Game 23: Isle of the Dead

You can sum up this game by quitting

Name:Isle of the Dead
Number:23
Year:1993
Publisher:Merit Software
Developer:Rainmaker Software
Genre:FPS/Adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:8 hours (including added time with CD version)

Isle of the Dead throws out a lot of ideas, most of which don't work at all. There's the adventure game aspect, which you could beat in 30 minutes if I'm being generous. There's the shooting aspect, which consists of shooting the same 5 guys for most of the game, followed by brief additions of two other guys at different points. Oh, and the shooting part is very slow until the very end.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this screen twenty times

The worst fault of the game is the constantly respawning enemies. While the game only has ten or so enemies in each area, these add up. In a practical, non-cheating sense, you will kill enough enemies to match something like Wolfenstein or Doom. Except because its the exact same enemies, it feels so much worse. In order to get past this part, you need to get an item that you might only get accidentally. One of the village chiefs says the oracle needs a sacrifice. You have a flower, which seems obvious. Smokes, lighter, gem, valuable, some games have gods like valuable things. Jacket, compass, possibly unique. A wolf corpse? Something that doesn't actually make sense and isn't a normal thing for a player to take? From my understanding, you're supposed to wait until they're on the altar before killing them. Mind, this doesn't get into actually reaching the oracle in the first place...

A good adventure game would have more than one line of text too

As to the adventure game aspect, well, its a joke. Its like a Cryo game in that only the important things are interactable. Like a Cryo game there's so much interesting looking stuff that you can't interact with that it sucks. Unlike a Cryo game, however, the things you do need to do are not completely shrouded in shadow. That doesn't suddenly make this good, as I can't even look at the bodies of my dead travelling companions in the plane, nor the guards, nor anything really. Even things you can look at tell you nothing. Actions too, are not easy to do. If you miss using an item, you have to go back to the inventory and start again. Don't even get me started on using items on other items in an adventure scene.

In some ways, the game is ahead of its time

Another aspect that didn't occur to me minutes before I hit the publish button, is that this game has a minor GUI problem. The adventure scenes have a decent UI, but that disappears when the shooting sections start. I suspect this might be because the Uzi was added later, they realized they could have just two types of ammo on the GUI when there are three. Or something about not being able to find anything on the ground. Now, this is actually the GUI that any ZDoom-derived engine uses, and I use that all the time, but the option is nice.

There are good elements. The graphics, when not in the shooting aspect, are appealing in their pulpy goodness. The endgame syringe puzzle, when not forcing me to backtrack across the island, was a fun experience. The uh...well I guess that's about it.

There are a lot of seeming glitches:

• Turning makes the enemies alert if they're in that sweet spot. They always are.
• Enemies appear in the walls.
• The machete sometimes has unlimited reach
• Doors, full stop.
• Doors that should link somewhere but don't.
• Cycling weapons is too fast. As you get more weapons, it gets worse.
  

Weapons:
The first three weapons are crap in the same way, they feel like the same weapon. Yes, the machete feels like the rifle. They do different damage, but it doesn't really matter. The "uzi", which is really a pistol someone modified, feels powerful. That's because it's only used in the last 10% of the game. 1/10

Enemies:
The zombies and other enemies each take a unique amount of ammo to kill, have their own lines, and really feel like they have their own personalities. None of that matters after killing the same enemies 1000 times. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
There aren't any as such, so I'm going to give this nothing here. 0/10

Levels:
If we take away the endless enemies, the game is pretty close to being smartly designed. It doesn't quite fit into what the beach would suggest, but every level can be smushed into each other with a little effort. Make the game about dodging enemies instead of burning through thousands of rounds and this would be really clever. As it stands, they're the right levels for a different game, but this game has respawning enemies. 1/10

Player Agency:
Firstly, let me point out that the movement, while its nice to have the option of various speeds, never hits a sweet spot. Its always too fast or too slow. This made picking up items a bitch, since I have to stop and press G to do so. This also applies to the weapon selection, hitting W cycles through them too fast. Using the inventory is an incredibly slow solution. The keys for running, shooting and strafing are all messed up in comparison to normal shooters. I also would have liked the ability to open a door, instead of standing in front of it. 2/10

Interactivity:
Before I get to the adventure game parts, I'd like to point out that the shooting parts have the odd bits of cleverness here. Sometimes you can actually do things you wouldn't expect to be able to do at the time.
The adventure game parts on the other hand, are very cumbersome and generic. There are almost no hotspots and the unusual hotspots there are...well, they're out of place. The actual adventure interface is understandable, but obtuse and annoying. It was a pain to interact with things and overall it was too slow. 2/10

This was clever the first time it happened

Atmosphere:
I feel like they had a good cheesy b-movie thing going on before they had every character break the fourth wall. Which would be the second you talk to a guard. 3/10

Graphics:
Most of the wall graphics are all right. Yes, the doors with the jungle is visually confusing. However, the comic book style graphics suffer from considerable flaws. The artist, while mostly competent, doesn't understand how long arms should be. Whoever scanned the enemies should be shot, because they're all the same height. They're very cluttered seeming. I also dislike the green background for the inventory, which is just someone using the noise tool. I guess it isn't visually busy at least. 3/10

Story:
You are Jake Dunbar, a pilot, I guess. You have to get off the island. You meet a chief, literally make the plot more interesting by rescuing his daughter, and defeat an evil scientist. Despite all the dialog going on, there's no point to much of it. 1/10

Sound/Music:
The musician here tried to go for a John Carpenter-style soundtrack, but unfortunately, the end result is very boring. Except for the medical lab, that's actually good. The sounds on the other hand, are all taken from a microphone with a very noticeable pop. Its very distracting. The guns lack punch and feel bland too. The CD version fixes these issues and has a new soundtrack, but I am rating the floppy. 2/10

Which brings the total up to 16. Despite a lot of elements that could be improved upon, this game's execution is tedious and unfun. Any entertainment I got out of it was solely do to finally beating it. Keep in might I am the person being positive about this game. Computer Gaming World called it one of the worst games of all time. The two internet video reviewers who have touched upon the game, Brutalmoose and LazyGameReviews, didn't have much higher opinions. You can certainly tell they didn't finish it. Honestly, I can't blame them.

The former president of Rainmaker, Sean Glaspell, apparently took the time out of his day to complain about people calling it a Doom clone on an abandonware site. To paraphrase, the game came out before Spear of Destiny came out, and had better performance when rendering enemies up-close than Wolfenstein. Now, unless there's something screwy going on with dates, that's not true. For the later? Judging by LGR's review of the game, that matters very little.
There's also something interesting in Myk Friedman. At first, it seems like he was just some guy who didn't do anything before or since. If I didn't read Sean's statements wouldn't take a second guess at things. Turns out Mr. Friedman actually is a comic artist, and one who very well may have read Dylan Dog or Deadworld. Now, I can't actually find that many comics he was the artist for, but he did do art for humorous back sections of Rock 'n' Roll Comics, which is a very interesting look back. I didn't check every issue, but he at least did a thing in no. 22. For the next 15 years, I can't find anything, but in 2008 he started making web animation as Toonsmyth Studios. Well, it might not be him. I haven't exactly exhaustively checked, but on the other hand, how many people share a similar weird nickname and an artstyle? Unfortunately, if my connection is correct, Mr. Friedman is dead. And now, with that bit of chipper knowledge, I leave you, until next time.

Isle of the Dead: Zombie Ritual

At this point I had a map, I knew roughly what I had to do. There were a few obvious items I needed to get yet, and I had no idea how to activate the oracle. The sun is down and I have a nasty feeling that's a bad thing. What did I do to solve this problem?
With a complete map of the game and knowledge of what to do to win, more or less, I started over. These first few paragraphs are a walkthrough of the isle part of the game. After that I don't really walk away from explaining the way to win, but I'm not going back and writing it the way I actually need.

I probably should have illustrated this with a picture of some of that

So, to start off, get everything from the plane, go to the northeast section. Enter the bunker, use wire cutters on the wire in the bunker, get everything in here. Use oil on rag, then rag on rifle. Go to the northwest section clear up as much of this area as you want, enter smiley cave, get crystal, go up hole in ground. After getting the flower go west until you reach the area with a cave. In the cave, make sure to get one of the wolf corpses.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

That's right, in order to win, you have to get a corpse of one of the wolves. Is it any wonder I never finished this before? Then, you make it to the first village. After talking to the guards and then the chief via the use of the book, you give the chief the cigarettes. Talk to him again and take the bolt cutters.

Something, something, cyberspace. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Go to the other village, north, kill the bongo player. Talk to this chief, go back to the other village, get his medallion. Go to the temple, its at the top side of the little ball in the map to the west. Use the wolf corpse and then talk to the oracle. You get an uzi, which uses a different kind of ammo. Ammo 1...ammo 2...yeah, somebody didn't think this through. The oracle tells you to starve the humming box. I.E., power supply box. Why a mad scientist brought along one of those, I don't understand. You have to talk to the oracle too, you can't just figure this out on your own. That's actually something I wouldn't have thought. Glad to see they did something right.

Its actually weaker per shot, but stronger in ROF

Here's where things get annoying, so far the game has told the player nothing they couldn't figure out themselves. A player who already knows this stuff could just use the smokes on the guy in the first village, then find the power box. Its in that little fenced off area in the southwest. Then you go to the upper right corner and find through scores of zombies. You use the bolt cutters on the chain wrapped around the fence door. If you use the insulated wire cutters, you die of electrocution. Why? I'm going to assume because the developers don't understand how insulation works.

Jesus Christ. The area behind it isn't even needed.

So the interior is rather calm. Deceptively so? Yes and no, the area where all the dead are is where the power box is.

I gotta get better at taking screenshots.

The left building contains some lab equipment. A syringe and a beaker. I find I can use the flower in the beaker but nothing else seems to be useful here. What a load of crap. You can touch a live wire.

At first I thought he was outside looking in...

In the other building, its a full-blown interior. The music changes to something out of Nitemare 3D. You can blow up a TV, or see how many paintings the good doctor has of himself.

Further in, there are a swarm of nurses. They're the strongest enemy, taking four shotgun blasts. How a mad scientist got this many people to agree with him, I'll never know. This has got to be a Manson-level cult of personality here or something. The "uzi" is a weak weapon, but makes up for it by having a firing rate of less than ten years per shot.
One room, hidden away deep in the house, has a red syringe. This not entirely necessary.

I didn't take a picture of that, so here's her inside you

Door three down, the rightmost of the three doors, has the native girl. She looks nothing like a native in cutscenes, but does look okay-ish in the inventory. You use the lower right button, the others are gags. When you free her, she mentions she knows an escape route in the basement. Okay. I don't know why...
If you examine her, you'll note it says she looks sick. Using the red serum will "calm her down", but the second you switch weapons or change screens she'll kill you instantly. Its not that she's okay, she'll still do that if you can't cure her, but the red serum must be the zombie drug.

If your arm looks like that, consult a doctor immediately. Not this one though.

In the middle of the three doors is the mad scientist. As you enter he hulks out. He's fought with a few nurses, which only serve as a distraction. The man himself is only a damage sponge and seems like he might not even be necessary to win the game. Killing him causes the isle to start self-destructing. In fifteen minutes.

Once again, I fail to capture a shot of the interesting part

He drops chemicals, which is the last ingredient for the antidote. You need to put the flower, then chemicals, then crystal into the beaker, followed by putting it into a syringe. Then you have to go to the oracle to inject it. Not the bathroom, not either village, not anywhere that's safe enough, no, I have to go all the way around the isle again in order to inject it.

How do you even know what flying is?

In order to actually escape, you can go by plane or by raft. With the plane, you need to disable the SAM. Its green wire, red wire, blue wire. How someone got a SAM down here is a feat in of itself. With the raft, you just need to cure her. You better have saved that flare gun. If you want to win that is, instead of sitting in a blue void for all eternity.

She just looks like she needs a good thousand year rest

With a little further testing, the good doctor IS necessary to win the game. In order to reach the plane you need to go into the basement. In order to open a perfectly visible door, you need the girl. Which is odd, because there's an option to get off the island on a plane which seems to be impossible with this framework. The girl is afraid of flying. Since she's a native, how would she know? The red serum turns out to be a sedative, thus meaning using it on her while she's infected speeds up the infection. Clever, if obvious.
I'd also like to point out that pausing the game does nothing to the in-game timers, as I had paused while the native girl was in my inventory, and unpaused to die.

Wow, I had no idea.

Couldn't there be a better way to do this?

So, what are the endings? There's little difference between the two. In each case you leave the island as "THE END - ?" appears at the top and bottom of the isle respectively. The plane ending involves us dumping green chemicals into the ocean. In both cases it is technically the end. The only other game made by people related to this was Nerves of Steel, a game that is much less amusing. Figuratively, this could be the prequel to any number of titles, depending on whether or not you want to make it so and the zombies can infect other zombies. Otherwise, there's just going to be some bad seafood for a while...

How is this not the end?

This screen moves really fast, so this is the only way you'd ever see it

Now, I'll close it off with a list of differences on the CD in comparison to the floppy version:

The rest of it isn't too bad...I guess

• Movement in the adventure sections is too fast when using the keyboard.
• The machete has had its graphics replaced with a stick of bamboo.
• The CD's trees look worse, but are more distinguishable from the exits.
• The sprite trees are garishly obnoxious.
• The shotgun is on the starting screen.
• Most of the death cutscenes have been removed, except for the snare. The scientist's HAHAHA seems to be all that remains.
• None of the gore unrelated to the player dying has been removed, nor have the scenes of you perving on the natives.
• The sounds are cleaned up and the guns seem to have different ones. They sound much better.
• The inventory seized up on me.
• The shotgun feels faster.
• The music is now pretty sweet.
• The save menu is much worse and even more unusable without a mouse.
• The save/load menu seems to not block inputs from screwing with your movement in the game.
• You get less ammo from the crate, but more when you get the uzi.
• If you get killed in such a way that would cause a game-over that doesn't feature the scientist, the game will just restart with no explaination.

In short, its unplayable. Not in the sense that you can't win, you can, but in the sense that if you don't know what you're doing you'll give up. The censorship is questionable at best. The gameplay improvements don't seem to fix anything.

Isle of the Dead: Cheating, and a Rough Map of the Game

Last time, I had explored the entire isle to the best of my ability. Problem is, with this game there's some very visually invisible doors. Normally, I wouldn't do this, but in the interest of actually finishing this thing, I have attempted to document the map of the game, and a big visual bonus. I modified some graphics.

In order to make the game look like this, you'll need to go to the cels3 folder of your game. You'll be picking RTREES1 & 2. Move these to a backup area, copy UNKNOWN (or something that won't visually clash) twice, rename those copies, and blam. One problem solved. You could also take the ones from the censored version. Viola, problem of the doors solved. That made this partially easier. I still needed a way to know where I was going. I was clear on the beach part of the game, but so was everyone. The interior of the game was a confusingly made mess that probably made sense to the developers at the time, but now no one knows. Its also worth pointing out that if you filled out the sheet on paper, you would end up with a mess, as the isle doesn't cleanly conform to an accurate rendering.

As can be understood, the game tries to fit everything into the actual space. Now, it isn't perfect, but can you imagine this game with an accurate beach? Yugh. Further, there are several walkable paths that can't be engaged with. These seem to be consistent across all versions, but you don't need them to complete the game. The one on the left side seems to lead to some unreachable place. There must be some unreachable map somewhere. The ones on the right link together via a map related to the endgame. You can't actually go into that area even if you're one second away from winning the game.
I didn't document it at the time, but the power supply box is in the little fenced off area in the south. SE portion of beach, southern exit, then left. The one that's a in-level yellow area. You'll need the rifle to destroy it, but don't think you're going to be clever by winning the game by skipping portions of it, you'll end up screwed if you do.
There's also the revelation that this is a really freaking small game. Without the constant stream of pointless fighting, you could beat this game in under 20 minutes. Not only are the enemies padding, they're the paddingest anyone has padded anything since the overstuffed chair.
I'd also like to add that I didn't fill in the cave system nor the fortress. The cave system you don't need to go more than one area deep. The fortress, well, once you get there, its smooth sailing. The smiley face cave because that thing is really easy to understand.

Isle of the Dead: Not-Alive, but Not-Dead

Ah, the safety of town. Reminds me of King's Quest 2. Which is about the only time this game is going to do that. Well, those zombies aren't going to resurrect themselves. To find the other chief.
One more thing of interest when fighting the not-alives, is that the child one can be shot a great distance away. This would be quality work if this also didn't apply to the other enemies at times. Mostly it only works against enemies that it should.

The second village is right in front of a horde of the undead. Right in front. Joy o' joy, oh happy day. Who designed this and thought, that's a good idea? Because that's the kind of guy who shouldn't be designing levels. The guards in the new village surprisingly seem to be different drawings than the ones in the first village.

How not to add hotspots, the game

Inside, we can continue our thieving rampage and...perv on some native woman in the shower. Now, normally, I'm not going to complain about T&A in a game, but come on. What is likely less than a minute ago, I shot a zombie with his guts hanging out, another using his severed head as a weapon, and a kid zombie. Yep, time to look at some titties! Get that motor running. VROOM! VROOM! Right, enough of that. There's a new track, which is some guy playing the bongos. It is incredibly annoying.

I was tired of being on barrel duty

I get another dialog with a chief. You know, talking to these characters is annoying, because each time I do so I have to use the translation book. Its not a puzzle, because its incredibly obvious. Its just busywork. Anyway, Mr. Gay Stereotype here complains about all the men disappearing, but he wants me to stop the music track. This is done by killing the bongo player, not turning the music off. Killing him literally turns off the music. Turning the music off does nothing.
Anyway, I must take the other chief's amulet to the oracle and maybe get a sacrifice. That's all I got in-between the devs making fun of themselves for drawing the same characters twice. At this point I mistakenly went back to the previous village and found out that wasn't what I was supposed to do. Upon reloading I come back to the village with a different song. One that sounds fun and like something from a platformer. Easter Egg? I'll see.

Smooth

So I leave the general area. Its hard to know exactly what I'm doing because these levels are terrible. First, I reach another area with a stone wall. I never noticed it before, but the stone walls are very badly made. Wow, I'm so shocked this game did poorly. Level transitions are difficult to figure out, it mostly involves hitting the wall with the machete and hoping you hit something, then standing there. If you have been standing there, you move automatically.
I also found out here that if you save while having the machete equipped, then reload that save, you have infinite reach with the machete. This is removed whenever you change rooms. Quality.

I only realized it now, but the female zombie looks wrong here

The next section I encountered was an area in front of a fence full of zombies. This is fine, since it seems to be the entrance to the final area of the game. There only seems to be the one entrance from the jungle though. I could be wrong. The PC is also bigger than one tile wide, as there was a corner piece I was unable to enter.

This occurs twice when it happens too

Wow, the first actual death cutscene I've seen. This is seemingly the censored version, that is, it doesn't play the zombie death scene. It seems to be missing the file, so either someone screwed up ripping this thing or there are three versions of the game. So graphic zombie dead is bad. Electrocution is fine though. Suicide is too, now that I remember it. Plane crashes...zombies...Anyway, a mad scientist appears each time you die. This doesn't make any sense until I actually get inside, I think. So, this is a bust. Good.

Another area full of stone, this time on top of a cave. The machete glitch seems random. Given how plentiful ammo is I suspect most of the dev team didn't use the knife enough to notice. There's not much to say about this one.

Underground reveals a new enemy, bats. Who look freaking massive yet are very much not. I find myself some rifle ammo down here. There are two exits in this cave, one to each side of a seemingly flipped stone area. I did not check the other seemingly flipped area extensively yet.

The area is a person's face. That's really fucking lazy.

I swear this happened, I just didn't get a good shot

To top this area off, I find this guy hiding in the walls. They're coming out of the walls indeed. This happened again later.

PROTIP: Zombies can't go over holes

There's a vine in the center of the cave that leads to a completely new area. Full of not-alives and a flower.

They actually breath when unalerted

At this point I lose interest in documenting this properly. I journey through an area or two of lifeless island terrain. If you ever want an answer as to how to do an island wrong...Anyway, I come across a vast cave system. This brings me to another new enemy, the wolves. They're wolves and they're about the size of a bear. These caves have a lot of rifle ammo.

Meanwhile, sometime later, back on the surface, there's nothing much going on beyond poor enemy placement. I think the tree may be dead enemies. I have not yet talked about the map system. The map shows the area you're currently in, with "X"s for marking dead enemies. No live enemies, no exits, no nothing. Now, I may be alone in this, but I never had any problems with figuring out where I was in the area I was in, just in relation to other areas. You know, because there's all these dead guys wandering around...

I can't get a picture of that, so here's this instead

In yet another area I find out that if you and a zombie occupy the same space at the same time, they can't attack you. Right, nothing more of value here...

Can you spot the problem?

To bring my session to a close, I find a bunker. This area is located directly on the beach, so if you decide to play this, that's where you should look. It appears to be a Japanese or maybe American installment. Don't question game logic, by now nothing really makes sense. Firstly, looking around, there's a corpse off to the side. A real old corpse. In one bit of actual cleverness, you can get or talk to the corpse. The game will call you sick. If you use the corpse the game will call you really sick. If you want to see this gag in a good game, play In the Dead of Night, which has multiple gags relating to doing object-related tasks on the human characters. In front, that's a rifle, I think it'll be useful. There's a crate of ammo that's really useful. There are a couple of tricks the developers pull with the rifle, but if you wish to not know how this goes down, you should skip now.

No

Firstly, if you don't notice the tripwire, you'll get vaporized. So you use wirecutters on them so you don't die. Then you get it out and you fire it and this happens...

That's the shotgun and neither have pistol grips

Just like a Japanese rifle* to do that. You need to use oil you find in the bunker on the gun in order for it to not kill you. Is it worth it? Its slower, but it does more damage. It would be worth it if there weren't a thousand shells lying around. To be honest, even if there weren't, it wouldn't matter, at that point Cheat Engine would be employed because that would be bull.

Where does this leave me? Well, I have a jewel I found in the cave of a man's face, a flower I found in the area of vines atop that. I am no closer to finding the oracle than I was when I started. I have most of the items, so I do believe I'm at least halfway through.

*I don't recall any issues with Japanese rifles, but a good chunk of WWII Japanese pistols are objectively bad. As in, if you fire it, you will possibly have it explode in your hands or it will shoot backward. Superior Nippon steel indeed.

Isle of the Dead: Should Have Taken a Boat

Exploitation films, these are low-budget films designed to cash in quickly on a trend, star or exploitive content. Chances are today, you probably know them from a mockbuster or the films of Quentin Tarantino. No group of people have ever gone out and said "This right here is an exploitation video game". While asset flips could be considered exploitation, it doesn't feel like quite that much the same. People don't just buy a bunch of stock footage and sell it as a movie, even Ed Wood. While the best ones are indeed worth the premium price that companies like Arrow and Shout! Factory put on them, some are crap made by crap filmmakers. Isle of the Dead falls into the latter. Because it is terrible.
Of course, its hard to call this exploitation when it clearly had more effort put into it than nearly every other Wolf-clone made this year. Its got features like adventure game elements, videos, a plot and comic-y graphics. While Isle of the Dead has the feel of pulp comics, it shares more with films like Dawn of the Dead than any comic released at this point in time*.
I had a demo of this on a shareware disc that I never played. I looked at the video files folder and then chickened out. That's right, one look at the video file names in the demo and I said no. One look at the video files in the full version here, and I can tell you I made the right choice. Of course, I already knew that, because I've played this in-between then and now.
The story, from our perspective, our plane is shot down over an isle, and we are the only survivor.

The title screen and intro music do a good job of giving that spooky low-budget feel. Like anything could happen. Like someone trying to copy John Carpenter's fondness of three note melodies and didn't understand why those were good. Or it could be I already know about the horrors within. So we're on the same page, I am picking the easiest difficulty, because I fear no evil except turning.

I start on a beach. Near a plane. I fumble around pointlessly trying to get the medikit you see in the screenshot for a minute. Oh, well, I better check out the burning plane here. Its on fire. A good sign. Not a sign you should flee or anything.

Note that the knife is just casually there, above my cursor

Isle of the Dead follows adventure game logic in that you should meticiously search the area for anything of value. In this plane you should find the following, a machete, a book, a flare gun, wirecutters, and a compass. The bloody remains of those who flew with you on this flight are a grim reminded that the squeamish should return this to the store they bought this from. You know, if this was 1993. Despite approaching its 30th anniversary I don't think this game is any less morbid.

Its also worth looking through items in your inventory. Sometimes its useful, such as searching through this jacket containing a package of copyright infringing cigarettes. Was it that hard to draw? Make sure to read the help section, its useful so you know which button to press for vital tasks such as getting items on the ground. The key for shooting is spacebar, and the key for side-stepping is Ctrl. Guys, I think you lost your attempt at not getting sued by iD by plastering the box with quotes relating to how much like Wolfenstein it is.

Is it night or day is the least of my questions

If I were smart, I'd wait to be rescued, because as anyone who's heard about downed planes knows, they search for those. Tell the coast guard about the undead, and then wait for the US government to send the Navy SEALs in or just napalm the place. I guess if the game was smart enough to know about that, it'd be smart enough to send the zombies to the beach. There should be a game about the former. That'd be awesome. Although it might just end up like this one...
Before I go jungle-hopping, I'm going to circle the beach. Why? Because we've only got a machete against a horde of undead. As anybody who's ever seen a zombie film knows, that is going to be as useful as trying to punch them. Along the way there's some useful coconuts and at the other end of the downed plane? A shotgun. This was apparently told in a comic that came with the game. That comic is now lost as is any trace of the story of this game.

I enter the jungle. You do this by cutting up an area that looks indistinguishable from the other walls. Yes, someone charged money for this, and chances are someone would do the same today. Inside I am greeted by the hordes of the undead. The badly, badly added undead. The undead that don't really make sense given the subject matter. You will see why soon enough. They aren't much of a problem on this screen, seeing as there's no way for them to sneak up on me, and soon enough they're all dead.

Let me talk about three issues at this point. One, the movement is really fast. Too fast. That's something I thought I'd never say, but its true. You walk faster than Doomguy runs and run like a supercar. Turning is either too slow or too fast, the options are pointless. Two, the soundtrack that was okay at the start, it is now annoying. There was an interm track on the beach, but in the jungle its the main theme. Now, I wouldn't mind this if it only played when enemies arrived, but trying to find out where three, the path through this game is, is very annoying. So I assume that this area has nothing for me as of yet, and I'll get past the fence later.

You can see over the walls, which is a flaw of this game's outdoor engine

Another area, this time full of even more undead. There's not much to say here, but jungle entrance of the eastern side of the east half of the crashed plane leads to the village. In such a way that you will surely get harmed on the way out. It hasn't cropped up yet, but enemies respawn. Every time you leave a screen the enemies you killed come back like you were never there. Items remain gone, so you can screw yourself if you aren't careful.

Shown here after having already convinced them I'm...okay?

The village is full of what appear to be Maori tribesmen. In order to get into the village you need the translation book, upon which a "clever" dialog will happen one line at a time. I'd like to take this time to mock the arms of the guy on the right. Heroic build, not strange proportions like the guy on the left. A lot of the anatomy here seems suspect, but competent enough that you might not notice it.
You are free to rob them blind, spy on a man taking a crap, and then talking to the tribe chief. Oh, and the dialog is voiced. I hear a lot of clicking and the sound of breath against the mic. I'm going to blame the developers. Because I can. The voice acting is bland.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

The chief tells us that a strange white man came to the island many moons ago, built a fortress, and then the island was plagued by "not-alives". He further goes on to tell us that the not-alives took everything from the village. That solves the problem of how they didn't get attacked, but also keeps the question of how they're still alive. Daughter taken, find brother, and BEWARE OF NIGHT DEMONS. We can't take his pliers though, because that would be stealing.
Which brings me to my final point for this section. Most of the undead clearly aren't the natives to this island, because they're vaguely some lost Maori tribe. Did someone just not notice some guy stealing a crapton of corpses? Including the corpses of children?

Well, I think that's enough IotD for one day, better quit and play some Master of Orion, and-

Imagine seeing this twenty times over the course of completing the game

That's right folks, if you quit this game normally, as opposed to quitting out of DOSBox like I imagine most people do, you will get a video of the PC killing himself. I'm sure you're thinking that's pretty low class. You'd be right. While I think there are situations where the developer can mock the player and even be right for it, I feel like there has to be an issue the player sucks at rather than the developers being incompetent. This is not the player being an idiot, refusing to read the manual and dying. Nor is it the player being so horribly incompetent they shouldn't even be playing this game to begin with. This is the developer sucking, mocking someone who may even like the game. I guess it is fair that it exists given the game's exploitative nature, but that doesn't mean its good.

Next time, my understanding of the game falls flat and then absolute chaos will befall me as I flail around trying to beat this thing

*Okay, that's not completely true, there's the obscure series Deadworld, and the Italian comic Dylan Dog but I doubt that the developers read either of these.