Announced at this year's Opening Night Live keynote at Gamescom, Dying Light: The Beast is bringing the first game's protagonist back with a brand new set of abilities. I sat down with the game's developer, Techland, for a behind-closed-door preview of the game housed in one of the cooler booths I saw at the video game show, a small room decorated to look like a post-apocalyptic bunker, similar to what you'd find in the zombie-filled world of Dying Light.

Kyle Crane is back, the original hero of the first Dying Light, along with his original voice actor, Roger Craig Smith. The game is set in a new open world region, far larger than the previous two games. And get ready to parkour your way around this environment too: swinging, jumping and mantling over obstacles all make a return here and the developers at the booth assured that this will remain a key component of the game. As someone who has only played the first Dying Light, it's hard for me to tell which parkour abilities were new to The Beast and which were introduced in the second game, but Crane was able to jump to extremely distant rooftops this time around.

Our demo started just as the sun was setting and we parkoured our way through a run-down town. The Beast's visual quality in its environments looked extremely nice here, especially while everything was bathed in a beautiful sunset. You have to locate a safe house as the sun sets and the world quickly turns to night. As before in the series, venturing out at night is much more dangerous. Not only is visibility reduced but the more lethal Volatile zombie enemy types are numerous -- it's often smarter to hide and avoid them instead of fighting. You can use stealth, like hiding in tall grass, as you work your way around the creatures and continue moving.

As we entered the safe house, we learned it was overrun with zombies and the power had gone out, rendering the UV lights useless. UV lights are crucial in the DL universe since they harm the infected and provide safe zones for survivors. This is where the franchise's signature melee combat came into play, and it felt just as visceral as I remembered. Using a modified baseball bat, we crushed a lot of zombie skulls and cleared the room of threats. It was very violent and pretty gross. 

The next goal was to turn the power back on and this resulted in a kind of environmental puzzle. Searching the building, following wires, and crawling through ducts were key to entering the basement area, which was also full of zombies. As we surveyed the room it was clear the floor was covered in gasoline, which ignited in flames when shot with a pistol. With the zombies on fire, taking them down was much easier. From there we were able to pick a cabinet's lock to find a new fuse to replace in the breaker and restore power and safety to the building, allowing us to sleep until morning.

This began the second part of the demo, a raid on an experimental enemy base. The compound was full of human enemies in riot gear, all working for Baron, the game's antagonist. After quietly taking out the snipers on the rooftop, we went in guns blazing. Techland made note that it "still wants to focus on visceral melee and in-your-face combat" and that it hasn't turned Dying Light into a shooter, but it seems like both will be viable options. Once we cornered the last remaining scientist he told us that the Freak, a new and powerful enemy type for The Beast, they had in captivity had gotten loose. It was up to Crane (and me) to lure it out and kill it.

Finding this particular Freak enemy, called Behemoth, kicked off a boss fight. It was easily the largest enemy we had seen, at least twice the size of the already giant Volatiles from before, and had powerful attacks including throwing entire vehicles at the player. But players have a new ace up their sleeve, as we were introduced to Crane's new beast-like abilities. Similar to Dead Island 2, another post-apocalyptic zombie game, after enough time and damage taken, your vision will go red and you can unlock powerful abilities and stronger attacks. Kyle Crane was able to lift huge rocks and throw them at enemies and rip apart the weaker, standard zombies with his bare hands. We killed the Behemoth by eventually ripping its head off, and that ended the demo. 

The Techland developers mentioned that the game has around "18 hours of adventure" but it wasn't clear if that was specific to just the story or not (as an open world game, I would assume there are dozens of side quests and additional content available). One very interesting point was that they explained how The Beast started as downloadable content for the second Dying Light title. From there, it quickly expanded until they made the call to turn it into an entirely standalone game. However, since it was supposed to be a part of the Dying Light 2: Stay Human roadmap of content, anyone who purchased the Ultimate Edition of the game will get The Beast for free. 

Dying Light: The Beast has no set release window but is coming to all current consoles and PC, as well as Xbox One and PlayStation 4.