Featuring fan favorite and returning character Kyle Crane, Dying Light: The Beast released on Sept. 19, and the video game was developed and published by Techland S.A. Originally, Techland developed the popular game series Dead Island but ultimately left the franchise due to creative differences between publisher Deep Silver who owned the IP. Dying Light: The Beast is the third installment in the Dying Light franchise, which was released in 2015.
Dying Light: The Beast is great for anyone who enjoys survival horror, which mixes elements of a viral zombie outbreak and parkour. It will also be enjoyable for fans of beloved protagonist Kyle Crane’s return.
The first game in the series took place in 2014 in a fictional rendition of Harran, Turkey, featuring Crane. Prior to the events in Harran, he was an American mercenary who was contracted by the Global Relief Effort (GRE) to retrieve a file containing sensitive information like a potential cure to the virus from a man named Kadir Suleiman. Unfortunately after landing he was attacked by a pack of infected and was bitten. At what seemed like his final moments, he was rescued by a group of survivors in the city.
While the people of Harran relied on the GRE for life saving supplies they would abandon the survivors of the city and offer Suleiman an escape from Harran in exchange for the stolen file. After the GRE betrayed Crane, he would flee to the countryside where he encountered a cult known as the Children of the Sun and their leader, a telepathic zombie referred to as The Mother. Eventually Crane was given a “cure” and escaped Harran, although he was changed forever.
Set 15 years after the events of the original Dying Light game, the GRE would develop a vaccine against the virus but secretly continued experimentation on the virus creating a mutated strain known as Tachytransmissive Harran Virus (THV) which would escape the lab. Quickly after the strain escaped the lab, 98% of the global population would be lost in an event known as “The Fall.”
Now in Dying Light: The Beast, after years of being captured by the GRE and countless experiments, a mysterious pair of survivors break into a facility that belongs to a scientist known as “The Baron” in attempts to rescue Crane, but they unfortunately fail and are knocked unconscious. Sometime after the mysterious survivors are incapacitated, a new test subject is acquired and Crane awakes only to be injected with a sample of the other subject's blood. After Crane was injected, the other subject awoke, broke free and destroyed the entire lab, finally allowing Crane to escape after years of torture.
For anyone who enjoys an action-packed survival horror video game with an undead aspect and long-term support for the game in the future, Dying Light: The Beast will not disappoint. The game is already available on PC, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X and S.