It's been a little bit since my last blog. I had intended to write something up about getting the new hard drive for my PS4, and my thoughts on the Borderlands The Handsome Collection, but...The stuff about the hard drive was basically just going to be me saying that having tons of extra space is rad, and that Sony still really needs to overhaul the PS4's interface. And, hey, I still like Borderlands. Haven't played Pre-Sequel yet, and I dunno when I'll get around to it. I will, eventually, but it might not be until after MGSV. We'll see.

(I should note that I kinda wrote part of this blog, then went back to an earlier section and added a bunch, so if anything seems a little weird, or ramble-y, that's probably it.)

HOWEVER, I have played Dying Light (thanks to my cousin for letting me borrow his copy, even though he'll never read this), and I do have things to say about that game. And if it's not quite enough to make this blog as long as I usually like them to be, maybe I'll tack on a bit about the specific things I want changed about the PS4's interface (though that basically amounts to, "Hey, let me make custom folders").

I would start this with a history of my time with Techland's previous zombie games, but I only played about twenty minutes of Dead Island. And that was on PlayStation Now, where between the (likely) sub-par port of the PS3 version, and the lag inherent in PlayStation Now, it was basically unplayable. But that game still does have a special place in my heart, solely because of that time the GB crew played it on TNT. If you haven't seen it since the day it aired, or missed it because you weren't around the site back then, it's 100% worth watching, or re-watching. Lots of trucks.

But because of my lack of having played that game, even despite hearing good things about Dying Light, I was still going into it more from just wanting to see what it was so I could form an opinion about it, than actually wanting to play the game and have a good time. However, much to my surprise, I ending up liking the game a whole lot. I'd even go so far as to call it great, even if it does have a fair number of issues, some game play related, some mission design related, and some...Well, I'll get back to this last bit later, because it's a bit different than what I usually write about.

If you're not aware, Dying Light is a game in which you hit zombies with things, and climb onto and over other things to get away from zombies that you either don't feel like hitting with things, or are too powerful/too numerous for you to be able to hit them without dying. That's a really simplified and kinda cynical description, but hey, that's what this game is. Despite that, this is definitely one of those games where the "game" part is easily the best part of the game.

It's really hard to convey in text, but this game just feels good to play. I did have to adjust some stick sensitivity when I started playing, but that's standard stuff. It's a game where once it clicks (which didn't take very long), it really clicks and you just have a blast with it. I know it's easy to mock games that have zombies in them, and I know I have done that before (and still do to a lot of non-game things that feature zombies), but the hits in this game hit really hard. Both literally, and figuratively. When you've got a zombie down on the ground, and you're beating its head in with a pipe, it just feels good. It feels like I'm really putting my all into these swings as I mercilessly beat this once human thing into a literal bloody pulp. And yes, before you ask, there was a point where I started to feel bad about enjoying that, but I'll get to that in a bit, there's some other stuff I want to cover before I get there.

As much as I like the combat, I'd have to say the traversal stuff is my favorite thing about the game. This sort of traversal in a first person game is hard to pull off, and I can see how it might make some people motion sick (someone told me this game did just that to him the other day). But, as someone who only just realized how cool this stuff can be when I played Mirror's Edge this year, I was SUPER into it. It can be a little wonky at times, and there's some stuff at the end of the game that uses it REALLY BADLY, but for the most part, getting around in this game was a lot of fun.

The sort of thing that made me glad the game doesn't have any fast travel, or vehicles to speed things up. I do, however, wish there was fast travel between the two zones in the game (it's a "segmented" open world). I do get why it is segmented, for fictional reasons, probably some technical reasons, and getting back to what I was saying about Arkham Knight's Gotham feeling more real to me because it wasn't the entire Gotham. That said, getting between the two is a real chore, and the sort of thing that I never did aside from when I was required to do so for the story.

Mechanically, though, the climbing is pretty simple. You hit R1 to jump, and you just kinda grab onto whatever you're looking at. I mean, sometimes you have to hit R1 to time grabbing onto a thing, and there's plenty of times when you need to be really careful about knowing how far you can actually jump, because there's a lot of fall damage in this game. There are skills you can unlock to lessen it, including a roll upon landing that if timed right will save you a lot of the time, but some falls are just lethal, no matter what. Though, of course there are conspicuous and impossible blue colored garbage piles that will let you fall from any height. But unlike Assassin's Creed (well known for its hay bales), these aren't positioned around every building, so they're not something you can rely upon.

But maybe my favorite thing with the traversal, which I got around midway into the game (you unlock it in one of the skill trees) is the grappling hook. When I saw there was a grappling hook, I figured it was going to be something realistic. You'd have to stand at the base of a building, wind up a throw, latch onto the top, and slowly rappel up the build.

NOPE! Instead you just throw that thing like Scorpion throwing a spear, and you go ZOOMING in real fast. You can even use it (sometimes) to Just Cause yourself safely to the ground from a fall. It's not quite as good at saving you as it is in those games, but it's still a lot more effective than I expected, and I liked it a whole lot.

Sadly, there are a few spots in the story where you can't use it for reasons like, "you're exhausted," which is a bad excuse, given that it doesn't limit any of the other things you can do. But this is also a game that takes away all of your things and makes you fight enemies with some not great weapons it gives you, and no medkits (not great for a game where your health only regenerates to a very small portion of the max). And it does that MORE THAN ONCE!

That was especially bad when one of them required fighting a new zombie type called the Demolisher. Demolishers are quite large, and somehow armored so a lot of your hits don't really do any damage. That'd be fine, if every hit from the zombie didn't knock me to the ground for several seconds (something the zombies that wield the large hunks of concrete like maces do too, though they're easier to manage). It certainly didn't help that it felt like the game was kind of cheating with some of the hit boxes on some of these attacks too.

Now, it can be kinda hard to tell these things in a first person game, when I'm frequently looking away from the thing that's hitting me. It's quite possible I was just imagining that. I still feel like there's a distinct lack of invincibility in the dodge in this game that should be there to make fighting these specific enemies enjoyable. I'm just saying that if I can dodge through attacks in Bloodborne, I should be able to in Dying Light. But, the bright side is that you only have to face this enemy type a couple times throughout the story missions, so it's not like it ruins the game.

Not like the end. Which, "ruins the game" is a gross exaggeration, because I said earlier I think the game is still really good. But this game's ending is really bad! First, there's this tunnel filled with zombies (including the really powerful ones that show up at night that I totally haven't even mentioned yet because I'm good at getting off topic) that you need to run through. It's not just a regular tunnel, because there's jumps you need to make, and things to climb, etc. That said, it's the very definition of, "This would be a great sequence if I made it through on my first try." But I didn't. I didn't keep count, but I had to have died about twenty times.

After that, you have to make your way through a building (also filled with zombies). During this part, I got stuck for about ten minutes on something that was very obvious once I realized I was looking at the wrong spot. Then, after some reasonable platforming, there's one bit where you have to run across this very thin beam, and occasionally climb over some stuff. And it's just straight up bad. The running isn't precise enough (for me, at least) to be able to do it without looking down to make sure my feet are still on the beam (thankfully this game actually renders your legs), which means I couldn't see the things I needed to climb up! This game is at its best when you are running around big, wide open spaces, with lots of different ways to get from point A to point B. This was the opposite of that, and it was bad.

And then the "final boss" is some Quick Time Events that messing up once means you have to start from scratch. But I only messed it up once, so that was merely annoying, not infuriating like that tunnel bit, which did not have any checkpoints either.

But this did remind me to write about the day/night cycle in this game. So, as you may have gathered, the literal interpretation of the name Dying Light refers to the part of the game where it's turning to night, and all the really powerful zombies come out of hiding. And it's actually a pretty interesting system. During the day, you only have to worry about regular zombies, most of which just shamble about aimlessly, though some will climb after you (and plead with you by speaking aloud, which is super disturbing, but only happened to me once or twice in the entire game). There's some human enemies too, but the most interesting thing about them is that you can sometimes hold them up with a gun, rather than actually fighting them (something I wish the game had more of, honestly).

But at night, the regular zombies become a little less lethargic, and the powerful ones I mentioned before (Volatiles! I had to look up what they were called and add this in during proofreading.) come out, and then the game becomes kind of a stealth game. You see their vision cones on the mini-map, and if they get on your trail, you pretty much HAVE to book it out of there if you want to live. And you do, because you lose Survivor Points (XP for one of the skill trees) when you die. But, the advantage of staying out in night, instead of sleeping in a safe zone, is that you get double XP for the agility and power (combat) skill trees. So, you can level twice as fast, but it's also a lot more dangerous. And a lot harder to see, because when this game gets dark, it gets DARK. And it's worth it, because a lot of the skills that you get from those trees are super useful.

Of course, by the end of the game, I had good enough weapons that I could take out those powerful zombies pretty easily. Not the Demolishers, but those other ones. At least if there was only one of them. I got a bit cocky at one point near the end, and got completely mobbed by them. I died.

The thing I liked most about getting better weapons in the game was the modification system. It's certainly better than the guns, at least (this game is not a very good shooter, and the shotgun is terrible, but thankfully, there's only a few times in the game where I felt like I was supposed to be shooting instead of meleeing).

The mods are, honestly, really silly and absurd compared to the generally "realistic" (never mind the zombies) tone that the game goes for. Like, I expect attaching a burner and battery to a sword to imbue it with both fire and electricity damage in Dead Rising (well, not the first one, but you get what I mean). I wouldn't expect it in this game, based on the tone it sets. So, in a way, it is kind of a weird tonal shift that is never acknowledged in any of the dialog. Yes, you get blueprints for some of these as rewards for side quests, but they never outright say, "I'll give you a blueprint for electric fire swords if you go collect this thing I need."

But I don't really think any of this is a bad thing, because nothing that goes on in the actual story is that interesting. Or really interesting at all. You play as Kyle Crane, a guy who sounds like Chris Redfield (like Arkham Origins, this is the same voice actor doing that voice again), who is sent into the city of Harran, a fictional city in a nameless fictional country somewhere in the Middle East (I assume, at least). Why is he sent in? Because some secretive global relief group ostensibly wants him to recover information that could lead to making a cure for the zombie virus, but you can tell real early on that, like all faceless corporations, they're up to something.

But what they're up to isn't really that interesting, and neither are any of the characters that you meet and do missions for throughout the game. I barely even remember the names of most of them. There's one who dies at one point, and given the way the game treats that character's death, you'd think he was some JRPG party member who you'd been questing with for thirty hours. The amount the game expects you to be invested in these characters far outreaches any emotional investment I ever felt.

In fact, not too long in the game, I started thinking of it as something Chris Redfield was doing in his off time between Resident Evil games. I mean, it's the same voice (more or less), and it's a zombie game. Say what you will about the Resident Evil fiction, but at least it has a fiction, and memorable characters. This? Not so much. And it's telling that my own "fan-fiction" ended up being a lot more interesting (to me) than anything that was going on in the game.

I got a little sidetracked there, but the point was that I wish this game leaned a bit more into the goofy and silly aspect of it more than it does. It definitely does a little, but not enough. The only serious zombie related things I've ever enjoyed the story of are The Last of Us and Telltale's The Walking Dead Season 1. And I think both of those are very much exceptions to the rule, as every serious zombie movie I've seen I have greatly disliked. Even ones that are generally regarded as good movies. They don't appeal to me on the gore factor, because as much as I like limbs flying and heads exploding in games, I don't really care for that stuff in TV or movies (something I've thought about recently given that I've been watching Daredevil (no spoilers, I'm not done yet), and how inexplicably graphic a couple episodes are). And I've gotten sidetracked again, sorry. I wouldn't apologize if it weren't for the fact that I think I could expand on a lot of this other stuff into their own pieces, but I need to get back on track if I don't want this to be a COMPLETE incoherent mess.

But what I do think is worth discussing are some of the, for lack of a better word, tropes that this game falls victim to. It does get into a damsel in distress later in the game, which I'm not going to defend by any means, but I don't think is worth discussing. At least not like the part where I don't want to call this game racist, but I think it's kind of racist.

See, Dying Light is a game where you play as a white guy who goes into a city filled with mostly people of color, and it more or less becomes a "white savior" thing. I have no idea if that's the proper terminology, as I didn't do nearly the research into this stuff that I should have before writing (though my quick Google search didn't turn up any articles written solely about this aspect of the game, so if you know of one, please tell me about it!). Also, as a person of whiteness myself, who has never written about this sort of stuff before, I feel like I'm probably not well equipped to be writing about it.

But something about the time when I was beating in a zombie woman of color's face with a pipe after knocking her to the ground just made me feel...Like this game is kinda racist. Never mind the part where I felt like the primal joy of beating in something's head made me feel bad as a human being (which is a whole separate thing about how this game revels in the absurd gore and violence, despite that being against the serious, survival focused tone of the game).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the people at Techland are racists. I'm not saying they intentionally made a game where you could brutally dismember people of color, but use the guise of zombies to make it okay. Maybe there's a secret Neo Nazi amongst them that got a kick out of it, but I just think this is a case of a bunch of (I assume) white people (probably mostly men) in a predominantly white country (Poland) who made a game without really thinking about this stuff. And the result is yet another power fantasy where you play as a white dude and you kill your way to victory, and it just happens that the moderately exotic location the game is set in is in a part of the world where most of the zombies (and survivors) are other black or vaguely Middle Eastern (in that way that, even to someone who isn't an expert, doesn't really seem authentic, culturally or accent wise (though I could be totally wrong, and please correct me if I am!)).

So what's the point of this? The point is that I wish Techland hadn't set this game in a fictional Middle Eastern city. Making the character a native of the city, and not white could have alleviated this stuff a bit, but really, why not set the game in a Polish city? Sure, then it might be a 100% white cast of characters (not unlike a certain other, high profile game made in Poland that was released this year), but I feel like that'd be better, if only slightly. Or set it in America, I dunno. I just don't trust developers to really do a setting like this (fictional or not) the justice it deserves unless it's made by people who have lived in a place like that. I'm sure Techland sent people out to do some base level of research on that part of the world, take some pictures, etc. But it's not the same.

An entire article could be written about this sort of stuff, and I'm sure it has been by much better writers than me, so I'll just leave it at this. Do I think Dying Light is worse off for this stuff? Yes. Do I think it ruined the game for me? No, because I still think that, despite its flaws, Dying Light is a really fun game to play, and any racism is a result of bad tropes, and people of whiteness not thinking before they went and made a thing.

I'll just hope that when Dying Light II: The Call of Juarez comes out, it handles this stuff better.

Tell me you wouldn't play a Techland developed old west zombie game. You can't, because you know you would.

I guess the last thing I want to mention about the game is that I think some of the music is a bit weird. Sounds like it was unused music from something like Deus Ex, which felt a bit out of place here. And I apologize for shoving this in at the very end, but I couldn't think of anywhere else to put it, and it was something I kept thinking about throughout the game, so I wanted to mention it.

Okay, here's the actual, one last thing. After going out and thinking about this piece for a bit, I got thinking about how the traversal was my favorite part of the game. And, that led me to thinking I wish this game (or perhaps a sequel) had less of a focus on actually fighting the zombies, and more on the traversal. I'm not saying completely remove the combat, but maybe reduce it to the point where really all you can do is push a zombie off of you, or shove it out of the way. Really make it so that you HAVE to avoid confrontation with them.

And put more of an emphasis on interacting with survivors, but in less of a scripted way. Here, everyone you encounter is either a shopkeeper, quest giver, NPC who just stands there, or an enemy. I want to have a game where I'm breaking into a store to loot some food, only to find that there's people already there. Not enemies, not named NPCs that have a quest for me, just some AI characters that are there. And then let me decide how to deal with it. Leave them alone, scare them away, or outright kill them. Whatever it is, but I want to play that game.

No, I don't want to play Day Z, before anyone suggests that. That's not what Day Z is. Day Z is a game where you wander around until you meet another player, at which point you probably get killed. I just want more varied interactions with AI in a setting like this. And who knows, maybe something like Fallout 4 will have stuff like this. I doubt it, but maybe. Kinda makes me think of that game about that war in that country. This War of Mine? Was that it? Think something like that, but more action-y focused, because I don't really like the strategy games.

And I'm rambling again, sorry. But I think that would be a really interesting game! Now, back to the rest of the blog that I wrote before getting up for a while and thinking on this stuff.

PHEW. I know that's far from the longest blog I've written, but figuring out how to word that stuff, I dunno, kinda took something out of me. Or maybe it's that I wrote that all in, well, not literally one sitting, as I did get up to use the bathroom, but basically all in one sitting, and in a shorter amount of time than I usually do. I dunno. Let me know if you liked me getting into that sort of angle of the game, rather than just talking about the game-y stuff, what did and didn't work, etc. As I've been doing things like reading the stuff that Austin writes on the site, it's gotten me thinking more about thinking about games from angles like that, and I think trying it out a bit was an interesting exercise. Granted, it is still stuck in there with stuff about the game-y parts of the game, but hey! It's a video game, and I think writing about those parts of the game are just as valid as examining the non-game-y parts.

What's on the horizon?

Well, obviously the big thing is MGSV. Once I play that, I'll have at least one sizable blog about that game. I'm thinking I might even write two. Have one just be about the game, maybe with a couple, slight/spoiler-free comments on the story (basically saying whether I liked it or not), and then have a 100% spoiler-full "analysis" of the story and themes of the game. Maybe. Could be that I play it and just give that stuff a big shrug. Who knows!

But in the mean time, I've got quite a few things I could be playing. I still want to play MGS2 HD and MGS3 HD. I will, at the very least, rewatch cut-scenes from MGS3 and Peace Walker, to freshen myself up on what happened in those games before The Phantom Pain. And I'll play Ground Zeroes again, but the last time I played that, I beat it in about 40 minutes, so that's not a big time investment.

And I also have the aforementioned Pre-Sequel, and this month's PS+ games. The only one of those I'll commit to playing all of is Limbo. I don't really know much about Sound Shapes (I remember watching the Quick Look and not finding it interesting), and I didn't care for Stealth Inc 1 when that was free on PS+, so I don't think I'll like part 2.

Anyway, I've rambled for more than long enough, so thank you very much for reading this, and I hope you have a great day. <3