Dying Light - Hellraid

The first hour of this one is genuinely rough, and I need you to know that going in. You start as Kyle Crane, a GRE operative dropped into quarantined Harran, and you are slow, fragile, and swinging a pipe that breaks after a few good hits. Zombies you should be able to shove aside will stagger you into a wall. Climbing feels sticky. Night falls and the game basically tells you to go home. If you bounce off it here I understand, but you would be quitting during the tutorial of a systems game that does not really start until you have banked a few skill points and unlocked the grappling hook. Give it four hours. The curve from helpless to superhuman is the entire point, and very few games pace that transformation this well. What you are actually playing is a first-person parkour survival game with an RPG spine. Three skill trees (Survivor, Agility, Power) level independently based on what you do, so sprinting across rooftops makes you a better climber and caving in skulls makes you hit harder. Crafting runs on scavenged junk and blueprints, and the good ones turn a plain machete into something that sets a horde on fire or electrocutes an entire alley. The day and night cycle is the real design centerpiece: daylight is for scavenging and traversal, nightfall brings Volatiles that hunt in packs and turn a two-block walk into a chase with your heart in your throat. All of it runs in four-player co-op, and Be the Zombie lets another player invade your night as a Night Hunter, which is either the best or the worst thing that will happen to your session. Now the part I care most about, and where I will be less generous. The writing is competent action-movie material and not much more. Crane's arc from company man to reluctant local hero hits the beats you expect in the order you expect them, the supporting cast back at the Tower is likeable but thin, and the villain is a cartoon. Meaningful choice does not exist here, so if you want branching consequence, look elsewhere. Harran does the heavy lifting instead. The worldbuilding lives in room detail: barricaded apartments, notes from people who did not make it, a school gym converted into something awful. That is real environmental storytelling, and it is undercut by an indefensible volume of side content that boils down to fetching three of something from a circle on your map for XP. The Hellraid content is the strangest thing in the package and deserves calibrated expectations. It starts as an arcade cabinet in the Tower that yanks you into a dark fantasy dungeon, trading rebar and machetes for swords, maces and torchlit corridors. At launch it was barely more than a wave-clearing score attack with a leaderboard attached. Techland kept building on it, eventually adding an actual story path with a boss encounter and new weapon sets, which is more post-release care than most side modes ever get. The medieval melee feels satisfyingly heavy next to the modern arsenal, and the tonal swerve is genuinely fun. Treat it as a side mode, not a campaign. Corridors repeat, enemy variety is limited, and the loop rewards grinding runs more than it rewards curiosity. Fellow dragon people, temper yourselves. There are no dragons. Who should play it: anyone who wants movement to be the power fantasy rather than the shooting, anyone with three friends and a free weekend, and anyone curious how a game this old earned years of continuous support, a level editor and a Workshop full of community maps. Who should skip it: players who need their RPGs to have writing worth re-reading, and anyone allergic to open-world checklists. I have replayed Harran more often than games with far better scripts, which tells you exactly where the value sits. Play on hard. Go out at night on purpose.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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