Isle of the Dead is a 1993 point-and-click / FPS game made by Rainmaker Software, and as the cover proudly proclaims, the best Wolfenstein 3-D knock-off ever made.
YES, they didn't even try to hide which game they're ripping off.
Anyways, you're Jake Dunbar, apparently the only survivor of a plane crash when your flight unexpectedly lose it's course and hits the edge of a tropical island. Rummaging the crash site for supplies, Jake tries seeking for help after seeing people on the beach... only to realize they're NOT alive. Turns out the beach is infested with zombies, and there's more undead in the forests inland, as Jake, grabbing a trusty machete retrieved from the plane and later obtaining a shotgun, makes his way into the depths of the island for answers.
Besides shooting every zombie in sight like all FPS games, Isle also have sections where the path branches off, requiring Jake to make decisions akin to a Point-and-Click Game.
The game is initially made just for the IBM Personal Computer, though there are later re-releases allowing the game to be played on different platforms.
Interestingly enough, this isn't the only FPS made for the IBM at the time - see Quiver and Nerves of Steel for similar examples.
Unrelated to the movie.
Isle of the Dead contains the following tropes, besides a ton of zombies:
- Battleaxe Nurse: The laboratory stage at the end have Jake facing zombie nurses, and they're among the most dangerous zombies in the game. Getting hit by their tasers is a One-Hit Kill.
- Bat Out of Hell: One of the minor enemies Jake encounters are zombie bats who attacks Jake on sight. They're among the flimsiest enemies in-game though.
- Body Horror: The zombies would've looked real gory and disturbing if not for the outdated graphic effects. For starters, there's a zombie mook whose guts are spilled open, where his innards flails about on the outside of his body.
- Dead Weight: The game have plenty of overweight zombies, all of them capable of soaking plenty of hits from any weapon before going down.
- Devoured by the Horde: Whenever Jake gets hopelessly outnumbered by zombies. Cue the cutscene of him being chewed to bits by the undead.
- Fanservice Cover: The game's classic cover depicts Jake Dunbar with a young, bikini-clad beautiful woman by his side. No such character appears in the game, the only other woman on your side is an unfortunate captive who isn't that scantily-clad.
- Flare Gun: Jake collects one shortly after getting off the crashed plane. Do NOT use it on the undead, he'll need said flare for signaling an escape.
- Game-Over Man: Getting overwhelmed by the undead and you're treated to a brief animated clip where a bunch of zombies pulls Jake limb-from-limb to pieces and he gets messily devoured. It's surprisingly shocking despite the graphic limitations
. - Genre Mashup: A combination between and FPS and a point-and-click game, one of the rarities of it's kind.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: There are large zombies who walks around carrying either their limbs or head. Get too close and they'll use whatever body part they're holding to bludgeon Jake.
- Guilt-Based Gaming: Atempting to quit gives the prompt "Taking the coward's way out?" Confirm, and cue a brief cutscene of Jake blowing off his own head with a rifle he doesn't even have (regardless of your current progress). Oh, and then a mad scientist cackles evilly with lightning flashing outside his lair (which you also see every time you die).
- Machete Mayhem: The first weapon Jake obtain shortly after escaping from the crash site. It's surprisingly effective when used against the undead.
- Mad Scientist: One serves as the game's Big Bad, who has been kidnapping humans to be experimented upon in his private hideout and is the reason behind the various zombies on the island.
- Reliably Unreliable Guns: The rifle will explode and kill Jake as soon as it's fired, unless it is oiled first. There's no sign that anything's wrong with it in the first place, until he pulls the trigger.
- Skull for a Head: One of the zombie mooks has a skull above its shoulders, despite the rest of its body still being covered with flesh (albeit partially decomposed, if its yellow-green skin is any indicator). Oddly enough, said zombies still have eyes inside the skull.
- Sole Survivor: Jake seems to be the only person who made it out the plane crash unscathed. And then it turns out the plane had landed in an undead-infested island.
- Strapped to an Operating Table: Jake comes across a woman captive in the laboratory, strapped on one such table. Which he releases so she can show him an escape.
- Title of the Dead
- Torso with a View: Female zombies will have their ribs rupturing and revealing a see-through hole when killed, even if they're taken down by melee weapons like the machete.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: The game throws around plenty of deathtraps that there's no way of predicting. For instance, pick up the rifle as soon as you see it, Jake sets off a barely-visible tripwire and get blown up by a random grenade, unless the wire is cut first. Pull the trigger then, and it'll explode and blow off Jake's head unless it's oiled first. That's just the earliest example in the game.
- Undead Child: The child zombies appears once in a while, and when killed they let out a faint, yet audible "da-da!"
- Unwinnable by Design: Of the Cruel variety. Right at the beginning, Jake can use the flare gun (since he's on a desert island)...you won't find out until the end of the game that he needs it for escaping.
- Your Head Asplode: When Jake chooses to quit, the player is then treated to a cutscene where he Ate His Gun via rifle. Cue a gnarly shot of his head being vaporized◊.
