NIGHT AND DAY
“WE WANTED TO USE THINGS YOU THINK OF AS MODERN – LIKE CHARGERS FOR ELECTRIC CARS – AND SHOW THEM DEVASTATED BY NATURE”
Game Dying Light 2: Stay Human Publisher/developer Techland Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release February 4
Familiarity breeds contempt – or, in the case of Edge, a 6. That was the score awarded to Techland’s Dying Light in 2015, a reaction to what we saw as a spread of ideas magpied from other games and stitched together into Harran, an open-world city flooded with zombie-like infected. There were Far Cry towers to scale, levelling through doing (as in Elder Scrolls), and a cast of ripped tanks and bloated exploders evoking the ubiquitous line-up from Left 4 Dead. All of this on top of tropes and beats that can leave infected narratives as indistinct as the shambling dead that comprise their hordes. Aim for the head! They won’t stop coming! Is man the real monster? For such a dangerous territory, in many ways the first game played things safe.
Familiarity clearly plays on Techland’s minds, too. Dying Light 2: Stay Human is not simple sequelcraft of the bigger, better school, but a considerable reworking of the core fantasy. Gone is Harran (quite literally, if you chose to nuke it at the end of Dying Light expansion The Following), replaced with Villedor and, more significantly, a jump 15 years into the future. “Harran was basically what we see outside of the window,” lead designer Tymon Smektała observes. “It was as if the apocalypse happened yesterday. But we wanted to bring something unique, a little more ours, so we came up with the concept of the Modern Dark Ages.” The phrase comes up a lot in our conversation, and describes a society that has returned to its brutal roots, largely from the necessity of living in a now tech-starved world – rickety clubs look held together with spit (or perhaps congealed blood) – but also partly due to lawless opportunities that allow thuggish leaders to violently seize city districts.
For Smektała, the time jump is a chance to “convey a feeling of loss and even make us, as humans, a bit ashamed of what we had and we lost because of the decisions that allowed
