All I want to do is test my gumption and find some volatiles to fight I can dropkick zombies now with extraordinary force, and craft flammable throwing stars. Standing at the peak of a suspension bridge, looking down on the zombie traffic jam from high above the city, the wind crackling, the GRE, Rais, and Brecken don’t matter to me. Dying Light forgets, or willfully ignores, that the appeal of the zombie narrative is the underlying questions of morality and social responsibility.
The glee with which one can strengthen her character and eventually shred through the undead isn’t enough to offset the moral bankruptcy at the very heart of the game, nor is it enough to quell the feeling that everything you do fails to serve a purpose other than collecting things. It’s fun, for awhile, but the absence of meaningful stakes, of an emotional storyline of some sort, ends up leaving it all feeling cheap. As you enhance the weapons in your arsenal, and build up your own ability to jump, run, and pummel, the zombie hordes become more like barely-moving target practice than a threat to your life. It’s not that the game is inordinately bloody or hard to stomach it’s that it presents itself like a sadistic RPG, where the main goal isn’t to find the aforementioned file for the GRE, but rather gain as much strength, agility, and weapon modifications as you can so that your zombie skirmishes become more and more ludicrous the deeper you get into the game. Without such a narrative, Dying Light devolves into almost pure gore. Without such a narrative, Dying Light devolves into almost pure gore. A narrative that presents personal, emotional stakes, like the rescuing of family members, or muses on universal themes of where our morality comes from and how such ideologies shift in times of distress and destruction, allow for the gore and cynicism of the zombie-survival genre to pack a meaningful punch. Survival/zombie narratives are often most compelling when they’re intensely personal or universally applicable. It’s a paint-by-numbers survival story that vaguely ties in ideas of psychology and morality in regards to rebuilding society. There’s hardly any narrative thrust, and the emotional beats are delivered through exposition rather than through any character insight or development within the narrative. In terms of storytelling then, Dying Light is a failure. Once you’re out in the world as Crane though, those stakes evaporate, the narrative more of an intrusion than a guiding structure. There are voiceovers that lay on the exposition thick, with Crane telling us that he’s conflicted about his role as a go-between for the GRE, Brecken and Rais, and he’s always mentioning how driven he is to find the missing file, because he’s infected, too. Crane is presented as a man in emotional turmoil, and yet there’s a mundanity to the missions that he undertakes, from collecting money on behalf of Rais, a stereotypical, maniacal crime boss, to setting up power grids. Kyle Crane is a man divided, one who feels loyalty to the GRE and yet can’t help but wonder if he needs to help the people on the ground, the survivors in Harran that have been rounded up by a man named Harris Brecken. There’s an uneasy tension between this world and the story of what you’re doing within it. The city does seem alive, though-or at least crawling back to some semblance of life. The city isn’t exactly operational as Kyle Crane, an undercover operative sent into Harran to retrieve a file (which potentially contains the building blocks of a cure) for the GRE (Global Relief Effort), you spend most of the game climbing up towers in order to turn the city’s power back on and collecting supplies to bring back to the safe zones set up across the city. Dying Light offers up a different experience, one where the city of Harran, post-disease and presently filled with the hungry undead, feels lived-in. No amount of side missions or unexplored nooks can disguise the fact that much of what you’re actually doing is repetitive you realize that the world you inhabit is big but unchanging, filled with meaningless moments. So many open-world games have an expanse of territory to explore, and yet much of the game feels the same.
There’s a wonderful shift in feel and atmosphere in Dying Light. In terms of storytelling then, Dying Light is a failure.
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