Two hours into my gaming preview of Dying Light: The Beast, I was jogging through a beautiful woodland dotted with cabins and park benches -- a spot that would make for a lovely vacation, if not for the hordes of zombies wandering all over. Despite stealthily creeping around, I was spotted by a large group and frantically fended them off with a shovel, growing more desperate and overwhelmed -- until my rage meter maxed out and I became a beast. I roared and tore the zombies limb from limb until the red haze lifted from my vision, leaving me human again to continue my journey through the park.
At a preview event in Los Angeles, California, Polish studio Techland set me and other media members up to play the first few hours of Dying Light: The Beast. It's the next entry in the beloved Dying Light series of games, which combine first-person parkour movement with zombie horror action. After the long gap between the 2015 original and its 2022 sequel Dying Light 2 Stay Human, the third game is coming out just three years later, with a release date of August 22, 2025. Dying Light: The Beast is a course correction that brings back more of the horror and vulnerability that made the first game so successful, Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala told me.
"Wtih Dying Light: The Beast, we want to recapture that fear, that horror, that tension that the first game had," Smektala said. "Maybe it was beginner's luck, but we actually managed to capture the atmosphere and the feel and the balance just right."
Part of that is bringing back the first game's protagonist, Kyle Crane, who has been locked away for a decade while the zombie plague he once tried to contain rampages across the world. After escaping an underground lab, Crane quickly discovers that years of experiments done on him have left him with bursts of strength and bloodlust, which comes in handy when he's beset by mutated enemies -- he becomes a monster to fight monsters.
Prior Dying Light games let players explore open-world cities with free-roaming parkour movement, leaping over railings and climbing up fire escapes. The Beast expands this to a seemingly less suitable environment: Castor Woods, a sprawling forest that feels like a national park, where players have to thread their way through woodlands, rivers, mountain paths and other terrain. Techland challenged itself to see if the series' parkour movement to evade zombies rather than fight them all would work in different biomes, Smektala said -- and he believes they've cooked up something unique that pushes players to change how they move and deal with the living and the dead.
"So you could say, 'okay, maybe I can hide behind trees and try to use how dense the forest is to lose the chase,' but on the other hand, you never really know what you can find behind that tree, what hides in those forests," Smektala said. "We like the fact that there are places on the map where you basically feel weaker, where you feel more fragile."
Techland
Swinging between fragility and "Beast Mode" revenge
In my handful of hours with The Beast, I frequently felt that sense of vulnerability, confidently taking on a couple zombies, only to get cornered by half a dozen more shambling up behind me. Combat feels slow and weighty, relying on timing to avoid exhausting myself. I had to circle enemies carefully and slip between their attacks as my melee swings gradually took them down one by one -- with guns and bullets scarce, at least early on.
But when I'd hit (or had been hit) enough to fill my rage meter, the game's unique mechanic, Beast Mode, activated turning me into a monstrous force of nature, battering zombies and ripping off their limbs (if not worse -- the game's brutal dismemberment isn't for the weak-stomached). Beast Mode is a deliberate counterbalance for handling hordes and turning the tides in combat -- partially inspired, surprisingly, by the classic game Pac-Man.
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