Dying Light 2 Stay Human

Available on: PC, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch

Developer: Techland | Publisher: Techland

Release: Feb. 4, 2022

Getting around in most open-world games is a slog. It’s a reminder that there are so many better ways to use our limited time on this Earth than to push a thumbstick as a character runs toward far-off objective after far-off objective to progress a game’s plot. But in “Dying Light 2 Stay Human,” these journeys overwhelmingly outshine the destinations. Parkouring across scaffolding twisted around gleaming skyscrapers or racing across the shrubby rooftops of crumbling brick buildings is the entire reason to play.

“Stay Human” is set after one of those all-too-familiar zombie viruses has ravaged the world and humanity has reorganized into several ideologically opposed statelets of weary-eyed survivors and murderous, Mad Max-style bandits. You play as Aiden, a parkour-running deliveryman trying to find his long-lost sister among the ruins of the fictional European city of Villedor. Aiden is defined by little more than his preternatural athleticism, keen sense of observation and a constant willingness to take on tasks offered by any nearby person yelping for help. The first of those traits makes his character a joy to inhabit; the last contributes to a narrative void that keeps the dynamic exploration of “Stay Human” from being as compelling as it could be.

These issues are clear from the beginning. “Stay Human” opens by stumbling through a long scene of characters in apocalyptic rags dreaming of the day they can retire from their work as wasteland couriers. Aiden and a colleague scavenge through an empty house, skeletons draped like decorative throws on couches next to dusty artifacts from the days before everything went wrong. The dialogue is dreadful, stiffly voiced and peppered with awkwardly placed curses, and the cramped setting provides few opportunities to showcase the excellent parkour movement mechanics of “Stay Human.” To properly pick clean an environment, you have to trigger Aiden’s “survivor sense” by pressing down on the right thumbstick, which drenches the screen in halogen-bright waves to mark locations of useful loot. Instead of allowing players to take in the scene before them and allowing a sense of place to develop, they’re encouraged to assess locations with the robotic outlook of a Roomba, combing every new room for glowing items.

This opening encapsulates the problems that plague “Stay Human” while minimizing the exceptional action that compensates for them in other parts of the game. And both of these issues — thedistracting loot-hunting HUD and the poor character performances — persist throughout the game.

We soon meet the game’s comically evil antagonist and are introduced to the major factions ruling the city: the authoritarian “Peacekeepers” and their anarchical counterpart, “The Bazaar.” You’re asked pretty quickly to support either one of these sides or some combination by picking certain dialogue options and allocating to the faction of your choice various city resources (electricity stations, subway terminals) you find scattered across the city map.

As Aiden learns more about these two sides, “Stay Human” presents a potentially meaningful approach to a story about post-apocalyptic morality and society-building. The game demonstrates the successes and failures of the Peacekeepers and the Bazaar in its side stories and main plot points, showing the competing rationales for embracing either violent order or laissez-faire freedom in turn. A belief in the essential, self-organizing goodness of a community can be undone by, in one example, a simmering leadership dispute that resolves itself in chaos and violence. In another, the desire to enforce strict state control to maintain order may result in a bureaucratic approach to justice in which individuals suffer top-down brutality. “Stay Human,” at its best, explores these dynamics through small character moments that approach the complexities with appropriate weight.

The potential of this story evaporates as it moves along, though. It settles into an overly familiar shape formed by the exploration of long-forgotten secret labs, errand-running between factions and predictable interpersonal betrayals. The eternal goal of “finding Aiden’s sister” is a moldy breadcrumb trail that twists from one sidetracking side plot to another before remembering to take precedence again at the game’s climax. Throughout all of this, “Stay Human” luxuriates in the bleakness of its setting and its inability to imagine any compromise between world views that aren’t, as the game shows in glimpses, entirely opposed. (Case in point, Aiden embodies aspects of both factions’ philosophies in his mission; he demonstrates that the Peacekeeper’s military discipline, which is necessary to successfully clear buildings of zombies, can coexist with the Bazaar’s espousal of personal freedoms, such as, say, taking breaks from work to try to find your long-lost sister or help strangers with their problems.)

Those moments when the plot does pick up a sense of urgency — including a shoehorned, last-minute twist that tries (and fails) to add depth to what came before — barely linger in my memory compared to the dozens of hours spent running missions for characters with staid, predictable personalities and dialogue delivered woodenly. (Memorably, a character played by Rosario Dawson approaches the gruff game protagonist tabula rasa that is Aiden and tells him not to be afraid of her after she’s tried to shoot him with a crossbow. “C’mon … I won’t bite,” she says as he backs away from her. “Well, not hard.” Later, in what’s meant to be a dramatic scene, she blames worn-down shoes for bigger personal problems and says: “They were my last pair of intact shoes, Aiden. My ‘sole mates’ in this dirty revenge-seeking business.”)

Fortunately, between dialogue-heavy scenes, the plot falls away far enough to make more room for what “Stay Human” is actually good at: creating a massive urban jungle gym for players to swing, climb, paraglide and sprint across. The game’s movement controls are simple enough to learn quickly, allowing for creative, nearly instinctive decision-making about ad hoc paths to take across the heights of skyscraper roofs, the shutters of houses and the power lines crisscrossing between buildings. Just as important, the city is beautifully designed, without much of the repeatable, modular design used to bulk out many open-world games and is filled instead with bespoke spaces that each provides its own self-enclosed acrobatic challenges, during and between missions. For instance, windmills that supply power to city districts are spread across Villedor, each one functioning as a test of the player’s reflexes and ability to spot ways to climb ever higher. The layout of each new neighborhood provides opportunities to flex Aiden’s expanding set of moves, too, as the opening hours’ two- or three-story apartment buildings and shops eventually transition to towering office and condo buildings best traversed with death-defying leaps or grappling hook-aided swings.

And although it’s a grimy, sometimes downright ugly world to explore, “Stay Human” is enlivened, too, with welcome visual flourishes, such as the dynamic framing of characters in dialogue scenes who gesture and wander about their sets more like actors in a play than the medium’s typical talking heads. When combat — a fairly simplistic and repetitive system of blocking and striking, parrying hits, firing arrows, throwing explosives and occasionally leapfrogging off one enemy to drop kick another — breaks out, the action is made more interesting by the game’s slasher movie fan-level devotion to deadly splatter. Zombies and humans alike explode into great gouts of blood and dirty limbs, the undead falling apart like decaying meat mannequins when a blade slices through an outstretched, claw-handed limb.

These touches, together with the regular excitement of racing and climbing across Villedor, can’t be underestimated. They’re what makes traveling through “Stay Human” worthwhile. Whether the moment-to-moment pleasures of this kind of movement and the visual flair the game devotes to smashing enemies apart is enough to outweigh the dismal plot is the question at the heart of “Stay Human.” For stretches of time, when ignoring everything but the thrill of jumping off skyscrapers or distractedly ticking off side objects in the cooperative mode (which allows up to four players — all of them carbon copies of Aiden — to parkour across the city together), the game is excellent. After spending more than 36 hours playing the game’s campaign and co-op, those were the moments that clearly stood out as high points.

Unfortunately, though, the narrative is a black hole of missed opportunities, surfacing time and again to remind players of what’s missing from the experience even as they try to forget and just enjoy what does work. If only “Stay Human” could navigate its story of post-apocalyptic morality with the same deftness as its assured, acrobatic protagonist.

Reid McCarter is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared at the AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste and Vice. He is also a co-editor of books SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, edits Bullet Points Monthly, and tweets @reidmccarter.