Dying Light: The Beast – Poland Sells Us the Apocalypse, Season Pass Included
Dying Light: The Beast – or How to Sell the End of the World Back to Us, One Parkour Zombie at a Time
From the warped newsrooms of Dave’s Locker | 12 June 2025
There are two kinds of apocalypse in 2025: the slow-motion one playing out in real time—record heat in Delhi, record floods in São Paulo, record boredom in Brussels—and the brisk, photogenic kind Techland keeps packaging in 4K HDR. Dying Light: The Beast, the Polish studio’s latest open-air abattoir, arrives just as the planet perfects its own viral sequel. Coincidence? Possibly. Good marketing? Absolutely.
Let’s zoom out for a second. From Lagos to Lima, people have spent the past half-decade stockpiling masks, canned beans, and grievances. Techland’s response: “Great, now try stockpiling rooftop agility.” The game drops you back into Harran’s bigger, badder cousin—an Eastern European nowhere that looks suspiciously like the parts of Bucharest Google Street View still hasn’t bothered to map. By daylight you loot; by moonlight you’re a bipedal kebab on legs. The metaphor writes itself, but Techland still footnotes it with a narrator who sounds like he gargled gravel and Eastern Bloc regrets.
The Beast, allegedly a 20-hour standalone expansion, is really a $40 confession that the last full sequel overshot its budget like a crypto exchange in 2022. The suits in Wrocław trimmed the fat, kept the parkour, and stapled on a morality system so binary it could run for office in Turkey. Choose to save the scientist or sell him for weapon mods—either way, the global south still boils, but hey, your crossbow now sets people on fire. Progress.
International audiences will appreciate the new weather tech: acid rain that melts NPC skin faster than IMF conditional loans melt public services. Players in Jakarta will nod knowingly; players in Arizona will simply call it “August.” Meanwhile, the co-op mode lets four strangers from four continents ignore each other’s accents while chainsawing virals in perfect, wordless capitalism. Ping the loot, bag the loot, pretend not to notice the loot drop is labeled “Humanitarian Aid.”
Techland’s smartest tweak is the “Beast” itself—an AI-controlled super-zombie that learns from every encounter. After three nights it started anticipating my Molotov arcs with the weary competence of a Ukrainian drone operator. By night six it was quoting Nietzsche at me in subtitles, which is either emergent storytelling or a bug the devs will patch next fiscal quarter. Either way, it felt unsettlingly intimate, like Alexa finally admitting she’s been listening to your break-up playlists.
Critics will complain the story still treats geopolitics like a loot crate—crack it open, receive one (1) vague allegory about bioweapons and privatized healthcare. But perhaps that’s the point. In a year when elections from Jakarta to Johannesburg hinge on which candidate promises to bomb the virus harder, a Polish studio reducing global catastrophe to fetch quests and fluorescent medkits is less escapism than mirror. The joke’s on us; Techland just held up the mirror and slapped a Season Pass on it.
Performance-wise, The Beast runs at 60 fps on hardware no refugee camp will ever see. The ray-traced puddles are so realistic you can practically smell the dysentery—a detail the marketing team curiously left out of the trailer. On Steam Deck it’s a portable panic attack; on PS5 it’s a demo reel for the military-entertainment complex. Pick your poison.
Should you buy it? If you’re reading this from a country whose currency is currently being used as origami, maybe torrent it and call it reparations. If you’re in Zurich, go ahead—your carbon offset subscription has you covered. Either way, you’ll log off, close the curtains, and realize the only real difference between Harran and here is that our nights last longer and the loot doesn’t respawn.
Conclusion
Dying Light: The Beast is a polished, paranoid postcard from the near future, delivered first class to gamers who’d rather freerun across fictional rooftops than confront the ones collapsing outside their windows. It’s thrilling, tasteless, and—like the virus du jour—remarkably adaptable. Somewhere between the headshots and the loading-screen tips about hydration, you’ll recognize the punchline: we paid money to practice surviving the world we’re already failing to save. Night falls everywhere, dear reader. Bring a flashlight, or at least a sense of irony.
