Editorials
Tips and Tricks for Surviving in ‘Dying Light’
Life in Harran can take some getting used to. The laws and unwritten rules that govern today’s civilized society went out the window as soon as the city was quarantined from the outside world following a nasty outbreak that turned most of its citizens into the flesh-eating undead. For some, survival means taking from others. But this isn’t DayZ, so we’re going to need to try something else.
I’ve learned some tricks during my time with Dying Light, some of which I’m going to share with you today. My hope is you’ll glean something that will make your experience with this fantastic horror game a little more enjoyable.
Ready? Let’s go.
It’s More Fun With Friends
This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Dying Light is exponentially more enjoyable if you have at least one other friend to share the experience with. They’ve even added random challenges that make co-op play more interesting by adding a layer a light competition to the mix.
The game supports up to five players in a game, but who’s that popular?
Come Up With Your Own Story
Techland is not particularly adept at constructing interesting stories, relying instead on satisfying how fun it is to use specially modified weapons to carry the game. Dying Light offers a stronger narrative than Dead Island, but it’s still weak.
Mute is always a viable option, as is coming up with your own story, if you’re feeling creative. You can also do what I sometimes do for games that are fun to play but not all that interesting to follow and listen to a podcast. I powered through the entire Serial series during Dragon Age: Inquisition’s quieter moments.
Save Your Mods
The weapons you’ll find in Harran can be improved by using blueprints and mods. The latter is found by completing quests, saving survivors, and looting police vehicles. When you get a mod, try and resist the urge to immediately use it on one of your weapons. The reason for this is you’ll almost definitely be swapping out your arsenal with better gear all the time, so it’s better to save up a few mods for when you find a weapon you’ll be using for some time.
It won’t take long. Loot is everywhere, and the shopkeepers’ inventories change every day and every time you gain a Survivor level. I also suggest buying blueprints from merchants when they’re available, because they’re never there for very long.
The Floor is Lava
There are no vehicles in Dying Light, so your own two legs will be your only way of getting around this wide open city. This means you’ll want to get that Agility level up fast, as it unlocks new parkour abilities — like the grappling hook, which descends from the heavens when you reach level 12 and immediately makes this game so much better — that make getting from point A to point B easier, faster and way more fun.
There are two ways to become a freerunning master — more on that in a sec — and the first is to run, jump and slide over everything. Just pretend like the floor is lava and stick to the rooftops.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Contrary to all those spooky trailers, the night is your friend. Harran gets significantly more dangerous when the sun goes down. Going out is worth the increased risk mostly because it doubles the XP you gain, so growing those Agility and Power levels takes a lot less time.
Another bonus to going out for some fresh night air is the precious supply drops that land at night can’t be looted by bandits. If you can make it past all the Volatiles, those supplies are all yours.
Get Those Supply Drops
Unless you absolutely cannot go for them, when you feel the telltale rumbling that signals an imminent airdrop, always go after them. Secure enough of them and you’ll never have to worry about flares or medkits, and turning them into the Quartermasters grants a massive amount of Survivor XP.
Secure Safe Houses
Scattered about the city are buildings and fenced-off areas that are well-lit enough to provide shelter for runners seeking safe haven at night. Before they can be used for this purpose, they need to be secured first. Securing as many of these as you possibly can early on will make nightime excursions a lot less terrifying.
Wait to Repair Weapons
Techland has done away with workbenches in this game, but weapons can still be repaired. However, each weapon can only be repaired a certain number of times, depending on its quality. For example, orange tier weapons can be repaired more times than a basic grey tier one.
To optimize the limited number of repairs you have, hack away or bludgeon Zeds until the game lets you know your weapon can’t take any more abuse, then repair it.
Certain Abilities Rock
Overall, I much prefer the skill trees in Dying Light to the more specialized ones in Dead Island. There are only a few I had no desire to invest skill points in, and even those were mostly two-handed abilities I’d never use because a true survivor never double-fists it. One-handed weapons all the way, baby.
Some of the abilities I highly recommend you invest in would include the Shield, because it’s unbelievably useful against human enemies. The head vault skill is great, too. Not only does it grant a decent amount of XP upon every use, but it also makes getting around a lot easier.
The head stomp — one of my favorite abilities in Dead Island — is also worth it. It’s satisfying and makes clearing a zombie-infested street simple. Just jump on a car and squish the heads of the zombies as they try and climb on the hood.
Do it right and you’ll get nary a scratch, I promise.
Bombers Suck
Of course Dying Light would have an enemy that explodes, it is a zombie game after all.
The Bombers are particularly nasty because they tend to insta-kill even the hardiest of runners with their too-overpowered kamikaze attack. They’re easily identifiable from the front because they have their insides on their outsides, but they look like any other zombie when seen from behind.
Use the Environment
Harran is lousy with environmental hazards. Car traps and electrified fences require certain skills before they can be used, but there’s plenty out there that you can make full use of from the beginning. If you see a puddle of water sitting on a tarp, lure some ghouls to it for a shocking good time. If you see a barrel or a wall with spikes on it, kick a zombie onto it to kill it instantly. Making use of these traps will net you bonus XP that will make improving your runner that much easier.
That’s most of what I’ve learned so far. I hope it helps. If you have some lessons of your own, feel free to share them with us in the comments below. Good night and good luck!
If Techland’s past work — Dead Island — has you unsure about Dying Light, I called it a “flawed, gorgeous, and alarmingly addictive.” It’s not without some jank, but it’s significantly less so than their other open-world zombie game.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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