The ‘Dying Light’ series is one of the biggest successes in the history of the Polish games industry. At first glance, it’s primarily about zombies. However, that’s not entirely true – the games are also always stories about great crumbling cities. And about the sense of freedom that comes from gradually exploring them.
It’s fair to say that Dying Light is a project that has been maturing at Wrocław-based Techland for decades. It grows out of a dream of an action game that turns the cramped corridors full of enemies, typical of 1990s computer shooters into vast, picturesque spaces where it’s up to the player alone where to go and how to deal with enemies. Released in 2003, Chrome did not succeed in fully realising this vision. Although the player-controlled character did walk through large areas with beautiful trees and futuristic bases for space thugs, the game itself left a lot to be desired. Another attempt to tackle the problem of freedom in large spaces was the much better received Call of Juarez (2006), which returned to a Western setting very rarely seen in games at the time. Call of Juarez is no longer a carefree shooter with a pretextual plot. Here we have a complicated family history, a glimpse of the ethnic conflicts gripping the US-Mexican borderlands, a handful of inspirations from classic and modern westerns, from John Ford to Sergio Leone to Unforgiven. To make the script more effective, the developers invited American writer and scriptwriter Haris Orkin, who still works on Techland’s games today, to join them. Although there are, of course, vast landscapes that can even be traversed on horseback, the sense of freedom they offer is illusory, as both the story and the protagonist’s route follow a set path from point to point. However, the illusion is still very enjoyable – so much so that the game became the start of a whole series.
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Call of Juarez, 2006, photo: Techland / www.techland.pl
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The real breakthrough in Techland’s international career, however, came only after the release of Dead Island, a game published in 2011 by Deep Silver. It was part of a wave of fashionable zombie games at the time, and although at first glance it did not stand out too much among them, several elements caused it to stand out and win players’ appreciation. Firstly, it took place – according to Techland’s tradition – on huge maps, which could be freely explored, and this exploration was sometimes very pleasant, as the action starts in a beautiful tropical resort. Secondly, Techland’s developers very cleverly picked up the gameplay model from the hugely successful Borderlands, which featured a wide range of randomly generated weapons with a variety of properties. These allowed players to shape their gameplay style very freely – where one player exterminates zombies with fire, another prefers to electrocute them. They could even do this at the same time, as the game allowed for team action. As in Borderlands, characters gained skill-developing experience during combat, so the sense of flexible gameplay was even stronger. Reviewers complained a little about the shallow storyline and repetitive gameplay, but players had a great time and Techland finally built their dream game with big open spaces and carefree freedom of action.
In Dead Island, you can already see the seeds of Dying Light – especially clearly when the action moves to the tropical island city. As long as the zombie battles took place on the expansive beaches, there was ample room for both attack and evacuation when the horde of opponents became too large. In the narrow streets, life for the zombie slayer became much more difficult, as the monsters, lured by the noise, quickly blocked all escape routes. In order to clear a square where an objective could be found, it was now necessary not to slash and chop, but to lure a crowd of angry zombies into an adjacent alley, find a fire escape on the run, climb to a nearby roof and watch from above as the confused mob huddled below, wondering where their would-be victim had escaped to.
It was this way of doing things that became the basis of the gameplay in Dying Light. In theory, the game could have been the next instalment of the Dead Island series, with that brand owned by publisher Deep Silver, who decided (after Techland created a standalone add-on to the game, Dead Island: Riptide) to entrust work on the sequel to another company. This issue turned out to be much more beneficial for Techland than for Deep Silver – Dead Island 2 was finally released after almost a decade and passed largely without notice, while Techland regained creative freedom and was able to experiment with all the ideas that the Deep Silver producers thought were too crazy.
The most important change between Dead Island and Dying Light, released in 2015, is the agility with which the protagonist runs across streets and rooftops, using the art of parkour. This has been present in games for a long time – it all started with the impact of the successive instalments of the Assassin’s Creed series, whose protagonists ran and climbed around the buildings of historical cities with monkey-like agility. This theme was developed in the game Mirror’s Edge, in which the protagonist jumped between the roofs of skyscrapers of a futuristic metropolis, and the player observed her actions no longer from the outside, as in Assassin’s Creed, but from the perspective of the character. While in Assassin’s Creed the player was completely free to move around the big cities, in Mirror’s Edge the routes were strictly defined. However, the extraordinary dexterity of the characters in the Assassin’s Creed series meant that you didn’t feel the physical weight and stamina of their bodies at all – they rushed effortlessly ahead, overcoming all obstacles with ease. Meanwhile, in Mirror’s Edge, the protagonist’s body, its materiality and weight were much more palpable, and the satisfaction of overcoming its physical limitations much greater.
Dying Light has combined the best features of both games. The action takes place in a huge city, in which the player has total freedom of movement – if a building visible in the distance catches our eye, they are usually able to run to it and climb it. At the same time, the game constantly emphasises the protagonist’s corporeality: we can see his hands gripping the edges, hear his heavy breathing during a strenuous run, feel the effort when overcoming obstacles. The impression of stepping into someone else’s body – incredibly fit, but with its limitations – is very strong.
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Dying Light, photo: Techland / www.techland.pl
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Screen from Dying Light, photo: press release by Techland / www.techland.pl
The main problem with games with large open worlds is that repeatedly traversing sizable spaces simply becomes boring after a while. In Dying Light, the mechanics of running, climbing and overcoming obstacles are engaging enough that boredom does not threaten the player, especially as the streets of the city of Harran are overrun by zombies. So not only do you have to look out for a railing to grab onto after jumping from the roof of a car, but you also have to watch out for the hordes of grunting creatures that were not long ago peaceful residents of Harran.
Sometimes you have to fight, and combat, like parkour, puts a strong emphasis on the protagonist’s body. There are very few firearms, so the protagonist mainly uses more direct means – clubs, axes or machetes – to deal with individual enemies, but with larger crowds the chances of survival decrease drastically. If Dead Island was a game about killing zombies, then Dying Light is a game about cleverly avoiding them. Effective escape becomes even more important when night falls – this is when much more powerful beasts come out onto the streets of Harran, able to run across rooftops and fight as efficiently as the protagonist. During the day it is the player who is in control of the situation, but at night he is the helpless target of a vicious hunt. The experiences of day and night are so different from each other that Dying Light actually feels like two different games in one.
The city itself becomes an important character in the game. Harran combines various themes and influences – from eastern influences (it was long under the control of the Ottoman Empire) to subtle references to Wrocław, where Techland’s headquarters are located. We move through logically laid out neighbourhoods, from slums to the elegant old town, sometimes through cramped streets, sometimes along a piece of motorway on a crumbling flyover, sometimes along railway tracks blocked with abandoned carriages. In the spatial layout of the city, you can still feel the life that once pulsed through it. In the past, in video games, it was enough to put up a dozen or so buildings to build a city, but those days are long gone – now games need virtual town planners, whose work is still perhaps underestimated.
I haven’t actually mentioned the game’s plot so far because, frankly, it’s a secondary issue here. The city of Harran has been infected by a mysterious virus turning its inhabitants into zombies, and the protagonist, special ops agent Kyle Crane, finds himself there on a secret mission to obtain data to stop the outbreak. There are the classic story tropes – an enclave of survivors that the player must help, a brutal gang taking advantage of the chaos in the city to increase their influence, the unholy intrigues of the government and international organisations who, even in the face of a deadly epidemic, are trying to get something for themselves... It’s all done competently, but it’s not very memorable – just a backdrop for the impressive city and the hero’s breakneck exploits.
Dying Light was successful enough to get downloadable content (DLC) titled The Following, moving the action to open spaces outside the city, but fans had to wait a long seven years for the fully-fledged second part. Subsequent trailers suggested interesting changes – above all, making the shape of the city dependent on the player’s decisions or the original idea of a post-apocalyptic vision of the future clearly inspired by the Middle Ages. The game was also to have a serious, developed storyline, overseen by legendary scriptwriter Chris Avellone. Not all of the promises were realised – the medieval styling was greatly reduced, the collaboration with Avellone ended after accusations of sexual harassment (the allegations were eventually dropped), and the storyline, although ultimately a little more developed than in part one, is still more of an excuse for exploration than a moving story – perhaps because, in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, a story about zombies set in a global pandemic caused by a spreading virus was quite risky anyway.
The game’s protagonist is Aiden, a runner who carries parcels and information between the few enclaves of humanity in a world overrun by the zombifying virus from the first part of the game. He ends up in the European city of Villedor to learn the fate of his missing sister, and eventually discovers a whole host of secrets about the virus and the experiments to develop it. There are a number of different factions operating in Villedor and, according to the developers, we can influence which of them will run the various districts of the city, which in turn translates into what infrastructure will be built there to make it easier to fight or escape from zombies.
There are quite a few changes from the previous part, but the most important is probably the much greater emphasis on verticality – most of Harran’s buildings were not very tall, but the centre of Villedor is filled with skyscrapers. You can climb them using balconies, balustrades and parapets, but most importantly, you can also use a paraglider, which completely changes the way you get around the city. Gliding above the crowds of zombies gives a great sense of freedom, but the challenge has not gone away. To get to the other end of the city, you have to carefully look out for high places where you can quickly fly to without unexpectedly landing in the middle of a zombie horde. In an interesting coincidence, the creators of Dying Light 2 were exploring the verticality potential of digital cities in parallel with the creators of Cyberpunk 2077 – both games introduced cities that will serve as a model for future developers in this respect.
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Dying Light, photo: Techland / www.techland.pl
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Screen from Dying Light, photo: press release by Techland / www.techland.pl
Dying Light 2 wouldn’t be such a successful game if it weren’t for the accompanying parkour music by Olivier Derivière. It’s not a ready-made music track, but a whole set of layers that gradually kick in as Aiden runs ahead and overcomes more obstacles. As he grabs the wind in his sails and multiplies showy tricks, the music builds up, the rhythm becomes more pronounced and new instruments arrive. When Aiden stumbles, stops or is attacked by zombies, the wave of music subsides and sometimes falls silent altogether. Derivière’s creation of a dynamic music machine gives the gameplay an unusual sense of lightness – which can, after all, be surprising in a zombie game.
This contrast of lightness and horror is perhaps the key to the phenomenon of the Dying Light series. Its creators reconcile fire and water: the grim realities of a post-apocalyptic world and the joy of running. The brutal violence and the poetry of flight over a ruined city. Being trapped in an infected city and a deepening sense of freedom. It is in these contrasts that the freedom dreamed of by Techland’s developers for two decades tastes best.
