PAX Prime 2013: Hands-On with Dying Light

othing frightens me more than the idea of someone behind me. The instinctive glance over the shoulder, hearing footsteps mimicking your own. It is the reason why I could never go up or down stairs in the dark as a child. Techland and Warner Bros. Games are encasing this feeling of terror and helplessness into a game where sometimes your only chance of survival is to run. Dying Light takes elements of other original games and are able to bring it into the zombie/undead/infected space with great efficiency.

We had the opportunity to play through an entire day and night within Dying Light, where the race against time turns into a race against the undead once the sun sets. Radoslaw Grabowski, International Brand Specialist at Techland was our guide, as we became more aware of our surroundings, training in the ways of navigating through the city and its rooftops. During the day, traversing through the area is best accomplished on the rooftops. Planning an offense and laying traps for later encounters is the key to survival. An electrified fence or abandoned car filled with explosives will be a game changer once the undead become more aggressive. This occurs once the day turns to night, as the once sluggish and easily confused zombies become enraged and difficult to stop.

As the sun began to set on the horizon, I encountered a man trapped in a building surrounded by the living dead. I rushed to his aid, slicing through one attacker with an axe and setting the other two ablaze with a properly timed distraction involving sparks and a pool of oil. The man, grateful for the assist, becomes an ally in the town providing additional missions and supply drops to collect. This is all optional, and can be ignored in favor of the main story. The developer could not comment on a potential morality factor in gameplay, but it is implied that every action is an exercise in risk and reward. What actions and decisions will make it easier to avoid the biters, or create more problems once the moon rises?

Once the chase began, I utilized the free running to climb and access higher ground to create distance between the biters and I. It was a fluid motion to climb, run and launch to rooftops, fences and other barricades. As we would dash past a trap that was previously placed, I would be able to turn mid run to see if my pursuers were stopped by a carefully placed instrument of death. The new information we were provided with was that the game will support four player cooperative mode. the intense action and parkour elements shared amongst four friends sounds very exciting. The folks at Techland could not comment on other aspects of the running, such as wall runs and potentially destroying parts of the environment to create new paths, as much as George and I tried to pry info from them. It seems like they could be working on more aspects before the games release in 2014. So far, however it seems as Techland is posed to make Dying Light something to really look forward to.