Editorials
Six Lessons ‘Dead Island’ Can Learn From ‘Far Cry 3’
With its emphasis on co-op and light RPG elements, Dead Island is one of the more interesting takes on the popular zombie genre we’ve seen from a big budget game in some time. I enjoyed the original quite a bit, despite its flaws. The story and characters may be alarmingly dull, but there’s nothing quite as satisfying as strapping a car battery to a machete so you can mow down a horde of zombies. I recently bought Far Cry 3 (finally), and I’ve realized that the entire time I’m playing it, all I can think about is how many things it does better than Dead Island. Comparing it to the post-apocalyptic zombie game might seem a bit odd at first, but the two games are actually very similar.
Each game violently tosses you into a hostile world where pretty much everything wants to kill you, and usually in horribly brutal ways — only yesterday I was mauled by a bear as I was stalking two pirates on a beach only to jump into the ocean and get eaten by a shark. Both games are about exploration, survival, and scavenging to survive, though Far Cry 3 puts more effort into the all of that. So while they’re different, they’re also really similar. The big difference is Far Cry 3 is far superior to Dead Island in many ways. To remedy this, I’ve chosen six things Far Cry 3 does really well, so Dead Island can take notes. Check them out after the break.
Now, because Dead Island: Riptide is already pretty deep into development at this point (it releases in April), some of these ideas might not be feasible this late into production. Riptide isn’t being described as a real “sequel,” it’s more like a Dead Island 1.5, so I’m pretty sure Deep Silver has a true sequel in the works, possibly from a different developer. If they do, I totally wouldn’t mind if they “borrow” some or all of this list to help make Dead Island 2 the best damn zombie game it can be.
Memorable Characters
Can you name any character from Dead Island that wasn’t Xian, Purna, Sam B, or Logan? Could you even name those?I couldn’t name them all (thanks, Google search!), but I can name several of the people I met during the many, many hours I spent playing Far Cry 3. Though let’s be honest here, when I say playing Far Cry 3, what I really mean is setting bears on fire and stabbing sharks in the face in Far Cry 3. More on that later.
Visually, they weren’t all that special, but the excellent voice work and mannerisms made them seem like real people. They look and act like real people, while in Dead Island it was often difficult to tell the living from the dead. Unfortunately, Dead Island Riptide isn’t starting fresh, as you can import your character(s) from the first game into the pseudo-sequel, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get the voices and animation right this time around.
Satisfying Stealth
Dead Island was in no way a stealth game, though it should’ve been. Look, if you’re going to make the guns as useless as they were in the original game, forcing you to get up close and personal, then why not give me the chance to sneak up on a zombie for an execution? Sure, you could do that in Dead Island, but it was difficult, and more often than not it ended with you desperately trying to hack (or bludgeon) your way out of a crowd of newly pissed of zombies.
There’s more to this idea, too. I want a bow, and I want to be able to sneak up on the undead for silent kills, but I also want to be able to distract them. Far Cry 3 has a nifty, and beautifully simple, feature that lets you press right on the D-pad to throw a rock. This will create a noise that temporarily distracts enemies in the area, great for clearing out a heavily guarded area or for getting an enemy to turn around so you can sneak up behind them and stab them in the face.
I just noticed how much time I spent face-stabbing in Far Cry 3… kind of scary, actually.
Equipment Upgrades
Yes, Dead Island already lets you create and customize the weapons in your zombie-slaying arsenal, but I’d like to see this taken one step further. I want to be able to use the items I scavenge from the environment (more on that later, too) to make the game more enjoyable. I want to feel stronger, and I don’t only want that sense of progression to come from my current level. I want to be able to craft bigger pouches, pockets, backpacks, etc. so I can hold more items, ammunition, and other precious resources (such as the incredibly stupid energy drink and granola bar health items). Please?
I Am Jason Brody
There are first person games, and there are first person games. Dead Island falls firmly into the first group, while Far Cry 3 is definitely a card carrying member of the second. While I play Far Cry 3, I feel like I’m in the world. Jason Brody may be a too entitled and moderately unlikable guy, but I felt like I was him. When I fell and hit the ground too hard, I felt it. When I got too close to fire and had to pat out the flames, I felt it. When I was shot and I had to dig the bullet out of my arm, I felt it. When I swam across a shallow river only to get attacked by an alligator, I felt it — and my roommates heard my screams. I case areas before I go in, observing them from afar, assessing the risks, and deciding on which approach I should take to complete my objective. I feel like I’m in the game.
In Dead Island, I haul ass from point A to point B, hoping I don’t run out of stamina (something they should remove from Riptide) before I reach my destination. If something tries to stop me I spam the right trigger until the bad thing falls down.
See the difference?
Scavenge To Survive
Scavenging is something that’s admittedly a little difficult to make interesting. I mean, you’re really just looking through bags, boxes, corpses, and various other containers in search of items your character needs to survive. It’s the adventure game equivalent to grinding — though there’s totally that too in Dead Island — but that doesn’t mean it can’t be satisfying. Sifting through the contents of countless briefcases isn’t fun, nor is it particularly satisfying. However, swimming through shark infested waters to that broken down ship that you just know has treasure in it, exploring ancient temples, or climbing a mountain so you can check that shack near its peak is all exponentially more satisfying.
In Far Cry 3, scavenging is moderately enjoyable. You’re still looking through containers, but the game made getting to many of those containers fun. I’d like to see more of that in the next Dead Island.
A Sense of Exploration
Now, Far Cry 3 doesn’t have the most memorable of game worlds. It’s a big, gorgeous island with few recognizable landmarks. Essentially, it looks like real life. Dead Island suffers from the same issue, in that its world isn’t all that interesting. It’s beautiful, and the contrast between a zombie apocalypse and a tropical island resort was fun to look at, but exploring it wasn’t very enjoyable. For an open world game to succeed, its world has to be interesting and unique and fun to explore. Far Cry 3 did this by making its world unpredictable. Bandit hide-outs, temple ruins, sharks, bears, tigers, big fucking birds that you really should not underestimate, you never know what’s going to happen, so you always have to be prepared. Dead Island is trying to remedy this by adding a dynamic weather system into the mix (I totally requested this last summer) that can cause flash floods. I love this idea and I can’t wait to see it in action.
Far Cry 3 also made getting around its world easy. If you’re lazy (like me, sometimes) you can fast travel, or you can drive one of the many vehicles you find scattered about the world, or you can go by foot and hope one of the aforementioned monsters doesn’t eat you along the way, or you can grab a boat or jetski and jump waterfalls, or you can paraglide above it all in relative safety, I only hope you’re good at landing (I always messed that part up). The point is, you have options, and each is fun in a different way. Riptide has added a boat, though I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that turns out.
While we’re taking pages out of other game’s books, let’s look at The Walking Dead. In Telltale’s episodic series, which I’ve recently discovered actually causes me physical pain if I go a day without talking about it, I cared about the people I interacted with, I cared about the person I controlled, and I cared about the story. I can’t say the same for Dead Island, and I wish the game had made me feel even a fraction of the emotions I felt while watching its incredible trailer.
Have a question? Feel free to ever-so-gently toss Adam an email, or follow him on Twitter and Bloody Disgusting.
I first heard about The Mandela Catalogue through a couple of nephews who were obsessed with the ARG’s sinister mythology. It was only after watching Wendigoon’s in-depth analysis of the series that I realized just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
In fact, I’d already been exposed to the nightmarish visuals of Alex Kister’s YouTube creation for years at that point without even realizing that it was the origin of several viral “cursed images” and spooky memes that had leaked into the wider internet – with this viral element actually being a part of the Catalogue’s overarching narrative.
Flash-forward to 2026 and the unprecedented success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has led to Hollywood betting on horrific internet properties with existing fanbases, which means that Kister’s unique hybrid of both religious and analog horror is finally headed to the big screen with a script written by Kister himself alongside Tyler Clifton.
While this news shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve been keeping up with the ongoing success of The Mandela Catalogue (both myself and Wendigoon having previously predicted that the series would inevitably make the jump to theaters one day), plenty of horror fans are likely confused as to why so many folks are excited for what appears to be a Hollywood adaptation of a series of creepy .jpeg images under a VHS filter.
With that in mind, today I’d like to invite fellow readers to accompany me as I explore the origins of Alex Kister’s viral hit and attempt to explain exactly why we should all be excited about the Mandela Catalogue adaptation!
From High School Writing Project to Internet Horror Phenomenon
The first seeds of The Mandela Catalogue were sown when Kister was still in high school and developed a writing project subverting religious tropes in a world where biblical history had been altered by demonic forces. A little while later, Kister came across an analog horror contest on Reddit and decided to adapt his ideas into a standalone video where he would edit a religious kids’ cartoon –The Beginner’s Bible: The Nativity, to be specific- into something far creepier. This is how the iconic Overthrone video was born, with this viral short film taking on a life of its own as fans demanded more eerie content from Kister.
Though the video was originally meant to be a one-and-done sort of affair, with Kister actually regretting some of its primitive visuals and considering the editing amateurish and “YouTube-Poop-like” when compared to his current standards, fan reaction and free time during the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the (then) seventeen-year-old filmmaker to continue producing content set in this same world. The Mandela Catalogue name was inspired by the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory, as the series would slowly begin to explore the subtle horror of alternate histories.
Inspired by existential dread brought on by extended periods of quarantine as well as a personal crisis of faith, Kister continued to expand his alternate timeline where the rise of Christianity had been prevented by what was presumably the Devil disguised as the Archangel Gabriel. This alternate course of fictional events led to the existence of certain paranormal anomalies that had come to be accepted as “normal” by the 1990s, which is why most of the series’ supernatural horror is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner.
Most of this background information and religious lore is delivered by increasingly cryptic broadcasts and in-universe PSAs, as well as the occasional found footage video, that often have to be decoded by clever viewers. Of course, it’s the consistently disturbing imagery that made the series so popular – much of which was originally created by Kister on a smartphone!
The Alternates: Horror’s Most Unsettling Modern Monsters
The show’s early episodes mostly take place within the fictional Mandela County in Wisconsin and depict life in a world where demonic entities are capable of using media to enter our reality. This process usually involves scaring victims into killing themselves and then repurposing their bodies as horrific doppelgangers referred to as “Alternates”. This terrifying phenomenon has become so common that local police already have specialized procedures in place to deal with the issue, though this usually consists of simply ignoring calls for help so as to avoid spreading so-called “Metaphysical Awareness Disorder” any further.
Over time, Kister would expand this mythology and incorporate different kinds of Alternates into the mix, though the story never stopped deconstructing religious concepts. The series’ second volume exponentially increased both video quality and the overall narrative scope as we began to follow the lives of characters who had already grown up in this dystopian hellscape where the government is forced to prohibit religion, television, and even mirrors in the hopes of mitigating the damage done by the ongoing invasion of otherworldly entities.
The really interesting part comes into play when you realize exactly how the Alternates make use of scary media in order to spread their demonic influence, with the analog horror of it all being a diegetic part of the story and something of a memetic trap orchestrated by the false Gabriel.
I particularly appreciate how some characters begin to suspect that there’s something wrong with their version of reality and that things weren’t meant to play out this way, especially when Mark utters the haunting line “who have I been praying to all this time?” That’s why I think The Mandela Catalogue is an effective piece of religious horror even if you don’t subscribe to the Christian worldview, as the mere idea of a world where evil has already won is a universally terrifying concept in and of itself. Not only that, but the series’ uncanny analog imagery alone is already worth the price of admission, as you’ve likely already noticed by looking at the pictures accompanying this article.
Why The Feature Adaptation Could Be Horror’s Next Big Success
It’s actually been a whole year since Kister first announced that he had been working on a feature-length screenplay for a Mandela Catalogue movie since 2022, with his proposed story following an ensemble of high-school graduates who uncover a supernatural conspiracy after the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student. This premise sounds similar to narrative elements present in the series’ second volume, but I’m pretty sure that Kister is going to go the Kane Parsons route and make the movie more of a spin-off than a re-imagining of its source material.
While notable Hollywood producers like Aaron B. Koontz, Scott Stuber, and Steven Spielberg himself are backing the upcoming project, I feel like there’s no one better to adapt this deeply personal exploration of faith and the dark side of communication than the person who first came up with it. That’s why I can’t wait to see Kister’s work on the big screen, as I have a feeling that this young filmmaker is the next one on the list about to make cinematic history – especially since this is clearly a passion project that has been in the works for years at this point!
That being said, there’s always a chance that the film could end up unleashing a fresh wave of Alternate incursions, but I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.
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