I Still Think About Dying Light

Full spoilers for Dying Light and The Following, released for PS4, XBONE, and all computers.

Dying Light is a game from my goblethood. Before going full PC, I saved up for a PS4 as a sprout and got Dying Light for my first game, since it reminded me of Mirror's Edge and that was my most played game on the PS3. So, my ability to ignore most of the game's problems come from the few less-painful memories from my pubescence. Both that, and the fact it just seems to be one of those sleeper hit games from the 8th generation. Similar to The Witcher 3, which brought their developers from a well known studio among their target audience, to a worldwide sensation that anyone who wasn't in the know couldn't have expected. The dev team, Techland, were previously known for their Call of Juarez games, the same ones I reviewed previously. But, they saw a minor glow up after Dead Island, the game that they cannibalized to make up half of Dying Light's gameplay systems. By all accounts, Dying Light should have been an interesting experiment that got overshadowed by the third Left 4 Dead knock off and left to rot in-between Infamous Second Son and Mad Max. Both being big expensive titles that have extremely dedicated fans, but their glaring flaws prevented them from tapping into the markets their publishers wanted. Ultimately, preventing them from getting the sequels they desperately needed to sure up their faults. Instead, Dying Light is practically a household name for computer gamers. It got an expansion, several DLC, a great sequel with an expansion for it in the works, and the game still has constant updates and events that turn on moon gravity or completely change the loot system. I can't know why the game is actually so successful, but I can still pretentiously wonder aloud.

I'll break my standard formula by talking about the gameplay first, since that's generally regarded as the most unambiguously solid part of the game's experience. The gameplay loops can be best described as "A series of small decisions that build the house". The easiest example to spot is in the combat loops. Melee combat will probably make up 40-50% of your game time. The game could have definitely settled for good enough. Swing your weapon in the zombie's direction while within 5 feet, reduce their health, boom combat. Skyrim was happy to settle for this and it made every encounter feel a little samey but serviceable. However, Dying Light takes this up a few notches by actively showing your character's progression through the way he uses his weapon. As a freshly infected scout, your lead pipe impotently tinks off the skulls of the churning undead horrors outside. Your biceps are small and your blunt implements are fragile. By the end of the game, you're swinging a claymore that bisects anything you put it through. Crane reels back, screams, and then the world explodes into viscera. You can actively feel that progression with every new weapon you scavenge. You stop beating zombies until they slowly succumb to head injuries, and you start to split their heads with metal bats. You also feel this in the movement tech the game has. Even though I compared it to Mirror's Edge, the game is much more akin to Assassin's creed. You're usually only ever worried about how to climb up or get down as fast as possible. It's all about free climbing and making precision jumps instead of the flow Mirror's Edge has. That's not unusual, because the game is a fully realized fictional city you can traverse on every level. Mirror's Edge highly curated and suspiciously horizontal levels just weren't going to work. In the place of that flow there's ingenuity. The programmers purposefully designed the game to feel sticky. If you jump to a ledge and you're at least 70% sure you can make it, you will. Crane basically magnetizes himself to any surface you're looking at and the procedurally generated hand holds on every building will catch you 10 times out of 10. Dying Light is somewhat of a throwback to when a computer game was made to be fun and addictive, but more like a Diablo savory snack instead of League of Legends black tar heroin. You kill guys, take their loot, use that loot to kill more guys until you can scrape together enough coin to buy an even better weapon at the vendor. The cycle repeats. The weapons have rarities, but some weapons can be rare but objectively worse than others, so you're encouraged to keep your eyes peeled at all times. Plus, the scavenging and fighting feeds back into your XP system. The Combat, Movement, and Survival skill trees just bounce off one another so effortlessly. You have to turn in drops and complete quests to get Survival XP, but these tasks will almost always involve at least a little bit of combat, and you get Movement XP while traveling between key points. Then, the drops stop coming. The game gets shaken up and you get more desperate for Survival XP, causing you to take risks you wouldn't otherwise by doing harder side quests and braving quarantine zones to get drops. That treadmill of doing fun quests and then getting a little treat for having fun is just about the most goblin thing I can think of. That is, until the night comes, at least before the late game. Volatiles just beat he ass. They're faster than you, can jump like Larry Bird, and they pretty reliably kill you in 2 hits. So, why go out at night? For that sweet XP. In one of the few ways that the first game inarguably trumps the sequel, going out after dark is all reward with no risk. But, the game tricks you into thinking otherwise. Normally, you lose XP on death, not at night. You gain double the Combat and Movement XP, and also bandits will never steal drops from under your nose in the dead of night, so you always get the full reward. Sure the game is harder, you're suddenly playing a stealth mission, and you can't see worth a damn outside of your tiny flashlight cone, but that's all set in place to force you to mull over the decision because the opportunity cost is too high to not even consider it. At least, that's before you're killing Volatiles in 3 hits, but at that point you're a demigod anyway and the game's already over so I guess you earned it sport. The maps are so tight and condensed that I basically know my way around the Slums without needing a map, and by the time I reach my quest marker I looted 3 houses on the way. Oh and The Following has a car, it's okay I guess. It breaks the game's flow pretty badly, but changing up the main mechanics in the last 5-8 hours of game time was pretty welcome and it didn't wear out its welcome for me.

With an overwhelmingly positive score on Steam, and the amount of love I've poured on this game, despite barely scraping the surface of its complexities, it must sound like a 10/10 experience. Actually, it's the absolute best 7/10 you'll ever play in your life. That 3 points come from everything surrounding the gameplay and atmosphere. I don't mean the graphics. They're not spectacular for the time, but it's an open world game so I always give a pass based on that merit alone. I mean everything connected to the plot and characters. The story isn't bad in the way a silly and thin story like Resident Evil 6 drapes its nonsense over the decent gameplay, or in the way that a terrible story actively harms the experience if you don't skip cutscenes like in Forespoken. I mean the game is like Max Payne 3. It has some good ideas mixing in the pot before it trips at the 40 yard line, drops the ball, and shits its pants. And that's definitely the worst one for my money. For a quick rundown, if you forgot, Crane is a super special secret agent for the government. He needs to fleece Rais for a file that contains information about the Harran virus. He gets close, but Rais publishes the file and tells crane that the government were actually evil the whole time and wanted to make a super weapon using zombies. But a guy named Dr. Zere has the data files needed to make a cure. Rais steals that cure and Crane beats him up and takes it. The core plot is pretty damn generic, but tropes exist for a reason. As long as they're used in a new way or played well, it's all good. Dying Light is very middle of the road on all of them until it suddenly nose dives for a few minutes. There are good moments that resonated with me. Brecken punching that TV, Rahim's death, and the canon end of The Following all made me feel things, but they're just so steeped in intermittent mediocrity and writing that feels like it's the midterm of a sophomore Creative Writing student. Nearly every major player must have a complex internal narrative about the nature of mankind and the meaning of sacrifice, but you get the feeling that a question as simple as "Why would they even do that?" would be met with either flippancy or a long winded defense. Most characters like Troy, Zere, Breckon, and Rahim are just okay at worst. But, Jade and Rais just make me tired when I think about them. We're told at least 30 times that Jade is a fighter, the Scorpion, and tough as nails. But, when faced with any serious dilemma, just storms away in an emotional outburst. She yells over people when they say anything that she doesn't like, forgives Crane for something she found utterly despicable after he makes a single showing of effort, and her life ends as a damsel that dies saving Crane because she just intuitively knows he's important to the plot. It feels like the game's writing staff were jostled around and lost the forest for the trees after so many rewrites. The higher ups just didn't quite gather that you need to get a character over first before they can do anything meaningful to the plot. I felt at least one emotion when Rahim died, because he made sense to me. His childish behavior was understandable and his death was the result of a terrible plan laid out by some dumb kid. Troy's mannerisms and character design told me everything I needed to know about how good she was as a leader. I don't know a damn thing about Jade. Jade may be poorly written, annoying, and it feels like her character treads a little too closely to that "bitches be crazy" stereotype, but at least I didn't actively hate listening to her talk. Rais is every modern villain stereotype picked clean from the bone and put into a blender. I haven't seen many people accurately portray how terrible of an antagonist he is. Rais exists to be an asshole, mainly to Crane for some reason. Well, after Crane chops his hand off it makes sense, but even prior to that he has some fetishistic desire to monologue at Crane for what feels like minutes. I like Metal Gear, so speeches usually don't deter me. But, they have to be about something. He tells you that chaos is the natural order of things, despite being the leader of a paramilitary group. Rais also taunts Crane for always doing what he's told and not living like a man with dignity, despite stealing Zere's research so that the government will medivac him out of Harran at the first sign of things not going his way. Is he the Joker? A weasel? An intimidating military commando? I have no clue and the writers didn't either. It feels like that game the illustrators for the show Flapjack did where the head, torso, and legs would be drawn by different people so every character design was unique. Instead, every sentence Rais says is practically written by a different person. All of these clashing points for the character would work if it felt like there was intent behind it, but it just feels amateurish. And the publishers definitely thought they had something, despite almost definitely being the reason he's such an awful character. They thought they'd made Vaas, when he's actually a diet Jackal from Far Cry 2. A character I already didn't have much love for. He kills his own guys to show how crazy he is and singles out Crane because he's supposed to be intelligent enough to understand how important Crane is to the plot. Instead, he just feels like an idiot that performs random acts of evil while giving the least interesting edge-lord monologues he can muster at some random guy. Say what you like about Ubisoft's charismatic villains, but when they work, it really adds to the mix. Pagan Min killed his own soldier in the fit of having a tantrum and to punish them for almost killing his son. His judgement of Ajay's killing spree is perfectly believable because, even though Ajay's crimes don't hold a candle to his, he grew up in an environment where he's never had to be responsible for his actions. Rais never got over, so his terrible and constant dialogue just bounces off with a heavy thud on the ground. The worst part is he just never takes Kyle's advice and shuts the fuck up.

I did spend a while ripping into the game's story, but it does have one huge highlight. That's all the stories happening around the plot. The side quest for the wizard in the tower, Gazi's medicine, and stealing C4 from Rais' thugs to blow open the underpass always come to mind. They're either great narratives, or just impact the game world in a really cool way. The environmental storytelling is the good shit, Fallout New Vegas type of stuff. Pill bottles next to corpses, handwritten notes and voicemails, luggage strewn around from people who didn't make it to the airport before the quarantine, it's all great. Anything that Warner Bros. didn't touch is pretty much golden. So, I think I'll happily be returning to this game several times in my life. Although, I do think the sequel is just a bit better.