There's a pervasive plainness to Escape Dead Island that hasn’t been common since the PlayStation 2 days. This zombie joins the list of competent yet unremarkable third-person survival adventures like , using newly acquired grappling hooks and other gear turns a 15-minute trek into a five minute stroll. You can tell this was inspired by the best Metroid and Castlevania games, but the application of these influences feels lazy and trite.

The only reason you might want to go off the beaten path would be to hunt for collectables, and even those items offer scant insight on the cause of the infection. In the interest of a thorough investigation, Cliff's colleague in crime, Linda, asks him to take photos of newsworthy locales and objects, but since obtaining a complete collection of photos doesn't yield anything worthwhile, this side mission carries little value.

As an origin tale, Escape Dead Island is hampered by an issue common to the zombie genre: the appeal of the narrative focusing on the characters' day-to-day survival, combined with little attention being given to finding a remedy to stop the outbreak. When I finished Dead Island three years ago, I wasn't compelled to scour forums to theorize the root causes of the infection. There was enough exposition by game's end and whatever mysteries were left unsolved left me feeling indifferent. Despite my profound apathy regarding making sense of Cliff's hallucinations and dreams, there was at least some satisfaction in silently assassinating the undead.