together, and eventually the third, so between those, Cyberpunk: 2077, and various mods for Skyrim, gaming instinct slowly came back online. We didn’t jump back into horror or anything particularly scary for a long time, but things turned around when we finally caught wind of Dead Island 2. In 2022, an updated trailer was revealed for the game, and we felt a familiar twitch in our eye when it eventually became the game that got us deeper into horror than ever before.
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It wasn’t just because we grew up in and around Hell-A and wanted to create some undead ruckus – though that certainly helped. Seeing the Santa Monica Pier, Venice Beach, and parts of Hollywood so realistically rendered, even in a full CGI preview with zero actual gameplay, was more than enough to pique our interest. Not only that, it also seemed to find a way to get around beating a dead horse via tongue-in-cheek self-awareness more closely resembling the tone of films like Zombieland or George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead than anything adjacent to it in gaming at the time.
So after completing the game and all its DLC, we were left with a revelation – suddenly we could see some relevant parallels. We’ve already established horror can be therapeutic and awesome. What we hadn’t really thought about was that it’s fun the way death metal, grindcore, and harsh noise are fun. In terms of music, the natural overwhelm, whether you’re feeling it as a receiver or the sense of it you create as the performer, can make for pure catharsis. It’s not meant to be pleasant per se, but in terms of horror, there’s a reason we keep coming back like hordes of the undead to the… hordes of the undead. After digesting all of that, we consumed more and more horror, and continued to process more and more trauma in these cathartic, adrenaline-spiked moments. First came the Alan Wake series, then the Metro and Stalker games, and then we replayed all of the Doom games we could handle. We’d been meaning to play out the remastered Resident Evil series, but we hit a roadblock when we stopped to check out the original Dead Island and it’s spinoff Dead Island: Riptide.
This is when we realized that this whole time, we were starting in the middle of the story. Turns out, there was a lot to write about, and a few had, but thought we’d give things an update for spooky season. Full disclosure, actually we wish Jason Schreier were the one covering this. After reading Blood, Sweat and Pixels, we’re sure he would know just how to give this fertile mystery it’s due. Maybe this one’s not actually a mystery, just a fascinating intersection of development, competition, and a love for the undead. But for now, yours truly will have to do.
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While the first iterations of Dead Island stand as great concepts, they’re also endearingly jank. Not bad by any means, but with so many things improved on in Dead Island 2, we didn’t feel too guilty about uninstalling them when we got halfway through both of them. They did have cool combat systems with the dynamic reticle telling you exactly where you’d be attacking, and the resort area is still a fun romp, but the weapons and movement feel clunky and archaic, which makes exploration kind of a chore. Luckily the developers would immensely improve the experience… just not in the same game, or even the same IP.
You read that right – the devs behind the original Dead Island and DI: Riptide are NOT the same ones behind Dead Island 2. Dead Island 2 as we know it today was officially developed by Dambuster, at the time most easily associated with 2016’s Homefront: The Revolution – but we’ll return to them in a moment, because that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
After the release of the first two Dead Island games, Techland (who also did Call of Juarez) knew there were still improvements to make on their established formula, and allegedly wanted to tackle something more serious and grounded in the next chapter. They tried to get the ball rolling with Deep Silver for a sequel, but couldn’t come to an agreement, and ultimately left it behind in favor of coming up with something new. As hard as it must have been, the results would change the face of horror games overnight.
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To this day, 2015’s Dying Light exceeds people’s expectations with its dedication to two pillars – one being horror, the other being freedom of player movement. It’s like cross between Mirror’s Edge and Far Cry with an emphasis on melee combat, but enemies so effective running is often the safer option. We doubt it was easy for Techland to leave the series they’d started behind, but committing to what became Dying Light was potentially the smartest move they’d ever made. Everything about it was a leap forward – the voice acting and story are great, the graphics and setting of Harran have a strangely timeless feel to them, and of course, the day vs night cycle is truly a thing to behold. If you can survive it.
When the sun sets, you’re not just outnumbered, you’re vastly outgunned by enemies smarter, stronger, and more capable than you – and they’re ghastly, too. Like they look very, very dead, and somehow very angry at the same time, and that’s not even getting into the Volatiles. The TLDR? Techland put their money where their mouth was, and it paid off in spades. But in 2022, Dying Light 2: Stay Human hit the shelves, and some felt they’d bitten off more than they could chew.
While the game was still generally praised for taking things forward, the changes and expansions to the first game’s defining mechanics were hardly subtle, with signature systems feeling both simplified and strained. Players had to block in order to kick, mitigate constant infection, and the night-time terrors had been reduced a fair amount in order to make space for nocturnal runs for valuable supplies. Truth be told, though we struggled at first with each of these things and more, we still play Stay Human to this day because it’s a little more arcade-y feeling. It’s not as scary, but it is tons of fun. It also has the most compelling exploration in the series, with Paweł Selinger and Eric Cochonneau’s vision of Villedor resulting in a city that often echoes the art directing genius of Viktor Antonov (Dishonored, Half Life 2). There’s broken art-deco, repurposed art nouveau, and antebellum gothic themes all smashed together, and that’s just in the areas people feel safe. It’s crowded, but it’s deep, and when you start to understand how much of it you can explore, it kind of makes sense that they toned down the terror so you’d be more encouraged to see what’s laying around those nooks, crannies, and vacant apartments.
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After so many patches, the game’s achieved almost everything it set out to do over the years, and at this point the starkest contrast between Stay Human and the original is the difference in storytelling. It’s actually a story we want to love, because we more or less get what it’s trying to say about empathy, community, and individualism in times of crisis, but it’s heavy handed compared to the first. The craziness of the plot also gets amplified by iconically strange delivery at times. This doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s all over the place – while a lot of people like to point fingers at the little sister, the main one for us was trying to understand that Aiden was not Kyle Crane, despite his VO sounding identical to Roger Craig Smith. Allegedly it’s because Craig Smith’s performance was so good that they asked Aiden’s voice actor (Jonah Scott) to mimic it, which is again, bizarre, but either way Techland had pushed to broaden the scope of what survival-horror could accomplish for a second if not third time, and for the most part stuck the landing.
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Yet behind the scenes, the back and forth between Dead Island and Dying Light continued. Technically, Stay Human hit the shelves about a year before Dead Island 2, and thanks to years of development hell, not everyone who saw Dead Island 2’s trailer was convinced it would actually release. Multiple studios had tried to get it through production, but for whatever reason couldn’t, so when a new trailer dropped in 2022, a natural skepticism was exposed. Considering it had been eight long years since the original trailer showed at E3 in 2014, how could we be sure the latest preview wouldn’t treat us to the same fate?
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Side note, that original trailer was the work of the second team hired for the job – Yager Development of Spec Ops fame had taken over at the time, which didn’t seem like a terrible match, though it did raise some eyebrows. At the time, Techland’s Maciej Binkowski had noted ‘lukewarm sales’ being the largest factor in Techland’s separation from the IP, which you can still read about in Bloody Disgusting here, but clearly Deep Silver and fans of the series were still invested.
Despite the buzz, by 2015, Critical Hit had reported in an interview with Techland’s Tymon Smektala that he’d ‘love to return to the series,’ said of course in the context of Yager Development also being booted from the series, again due to differences in vision for the series. Funny enough, a roughly polished playable build of the game leaked around that same time, which didn’t help the optics, but it’s worth checking out here because it’s actually pretty congruent with the DI2 we have today, though it more strongly resembles it’s predecessors.
Obviously, Techland ended up not returning to the project, and by March of 2016, Sumo Digital was designated by Deep Silver as next in line to build upon whatever was left of the game’s skeleton. This was actually a bit of a shocker for the community – Sumo’s output had been mainly platformers and sports games up to that point like Virtua Tennis and Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing. What would they try to do with Dead Island? Dead Island Racing? Dead Island Tennis? You know… maybe that’s actually a vein worth tapping into. Sadly, we never really found out. But Deep Silver officially sent in Dambuster to finish the job in 2018, and things sure turned around.
Of course, Dambuster also had somewhat of an ace up their sleeve, being that some of their staff were far from beginners. In fact, some of them were dev legends. If you played Homefront: The Revolution you know it was leaps and bounds beyond it’s middling original, but most people forget that Dambuster was started after the fall of Crytek (Crysis 2 and 3, Warface), formerly known as Free Radical Design. Yes, that Free Radical Design – developers who had left the legendary UK studio Rare after working on Perfect Dark and Goldeneye to cook up Timesplitters. Looking back, we are still bummed that they never got to complete a next-gen Timesplitters, but if you look at the multiplayer in Dead Island 2, you can see shades of that same glory in it’s creative and ‘fun-first’ philosophy.
Still, it was probably a lot of pressure when they took it on, especially considering they did their best to start from scratch – game director David Stenton was quoted day of release in Gamesindustry.biz as saying that despite similarities in tone to the original trailer from Yager in 2014, they never used it as a direct reference. While we were unable to get in touch with them or Deep Silver for quotes or interviews of our own, we can only assume that Dying Light 2’s 2022 release made for a nail-biting home stretch when it came to Dead Island 2’s development. Even with people’s hangups about Dying Light 2 being different, we could definitely see it setting additional internal expectations for Dead Island 2, even if that was specifically so they could be as distinct from each other as possible.
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Dead Island 2 finally hit the shelves in 2023, and fans appeared in droves for a true battle of the sequels whether Techland, Dambuster, or Deep Silver wanted it or not. Comparison had become the name of the game – every day content creators from the social media sphere would spawn new waves of video analysis and critique, and with both developers actively patching and updating as often as they could, it was a real frenzy. It felt like sports, but for zombie games. Generations of people couldn’t help but ask, “who has the best combat? Who has the best gore? Who has the best story? Who has better exploration? Who has better weapons?” Even people who never played the originals.
Much like Dying Light 2: Stay Human, the story was the most maligned aspect of Hell-A. Not everyone appreciated its cheesy tones or predictable story, and sometimes the movement still feels dated, though it is lightyears ahead of the original. Also there are a couple maps that we’ll probably never revisit like the Metro, that feel more like transitional areas than any place you’d actually want to spend time in. But all that being said, we found a lot more depth in the story than we anticipated on our first run through the game as Dani, and exploration is rewarding for us to this day – not only do you often find cool new weapons after intense battles, but as you meet more characters your character reveals more about themselves, and those moments are grounded in surprisingly relatable narratives.
But Dead Island 2 shines brightest when it comes to combat and its iconic gore, and for a lot of horror gamers, that’s enough. Morbid? You could say that. Yet if you’ve ever complained in a game that the sword doesn’t rend your enemy in half or remove limbs properly, this is the game for you. With the combat actually feeling so fun in this one, you can’t help but explore your options with flaming meat cleavers, auto-carbines with poisonous ammo, and electrified throwing stars. It’s worth noting that Damuster’s dismemberment system is actually known internally as FLESH, which stands for “Fully Location Evisceration System for Humanoids.”
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In the end (well, almost the end) gamers lovingly embraced both. Both come in at solid 80/100’s on Metacritic, and we currently have both sequels installed because both have a lot of replay value, which isn’t always the case in horror. For instance, the second we completed everything in Doom: Eternal and Alan Wake II, we uninstalled them immediately. It’s not that there wasn’t anything to come back to, it’s that the dread was so all-consuming and effective that it actually trumped replay value – we needed time to recover. While neither are terrifying, Dead Island 2 is about as intense or scary as Stay Human. But both pale somewhat in the face of the first Dying Light.
However, if it’s horror you’re looking for, the best may have indeed been saved for last – it’s 2025, hell, almost 2026, and Techland have swung a third time with Dying Light: The Beast. While not necessarily as huge feeling as the previous entries, which is fair considering it started development as DLC, it still feels massive, and very, very alive. Many of Stay Human’s best qualities ie. crafting, loot, and exploration are all back, and all improved, but perhaps the most welcome change we’ve noticed was going back to the original’s HUD and UI. It’s just such a subtle yet cozy ‘we are so back’ moment for fans of the series. Also, the enemies are more varied and challenging than ever, and twice as fun to fight. The story is what it is not super ambitious, as evenge tales are always a little predictable, but there are some twists and interesting moments to keep players on their toes.
Personally, we’re getting a lot of joy from hunting down these strange new volatiles, and the day / night cycle delves into even more terrifying extremes than the original. We recently jumped over a ledge scaled a banister to escape an uncoming Volatile, and it literally walked up and scanned the distance for us as we tried not to breathe, right under it’s rotting nose. It was seriously just like the scene in LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo demands they get off the road, and damn if we didn’t get a little addicted in the moment. Then it jumped on top of our car and broke everything as we tried to get away. We did not survive. But we had have a lot of fun.
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Here at the tail end of 2025, any contention between the IP’s seems to have cooled considerably. Looking back, the brutal back and forth has given us a veritable mountain of blood, guts, and zombies to enjoy. If it weren’t so disgusting, it would be beautiful. Actually it’s still pretty beautiful.
The differences between Dead Island and Dying Light have become their strengths, and perhaps we’ve arrived at the point that the series are so different that comparisons aren’t even necessary anymore. But the inertia of their shared pasts remains a force to reckoned with to this day, and we have a feeling it’s not really over, so we genuinely felt compelled to get this out there as soon as possible.
Not only did Dying Light: The Beast just release last month, Dambuster also posted a cryptic ‘thank you’ note to the community at about the same time to announce they were actively working on ‘whatever comes next.’ We’re not sure if that means more DLC or a true three-quel, but if more horrors await, so will we. Although in our heart of hearts, we’d love to see some kind of unholy mashup like Dying Island or Dead Light, we’ll take what we can get. God we wish Jason Shreier wrote this, although we enjoyed the hell out of playing all of these games for hours and hours, telling ourselves we’d eventually write about it. As spooky season overtakes us, maybe it’s helpful to think of horror as immersion therapy. We’re looking to re-contextualize fear itself, and that can be incredibly powerful. It can create monsters and zombies, sure, but they’re not the point. It’s not the absence of feeling one strives for in horror, it’s the triumph of facing one’s fears. In the end, maybe the goal is, to borrow a phrase from Techland, to stay human, and maybe even emerge from the experience a better one.
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