Techland's Dead Island hasn't got off to the most auspicious of starts. Steam received a wonky build when the open-world zombie shooter launched today, which was apparently intended for developers, not players, and suffers a few... quirks.

"We deeply regret that an incorrect version of Dead Island was inadvertently made available to players on Steam launch in North America," reads a note on the game's Facebook page.

"We are very sorry for any issues you may have experienced while playing the game - the correct, patched version will be made available to North American players ASAP."

Steam players noticed some very unusual behavior, such as the 'Y' key activating "noclip" mode. This would let players fly through the air and pass through solid objects, and handily also wiped out their character's stats. Ars Technica's own Ben Kuchera fell victim to the bug, having to start a new game.

The launch was also accompanied by a day-one patch with 37 fixes.

Publisher Deep Silver insists that the rest of the world is "not affected by this situation," and will receive the fully-patched version when Dead Island launches elsewhere on Friday. North Americans, you might want to hold off on playing any more until the game's ship-shape, as some on Facebook are reporting that their saved games have been outright wiped by updates.