If you are going to create a game called Epstein Island, you have two options; both of which require equally dubious morals. Either you try to remain earnest, modelling the location after the real island of Little Saint James, re-treading the horrifying real-world accounts of what took place there, and attempting to educate the general public on why something as despicably heinous as this can never be allowed to happen again on such a large scale.
Or, you lean into the parody angle. Make the whole thing one big meme, with Stephen Hawking chasing midgets around on a rocket-powered wheelchair, and a mini game where the player has to avoid Prince Andrew’s over-sized drops of sweat. This would of course be exceedingly disrespectful to the real victims of Epstein and his cohorts, but it would at least require an iota of effort to create.
Needless to say, Epstein Island does neither of these things. Instead, this game is nothing more than the laziest excuse for a survival game that you can imagine, with the Epstein name slapped on top for the sake of clickbait. It really is as pathetic as it sounds, an asset flip that looks awful and feels even worse to play.
Epstein Island technically isn’t a scam game, although it might as well be
As soon as you boot up the game, you are greeted with a start-up screen that shows two generic assets directly lifted from the Unreal Engine library, along with a large piece of hastily added text that inform the player that they can hit the delete key to kill themselves at any time during gameplay, as you will likely get stuck in the environment at some point, or encounter some sort of game-breaking bug. As far as first impressions go, this may be the worst I have ever encountered.
So, you press start and are taken to the most bare-bones character customisation menu that you can imagine. The game attempts to make you think that skill points are something that are going to matter at this point, as if you are playing some deep RPG like Skyrim or Cyberpunk 2077. As you may expect, these skills points mean nothing at all, and are completely arbitrary as far as I can tell.
You then spawn into the game world, quickly learning that there is no controller support in Epstein Island; because why would there be? You appear on the top floor of a basic, empty house that again, has been directly lifted from an asset library. You turn around to find a large square-shaped hole in the floor because the developer couldn’t even be bothered to grab a basic staircase from the asset library.
After you jump down the hole, you are greeted with some text stuck to a wall, which essentially serves as an admission that this game will almost entirely be made up of borrowed and reused assets. Following this, you will find a note informing you to complete your current quest and you’ll venture outside for the first time to lay eyes on the painfully basic looking game world in which the rest of Epstein Island will take place.
I’d like to take a minute to question what the hell the developers were thinking in terms of the order that these first quests are given. The first thing that the player is tasked with is crafting a hatchet, which requires stone, wood, and cloth; although it doesn’t do a great job of explaining what is required to craft the tool, this is all pretty standard stuff for any survival game.
However, once you craft the hatchet, the game then asks you to gather an arbitrary amount of wood, stone, and cloth, – you know, the exact list of resources that you have already gathered in order to craft the hatchet! If you hate yourself enough to go back in and play another session, as I do, you may realise that you can actually just open a chest on the first island which contains a hatchet and pickaxe, completely negating the first task in the quest-log. The chaotic logic of ordering the tasks in this utterly baffling way cannot be understated.
What am I looking at here?
After you land on the main island and take a look around, you will quickly see how sloppily this environment has been thrown together. Standing under certain trees will get you caught in the terrain, the camera will periodically clip inside seemingly inaccessible buildings, and if you look up into the sky, you will literally be able to spot the corners of the map where the skybox hastily ends.
Not only does the environment that the game gives you to explore in Epstein Island not resemble the real island of Little Saint James in the slightest, it doesn’t even resemble the environment shown in the game’s AI-generated cover image. The day/night cycle is insane, with some days inexplicably seeming to last far longer than others. The only thing that has seemingly had any effort put into it is the animated mini-map found in the top right corner; although that too was likely a borrowed asset taken from somewhere else. One thing that zero effort has been put into is the enemy character models.
While this may not come as a great shock given the poor quality of everything else in the game, it is a bit surprising given that the Steam description sells the game based on the enemies you will encounter in Epstein Island. Names such as ‘Blue Andrew,’ ‘Strange Danold,’ and ‘Headless Leonardo’ have been lazily slapped onto generic enemy character models without any rhyme or reason. The one labelled, ‘Mini Havking’ doesn’t even have a walking animation and just glides across the map.
I naively thought that the bosses in the game, the lazily named ‘Clintin,’ ‘Havking’ and ‘Minwell,’ would at least be loosely modelled after their real-life counterparts. Apparently I was giving the developers far too much credit with that expectation, as they too are simply generic monsters with nothing to them. I never played long enough to encounter, ‘Jefry,’ but I’d wager that the same mentality was followed when implementing that character too.
It is so blatantly an immoral cash-grab
If the Epstein Island didn’t already feel like a shameless, cheap cash-grab, then this lack of care just hammers the point home. Sure, you could argue that making these characters look too close to their real world counterparts could invite legal issues. The the thing is though, lazily changing the names of notorious real life figures by one letter, likely isn’t going to prevent a lawsuit. Also, ‘MJ’ is the one NPC that assists the player, while the rest are antagonistic; make of that what you will.
Progressing through Epstein Island only leads to the player discovering other poorly implemented aspects of game design; from an utterly garbage combat system, to god-awful survival mechanics, and abysmal crafting and building controls.
The only positive thing that I can say about the game is that I never experienced a technical crash. Although, that does not mean that I wasn’t kicked back to the menu screen several times. See, this is the kind of online game in which one player creates a server that others can then join. However, if that host player then quits the game, the server is closed and all participants are abruptly kicked back to the menu screen with any progress being lost. It is atrocious.
I feel as though by giving Epstein Island a review score, I am somehow justifying the game’s existence, and I refuse to do that. Please, don’t buy this game, even at the low asking price of under $10, it is still overpriced. As someone who is close friends with SA survivors, I truly hope that the survivors of the real life Epstein Island are never made aware of this game’s existence, and if they are, I hope they sue everyone involved with the development, publishing, and distribution of this game.
If you, or anyone that you know has been a victim of abuse, or believes that you are being abused currently, help is available. If you are in the UK, check out Victim Support. If you are in the US, reach out to The Hotline. If you are located anywhere else, then you can find help online for your local area, otherwise reach out to a therapist, a healthcare professional, or local law enforcement. You are not alone, you matter, please don’t suffer in silence.
