Dead Island 2 feels like an escapist dream of summer. Specifically, it feels like the kind of game I dreamed about playing when I was working the best and worst summer job I ever had.
That summer, I was a bug boy. That was what me and my friends called ourselves, but the more traditional term would be door-to-door pest control salesman. I spent four months pacing the suburban streets of Illinois, walking from house to house and ringing several dozen doorbells each day to get, at best, a few sales. In between doors, I could check my iPad for a scoreboard of how the rest of my coworkers were doing. If you got a sale on the board early, it gave you the confidence to know you weren't going home empty handed. If you didn't, the day might be as long as your evening shadow stretching out on the pavement ahead of you.
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That summer was the best of times and the worst of times. The people I worked with were a ton of fun to hang out with, and we all lived in the same apartment complex. You worked all day (9 am to 9 pm) Monday through Friday, and most of the day (9 to 5) on Saturday, so there wasn’t much free time. But the truncated weekends we did have were a burst of some of the most fun times I’ve ever had, getting rewarded with an expensive steak dinner in Chicago when a week went well, or just goofing around at the apartments.
Most of the time it was hot, sweaty misery. Doing a job that you're not good at for most of your waking hours for six days a week for four months out of the year can push you to imagine any kind of escape. At night, this was my writing. I had taken a poetry class the year before, and I started scratching out free verse on my iPad, beating myself up over wasting so much of my college career failing to pursue the thing I was most passionate about. During work hours, escapism sometimes came in the form of a long lunch break, or leaving the doors to go watch a matinee, or finding a water park or mini golf course or Goodwill in the area to pass a few hours when the sun was at its highest.
But, the most common form of escapism, the kind I lived in during each day of work, was within my own mind. I would think about what I was going to do when I got home that night, what I wanted to write about next, and what the year would be like when I got back to school in the fall. Occasionally, the houses would prompt daydreaming as well. The big ones would prompt thoughts of vacation or future success. Sometimes it was the people. Sometimes a teenage boy would answer the door, and I would think about how, in a different, earlier summer, I could have been doing what he was doing, hanging out at home in my PJs all day, playing games, watching TV, hanging out with friends, and staying up all night if I felt like it. Certain neighborhoods just conjured that longing for better days. It may have been the scent of the grass, or the specific shade of a house's vinyl siding, or the intensity with which the sun bore down on my forehead on days where I wasn't wearing my insect emblazoned ball cap.
If I thought about it, I imagined myself playing something like Grand Theft Auto 5, a sun-drenched open-world where I could tool around, hang out, and only go on missions if I wanted to. It seemed like my current life, sunny and hot, but without the obligation to do difficult emotional labor dozens of times each day. While playing Dead Island 2, I'm realizing that it's the same kind of game. Its sunlight is incredible. The abandoned houses of its Beverly Hills aren't much different from the big houses I would knock on a regular basis, and occasionally get to tour. Some of its people, like a YouTuber you meet who wants to capture gruesome zombie kills for her channel, remind me of guys I worked with, who were constantly updating their Snapchat stories with videos of their antics throughout the day. It's a goofy, sunny game to play where death is constantly around the corner if you don't work to prevent it.
Had it existed in the summer of 2015, it would have been where I wanted to be.
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