Dying Light 2 Stay Human elicited involuntary, physical responses so often throughout my playthrough that I started to dread needing to sit down and consume more. For someone by having an intense visual height intolerance verging on acrophobia, Dying Light 2's feeling of scale was panic-inducing; I literally had to stop and breathe deeply and slowly between certain jumps. I've had games like Alien: Isolation and Silent Hill beat on my small amygdala like it would be a speed bag before, but never made it happen feel so personal. Even falling to my death many, often and respawning like nothing had happened didn't cure me from the anxiety about missing an increase. The standard gaming maneuver suddenly had new meaning.
To say that I enjoyed the anxiety-inducing moments of Dying Light 2 could be an overstatement, however i can at any rate understand the craft that entered making such an unpleasant, physical response possible. Dying Light 2's parkour is great because it often seems like something I (well, not me personally, but someone in actual good shape) could do in the real world, and in addition it feels like something I could die while doing in the real world. I am not going to Mario-style triple-jump round the city or swing on webs like Spidey, but I sure as hell could at least attempt some jumps the way they're presented in Dying Light 2. Later, when you unlock a paraglider and a grappling hook, Dying Light 2's parkour feels a little more videogamey, but the sense of vertigo never went away, no matter how many tools I needed to fight against gravity.
The first-person action in Dying Light 2 feels grounded and physical even with a paraglider that magically refolds itself whenever you're done utilizing it, it breaks from the confines of reality in additional subtle methods to make sure it's still fun. There are moments when, in real life, releasing a rope in a certain angle would likely lead to falling in to the gap you were most assuredly trying not to fall under, but Dying Light 2 massages your momentum just enough so that you can have a little more control than you realized.
Part of the items makes Dying Light 2's parkour so effective is its world design. Odds are, if you feel you are able to ascend or jump onto something, you are able to. Uness it is a tree; for some reason, you can't climb trees whatsoever. I suppose which makes sense, as Dying Light 2's approach to level design is to shed the rough edges from the real life sufficient to fit in to the type of modularity necessary to create a satisfying platformer. The game does show you in some ways with the color yellow: yellow-painted ledges, yellow-painted signs, and so on. But that's mostly in confined areas or when climbing the Far Cry -esque windmills.
And there are places within the city that feel, as John Wilson would put it in his How To episode about scaffolding, as if the buildings all shopped at the same store. Still, that does not matter so much when hopping, skipping, and jumping around, as Dying Light 2 projects the parkour spirit of expressively, artistically turning urban modernity into a playground.
Ironically, where most open-world games feel inhibitive in the way they make you traverse their maps, Dying Light 2 feels freeing, even with no easily accessible fast travel. That you can level up your character's parkour skills simply by engaging using the game's movement mechanics, without needing to complete specific challenges or jump through hoops, causes it to be even more liberating.
Techland is its most artistic when portraying the feeling of parkour. The way the music subtly cuts out and cuts back in when taking off and landing an increase symbolizes that bass-drop feeling you get in your stomach when slightly lifting off from your seat in a car or a rollercoaster. But Dying Light 2 doesn't really have to accomplish this symbolically; if you are like me, you'll feel it. However there is the other kind of physical reaction that I needed to Dying Light 2, one that's close to the anxiety I felt while jumping across rooftops although not as thrilling. It's a feeling closer to revulsion at the grotesque nature of all things else that entered farmville.
Sometimes, the revulsion is nice, or maybe not “good” then at least intentional. This can be a zombie game, after all, and the zombies are gross. Getting grabbed by a zombie, you can almost smell the rotting flesh and bloody gunk throughout its skin. Even when doing the grabbing and putting the zombie in a headlock, the wispy, thinning hair on the back of its molting scalp and also the gurgling sounds it can make while you're attempting to break its neck disgusted me. There is a real misanthropy in the style of Dying Light 2's zombies, a pure disgust at the human form generally.
But this misanthropy worms its way into many other facets of Dying Light 2, most notably in its narrative. Taking place years after the original game's events, the sequel takes place in a world where scientists have actually discovered a vaccine for the virus that turned Harran into a zombie-infested hellhole and basically saved the planet. Everything was fine, I guess? Until it wasn't, thanks to the “humanitarian” group, Global Relief Effort (GRE), which attempted herpes to militarize it. The virus got out, yadda yadda yadda, and here i am. It's all regulated pretty standard zombie stuff, even in spite to the fact that Techland didn't need any of this background to explain why a spook outbreak in one city wasn't contained. Really, “solving” the zombie crisis and then starting it back up again helps make the entire setup for that game narratively wobbly.
Techland posits the world of Dying Light 2's city, Villedor, as taking place in the “modern ancient,” but that is not necessarily accurate, as there is no feeling of religious belief or feudalism dominating the planet. Moreso, Villedor is a nightmare town of tribalism where individuals beat one another to death with weapons made out of rusted scraps. Villedor's citizens are divided up into different camps: Friendly factions range from the hardscrabble Survivors and also the militaristic Peacekeepers, while enemies include the cult-of-violence Renegades, random bandits, and zombies. It's all very rote post-apocalyptic stuff, however it doesn't make an effort to mine these tropes or do anything whatsoever interesting with them whatsoever. Instead, it's content with letting these two factions take part in the exact roles that you would expect these to play inside the game's limp, choice-based narrative. It's all the greater disappointing considering that the original Dying Light could weave an intriguing tale of corporate espionage in a zombie setting without needing to rely on the same character tropes we have seen time and time again in this kind of fiction.
As a Pilgrim (basically a post-apocalyptic mailman) named Aiden, you've got a simple goal in mind in the outset of Dying Light 2's story: travel to Villedor and find your sister, the aptly named Mia. In searching for his sister by first finding a bad person called Waltz, Aiden gets sucked into the tense, barely antebellum politics from the city, and finally ends up involved in a fight for the fate of the world. (I am talking about, not literally the world, however, you get the idea.) Aiden, sticking his nose into everyone else's business-including Rosario Dawson's-in pursuit of Mia, needs to make choices throughout the game that truly do change up the story and Villedor itself, however the only choices that actually make sense for the character are the type that would get him nearer to his sister.
One from the driving philosophies behind Dying Light 2's storytelling is that consequence matters. Anyone can die anytime, in line with the decisions you make. But this only works should you actually care about the characters. Without spoiling an excessive amount of, a particular reunion-like the one that drives the entire narrative-is so brief and thus underwhelming, it's similar to it had been an afterthought. It does not help the dialogue is all written as if it's designed to sound badass and funky, however the phrasing is simply awkward enough that it comes off as parody, like the writers were trying to make fun of what teenage boys would think is cool rather than actually trying to make the characters seem cool. One character describes a woman who is maybe trying to kill him as a “vagina dentata.” That's the degree of subtlety we're taking a look at here.
Meanwhile, all the best story beats are buried in side quests, or they just disappear without seeing any kind of resolution. There is a side quest that lets you decide to either save or kill a character that could ruin your cover and make you the city's number-one fugitive. After deciding to save that character's life, an action that would have assuredly derailed the rest of the game's story, I experienced no consequences, no resolution, nothing. Sure, you might get to decide Villedor's fate, but Dying Light 2 feels averse to real, character-driven drama. Instead, it fills your spare time with looting and crafting, though no matter how much you loot, you never seem to have enough to craft.
The same can probably be said concerning the game's gear system. I had been constantly obtaining gear, however i rarely ever felt compelled to change what my Aiden was wearing or using. Different classes of equipment such as the Bruiser or Ranger offered buffs for such things as stamina and damage with one-handed weapons, but no choices I made felt overly meaningful. That said, it also
