After providing a hands-on preview of Dying Light: The Beast at Summer Game Fest 2025, acclaimed video game publisher Techland invited Den of Geek for a more extensive look at the game in Los Angeles and an interview with franchise director Tymon Smektala. Continuing the story of the survival horror series’ original protagonist Kyle Crane, the game has Crane hunting a warlord known as the Baron who is hiding out in a resort community known as Castor Woods. Seeking revenge after being experimented on for 13 years, Crane now has a variety of superhuman abilities that can be unleashed when he erupts into a temporary fury, affectionately dubbed Beast Mode.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});This direction for the series came from the last time players saw Crane, in the 2016 DLC epilogue Dying Light: The Following, with Crane infected with a modified version of the virus. Feeling players would expect to see an unnaturally altered Crane based on the previous game’s ending, the developers wanted this to not only be reflected in The Beast’s story, but also in changes to its gameplay. With these sensibilities in mind, the developers retained the core aesthetics and mechanics as preceding games while surprising players with changes to the gameplay and overall layout compared to past experiences.“We felt that we are at a place where we understand what makes Dying Light work so well, so we could have some fun and experiment with the formula a little bit. Survival games are all about the world trying to kill you,” Smektala observes. “That’s great, but maybe there’s a way we can have a survival game where, from time to time, you can turn the tables and repay the world for what it’s done to you.”Absolutely cathartic, this new Beast Mode mechanic has Crane rip through hordes of zombies with his bare hands, graphically tearing them apart in moments when the player feels overwhelmed. Even with this feature, the parkour mechanics and day-and-night cycle that Dying Light fans know well make a return, albeit tailored to this new bucolic environment rather than the cityscapes from the previous two games. Even with more tools to fight back against the hordes of undead, the suspense and horror-fueled elements remain, keeping players on their toes, especially when the sun goes down and the monsters become more aggressive.“We realized we captured this vibe that we always wanted for Dying Light, the horror and scary aspects of it. We said to ourselves, now that it all works, let’s do something that breaks it all up,” reveals Smektala about the game’s early development in perfecting the franchise’s survival horror tones. “If you survive long enough, you might be able to trigger Beast Mode. This creates a new dynamic where hope never dies and you keep pushing.”Though the open-world experience remains, along with the option of four-play cooperative online gameplay with cross-progression for those looking to face the zombie apocalypse with friends, Castor Woods makes Dying Light: The Beast feel like a fresh experience. When chased by groups of ravenous undead, players can’t always rely on losing their pursuers by jumping across rooftops if they’re caught in the wide, rural portions of the map. Techland has also refined and made the driving mechanic introduced in Dying Light: The Following more prominent, giving players more options to navigate Castor Woods’ winding mountain roads, with even some off-roading possible.“We knew that we were going to keep the essence of Dying Light: parkour, many weapons, the day-and-night cycle, etc. But we also knew that we wanted to test new things out. One of the things that we definitely wanted to test was a new environment,” Smektala continues. “Dying Light: The Beast is different because we have swamps and forests there. We wanted to find if we could find a meaningful way for a Dying Light game to happen in those locations. We found out that we could actually do that and those new areas add a lot of new things to the experience.”Dying Light: The Beast comes out in time for the franchise’s 10th anniversary, with the series having collectively sold over 50 million units across all of its available platforms so far. In returning to the story of Kyle Crane, after introducing a completely different protagonist in 2022’s Dying Light 2, The Beast feels like more than just a full circle moment for the development team at Techland. Completely reinvigorated by the experience of revisiting Crane and pushing his adventures into one of superhuman proportions, Techland hints at not only a satisfying return to form for the Dying Light franchise but a robust future moving forward.“I love working on Dying Light. This is my type of game. I’m very happy that we’ve managed to go so far with the series and I hope Dying Light: The Beast will be a very nice summary and culmination of those experiences. But I also do hope that we’ll surprise players and the gaming industry with all the new Dying Light games that we’re already thinking about.”Developed and published by Techland, Dying Light: The Beast will be released August 22 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions planned for late 2025.The post Dying Light: The Beast Developers Unveil a Bold Return for the Franchise appeared first on Den of Geek.