Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids, or FLESH, is behind Dead Island 2’s over-the-top and impressively gory combat. We sit down with Dambuster Studio to talk about how it all works.

A snippet.

Even though it's gory to talk about it in detail, I like how the style is more comical than outright disturbing or gritty. It’s a fine line between off-putting and cartoonish, and it’s cool that this is more of the latter.

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That was very intentional. When we started on the project, there were a lot of serious zombie games where the tone was bleak. Here, the game's set in LA, and Dead Island has a history of sunshine and splatter. We really wanted to move away from that serious tone seen elsewhere and make it pulpier. And with the gore at the level that it is, if it was entirely serious, it could have been quite disturbing. And some of the things you'll notice about the FLESH system is that we deliberately push it to that level where you have to laugh.

Eyeballs popping out on stalks. I've looked into it, and in reality, that would never happen; eyeballs don't hang out on dangly things. That's the kind of thing where when you see that, you're like, that's so ridiculous that I have to laugh. It’s the same with a jaw kind of dangling off. It's all there to push it to a level where it stops being disturbing and starts being funny.

Our Full Dead Island 2 Inside FLESH Interview