Rage, rage against the coming of the night.
I’d forgotten what it’s like to run for my life. It’s pitch-black in the city of Harran; slums, tower blocks and imperial apartments all equally anonymous in the dark. Behind me, the Volatiles ululate, disoriented as I duck through holes in fences, dodge round the more-sedentary dead, and bound over the rooftops. A single Volatile is more than a match for me. When an entire pack is chasing, pausing is a death wish, so I barrel headlong into the dark, bouncing off walls and trash. Not since the opening scenes of the original Pathologic have I been so disempowered. It’s only when I screech to a halt in front of a cliff that the pack catches up.
I was sceptical. Who wouldn’t be? Techland’s Dead Island had received much hype, mainly because of that CGI trailer. Yet neither it nor its expandalone, Riptide, had fulfilled the promise that Techland made, of Left 4 Dead-style co-op survival in an open, zombie-infested world. So when Deep Silver bought out the Dead Island rights, and Techland announced that it was to do another open-world zombie survival game, there was scoffing aplenty.
Yet here I am, running from zombies. My scoff lies dead in my throat, killed by the terror of Dying Light’s nights. Admittedly, the chasing pack, the Volatiles, are top-end zombie foes, able to leap up buildings and parkour off walls. I’m similarly bouncy, which would make this an elegant aerobatic performance if there was anyone left alive to see it. It’s a world away from the generic zombies and trudging pace of Dead Island, which feels like a stumbling prototype in comparison. Here on the cliff edge, I skitter nervously and jump. Way beneath me is a coastal road, and I land, thankfully, on a car’s roof, winding myself, before pulling myself up, straight into a sprint. I can hear the Volatiles follow me down. “If I can just run until dawn…” I think, starting to wheeze.
As a journalist, many developers tell me “This is our dream project. We’ve always wanted to work on Barbie: Horse Exploitation 3,” their self-deluded smiles crackling like popping candy. With Techland, that’s believable (about Dying Light, not Barbie). The devs here imply that the split with Deep Silver wasn’t down to ownership battles or personal antipathy, just a difference of opinion as to how the zombie genre should grow, and how they should patch the flaws they saw in their own Dead Island games. You can see Deep Silver’s concept in Dead Island 2 – essentially, set it in California to appeal to the US market.
So this faster, open-world melee game is Techland’s answer to those questions. I’m playing an unfinished version at the developer’s office in Wroclaw, Poland. I can tell it’s unfinished because the last quest-giver was missing his torso. I’m controlling it with a gamepad on a high-end rig, which makes it pretty damn shiny.
Looking out from the tower that’s the hub in the early game, the view is of a modern city, with the layered complexity of ages of development showing in the variety of construction styles. That’s presumably down to having an architect (Julita Arendt) as one of the game’s designers. Her exceptional ballpoint concept art has led to stunningly coherent areas. The playable world isn’t as big as the view from up here implies, but it’s big enough, or laid out well enough, that I don’t notice if I’m running at its edges.
The city is called Harran. It’s a Middle Eastern city, but Techland has chosen not to specify exactly where. It has the feel of a quiet counterpoint to the post-Iraq US videogame view of the region, which makes it out to be nothing but flat-roofed buildings and sandy ruins. Instead, this has the poor quarters, tower blocks and elegant 19th-century buildings that characterise historical-but-modern cities like Thessaloniki, Moscow or Istanbul.
However, the team has chosen not to tackle the problems of certain areas of the Middle East – neither the warfare nor the religious background. The producer, Tymon Smektala, says that as much as they wanted to redress the misrepresentation of the area by the media, “a game where you kill zombies with a hammer isn’t the best place to do so”. Instead, they chose this area because it was fresh to zombie stories. “I think there’s just one Arabic zombie movie,” says Tymon. “I think it’s even called Arabic Zombie.” Later, thinking about the moresubtle stories they couldn’t tell because of the game’s violence, he asks me what the English is for ‘ludonarrative dissonance’.
So Techland’s focus is on telling a coherent story in a great game world. The first thing that needed fixing was Dead Island’s weak narrative. To do this, they’ve hired Dan Jolley, an ex-DC Comics writer, to work alongside the core Polish team. I’m optimistic, as the sections I played had solid storytelling and well-written characters, mixing the easily identifiable characters beloved of DC with some European twists.
You play as Crane, an agent for an international organisation that wants to find a cure for the suspected viral outbreak, which has so far been confined to Harran. A man named Suleiman has data that might be useful to make a cure, if he can be found. Sadly, he’s in the city, apparently running one of the two main factions – but no one knows which one. You land by parachute, and are immediately beaten up by thugs, bitten by a zombie and rescued by Jade, who works with the tower faction. Then you need to prove yourself to the hierarchy of the tower, as well as secretly fulfilling the orders of your organisation to hunt down Suleiman and retrieve the formula.
More important than fixing the story was the movement. In Dead Island, the four characters had the stamina of asthmatic grandparents, while zombies trudged after them like a ketamined Benny Hill episode. But Dying Light is more Mirror’s Edge, with the few survivors living almost entirely by their ability to run from the monsters. The populace of the tower, your new home, is divided into three tiers: the elite runners, the scouts and the general refugees, with the zombie-disease suppressant Antizan distributed according to utility. So to rise up the ranks and get your dose, you’ll need to be able to run across the playground city.
This is a game where you improve by doing. The more you run, the more moves you can do, and the more agility experience you’ll acquire. The more you fight and kill enemies, the more your strength experience increases. The third experience track – survivor – seems to increase by completing tasks and surviving the night (which is pretty hard with Volatiles around). Unlocking enough abilities in each track unlocks the next tier, which tends to include a generic speed/strength upgrade. So spending enough time jumping from rooftops and sprinting up ramps allows you to get much better at that. Killing enough zombies lets you unlock the ability to coat yourself in their guts and try to pass as one. And so on.
There’s a touch of the Batman: Arkham Asylum in the way that those skills layer on each other. Unlock a slide or a jump, and it’ll segue nicely with other skills – so a skill that lets you pogo off zombies can be combined with an aerial execution move to finish a zombie fast. When I’m given a go on a levelled-up character, the fluidity of movement through the slums is startling – I run up a ramp, pogo off a zombie and walljump off a ledge, before running freely across the roofscape, my hands slapping everywhere in a realistic way reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed or even Mirror’s Edge, but without that latter game’s more linear path. “We wanted to give you the feeling you had a body, not just a camera on a balloon,” says Maciej Binkowski, the lead game designer.
When you’re running out there in the world, safe houses allow you to gain some respite. In these UV-protected buildings (zombies hate to tan), you can access your stash, craft safely and catch some sleep or shelter – which brings me on to the next huge changes, the day-night cycle and the weather system. Techland had put these into Riptide but only as a cosmetic change, not with an actual associated mechanic. The weather system is randomised but changes the game substantially. Fog obstructs your view, letting you more easily run into trouble. Storms are violent enough to cover any noise you might make. Rain can spread electrical attacks. And the population of zombies changes during certain weather.
Crucially, the day-night cycle counters the empowerment of the protagonist as you play the game. The day lasts about 40 minutes, the night about 20 – but it feels much longer. “You’re the master of the situation during the day, but the prey at night,” says Binkowski. “We had to tune it down when people refused to go out at night.” So by day, you’re a superhero, able to skip beyond the reach of the weaker day-zombies, as long as you stick to the rooftops. By night, the weaker zombies become faster and stronger, while the aforementioned Volatiles emerge and take control of the rooftops.
Occasionally, the nights are disturbed by a Hunter, the ultimate enemy. This is a fast, strong, player-controlled zombie, invading your game like some Dark Souls wannabe. You have a shortlived UV flashlight and flares, which can fend it off, and you can trigger UV light traps as you run, but you really want your co-op buddies with you for this. It’s genuinely terrifying, reminiscent of Bethesda’s classic Call of Cthulhu game.
The rest of the zombies are very Left 4 Dead. They chase more by sound than by sight. Biters – slow, tough and persistent – are everywhere. The next most common are the Virals, freshly infected, fast and agile zombies with a tendency to flick back to consciousness when hit. It’s hard to imagine anything more traumatising than a struck enemy pausing to ask you for help, before switching back and biting down on you.
I’ve spoken about the Volatiles already – they’re as super-powered as the player, and patrol the night in numbers, necessitating a stealth take if you want to survive. Much less subtle is the tank-like Demolisher – simply a giant, tough zombie capable of picking up cars and throwing them, and wielding a huge lump of rebar and concrete as a club. Hazmat zombies come complete with a comedy gas tank that can send them spiralling off if struck, before they explode. The Toad spits acid from a distance. And the Bomber explodes if you get too close. All familiar, but new to Techland’s games.
To do them in, there’s a distinct lack of guns – they’re super-rare and dangerous to use, as their sound attracts zombies galore. Thankfully, the stamina-based melee has carried over from Dead Island, but you’re able to make more attacks with most of the improvised weapons before you’re out of breath. Your attacks are also more realistic, as Techland had a Krav Maga expert bring in baseballs bats and sandbags, to demonstrate what melee armed combat is really like. “You could almost feel the blood getting on your face,” says Binkowski, disturbingly.
There are hundreds of weapons in the game, but the vast majority are weak, taking several hits to kill even a Biter. You can find blueprints for better ones as you explore the world, which you can craft anywhere if you have the requisite materials. These are more powerful, less realistic and occasionally silly – though never as unrealistic as Dead Island’s. Freezing, burning, poisonous, shocking, bleeding, stunning and explosive weapons aren’t uncommon, but even the best Lacerator has an annoying tendency to break in the middle of a fight.
I have some concerns about difficulty. For example, the death mechanic allows you to respawn without penalty at the nearest safehouse, which sounds to me like BioShock’s flawed Vita Chamber system. Binkowski reassures me by pointing out that there are rare resource-dropping creatures that can only be found during the night, which will vanish when you die, and that there are extra XP points for surviving the night; even more if you’re undetected. “We don’t want to punish you for dying,” he says, “we want to reward you for surviving.”
Dying Light is Dead Island with parkour movement, a comic-book script and a daynight cycle that’s more terrifying than most horror games. Dan Griliopoulos