Like Dead Island ON ACID! Escape Dead Island Announced

Take one pretty fun co-op game, ladle cash over the top, then persist with sheer bloody-mindedness and you too could have yourself A Franchise. Turns out, three Dead Island games are in the works: straight-up sequel Dead Island 2, the MOBA-ish Dead Island Epidemic, and now publishers Deep Silver have announced Escape Dead Island. It's a third-person action-y sort of thing (you know, like this), with a story that makes me think of Far Cry 3 with its rich kids and trippy hallucinations.

See, Escape Dead Island is about a rich boy who takes his dad's yacht for a joysail with his chums, planning to film a documentary about those nasty zombies. Only once he gets there, things get a bit weird, with reality going unreal at times. Weird beyond the fact that corpses are wandering around, gnawing on people, that is. Say, what if that zombie virus is messing with his mind? Supposedly it'll all call for a little stealth at times too.

Fatshark are handling development on this one, and have a fair bit of experience in swinging sharp things about after War of the Roses and War of the Vikings. None of the three upcoming Dead Island games are being made by creators Techland, who are instead working on Dying Light for Warner Bros., which I'd broadly describe as "Dead Island with parkour and a grappling hook." Deep Silver own the Dead Island IP, see, and are going hog-wild with it.

The game's due this autumn. It'll cost £34.99, so it's intended to be more than a small spin-off.