When the demo started, we have our protagonist standing on a rafter above a rundown District 9 sort of city. He watches two large cargo planes drop off two containers somewhere in the middle of the city. The protagonist contacts someone in his earpiece (which we never see) about the containers, and he is told to go get them for medical supplies. Sticking with a first-person perspective, our man jumps down in Mirror’s Edge style and begins his journey towards these large containers. Along the way, he runs into ‘infected’ individuals who resemble the walking dead.
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As our protagonist ran closer to his goal, the developer giving the demo stated that fighting the infected is fine, but running from them to get where you needed to go was a better idea sometimes. After dispatching several of the infected using a metal bat called the ‘Ripper’, he continues our main character’s journey. Our man jumps and climbs, again in a Mirror’s Edge sort of style, on top of buildings and down in the broken city streets. Along the way, his journey interrupted for a side quest. Audio reveals a young girl crying somewhere in one of the buildings he was passing by, so he has a choice to ignore it or to participate in her story. The developer stated that the game allows for dynamic side quests for each person playing. So, while one gamer might get this scenario and side quest choice, another player passing by this building might not hear the girl crying. It’s kind of a unique idea that side quests are randomly generated, as I’m not sure of the last game (or if a game) featured this option before. It’s unique nonetheless.
Getting back to the demo, our main character decides to help the girl out, goes into her building by climbing a nearby telephone pole, and finds her infected father (who is quickly dispatched). He then finds the young girl hiding inside a closet, crying her eyes out not knowing that her father was infected, or even killed. The main character calls into his base and tells the his boss on the other side that he could ‘help’ out the young child or keep moving forward. The response is that he keeps moving towards the supplies, so he does. Don’t worry, dear readers, the child is rescued by someone else — or at least we were given that impression.
As the main character moves towards the first container, he runs into a group of competing survivors, who quickly outman/outgun him and send our guy on his way. The developer didn’t tempt fate with the competitors, which is sad because it would have been nice to know if that option was available (it would be a dumb option, but gamers are generally good enough to find a way through — ‘generally’). With the first container captured by someone else, the goal switches to the secondary container, which is further away. As the protagonist continues his adventure, he stops off in a building to equip a machete with an electric device, giving the blade a bit of a charge. The developer tells us that there are several workbenches around the area, which allow for items to be crafted. Honestly speaking, I couldn’t tell the difference between the machete with the charge and without when it came to battle.
Regardless, it was a cool idea.
Anyway, the name of the game in this developer demo was to get to the container before nightfall, which, if the nightfall objection wasn’t met, promised something worse than infected beings. The nightfall creatures were called the volatiles. Of course, the main character gets to the container right at nightfall and then has to face the volatiles. We weren’t given a complete explanation about who or what the volatiles were, but visually they were giant grey beasts that wandered the streets of this city looking for people to kill. The main character had the power to distract these beasts by throwing out a ‘pulse’ in a different direction (sort of like the sonar of a bat). The pulse led the volatiles towards that direction, while our character slipped away in another. What was pointed out during this moment is that we don’t want to start a fight with these things because we would die. Whether they have to be avoided during the duration of the game (I doubt it) or not, wasn’t made readily clear. Regardless, once they saw the main character then the chase was on.
The chase shown was quite relentless, as our main character had to jump on top of vehicles, houses and other things in attempt to get away from the volatiles. The beasts kept up and our character’s main goal at this point was to make it to a safe house. As you can imagine, the demo ended with one of these things catching him and taking a giant, very jarring chunk out of his face. It was scary as shit.
The game demo really put together some intense atmosphere, while still maintaining some fun and unique mechanics. It’s not often that a Resident Evil-type of horror game gets the first-person treatment, as these type of games are regulated to third-person perspectives. This particular perspective really sent the intensity of the entire bleak situation through the roof. I’m not sure anyone was comfortable while watching this demo, which says a lot about the game.
Another bright spot of the game is how absolutely incredible it looked. Running on next-gen hardware, the game featured some dynamic wind changes, which you could see quite well in the grass, trees and even the large water puddles on the ground. Even the reflections in the water looked spot on what you would find if you looked outside after a rainstorm. Lots of beautiful dirty details in the environment and an enormous amount of details in the cityscape helped to bring this entire game to another terrifying level. The worn down, rusty roofs of the abandoned buildings around really re-enforced how brutal things had gotten in what wee can only assume as a quarantined city.
As for the infected, they had a good collection of Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead about them. Some of them walked slowly towards you, while others ran. They moved and attacked in appropriate manners (like zombies you would find in movies and television shows). As for the enemies, they all seemed unique from one another. Some of them had clothes, each set of clothes were different, some of them were half-naked; there was a solid variety that didn’t feel mechanical. This type of unique look even went down to the infections on their skins, which seemed to be all over the place from infected to infected.
Techland did one helluva job with this demo and gave a lot of hope to what’s coming to gamers in 2014. Hopefully they can keep deliver more of the same with the rest of Dying Light.
Hands down, this was my favorite of the show (though, The Wonderful 101 is either tied or a close second).
