With a wristband secured, the game settles into a rhythm.
“Aiden has expert parkour skills that allow him to scale buildings and dodge undesirable characters” Owning one of these wristbands is a condition of living in the City, perhaps a nod to the various covid passes that have been implemented around the world. One of your early goals in the game is to acquire a wristband that provides an alert when you need a top-up of UV. There, you discover that all of the other survivors are also infected, but use a variety of tools to avoid zombification – hence the “Stay Human” part of the game’s title.įull zombies can’t survive in sunlight, so City folk have set up ultraviolet lamps to hold back the infection. After being bitten by a zombie, you enter one of the last remaining outposts of society, known only as the City. The game picks up the story in 2036, where you play as a survivor called Aiden Caldwell. The zombies took over and civilisation collapsed. The end of the game promised a cure to the disease, but as the introduction of Dying Light 2 explains – and stop me if you have heard this before – a new variant of the virus emerged in 2021 and spread rapidly. It is a sequel to the 2015 game Dying Light, which saw a viral outbreak in the fictional Middle Eastern city of Harran turn people into zombies. This time, it is Dying Light 2 Stay Human, and it is interesting to look at the game as a work of post-pandemic (mid-pandemic?) fiction. Two years on, the pandemic is still going, and I am still playing zombie games. IN APRIL 2020, soon after the UK entered its first lockdown, I reviewed the zombie-packed Resident Evil 3, describing it as noticeably “pre-pandemic fiction”.