Sometimes, the revulsion is good, or if not “good” then at least intentional. It’s a feeling closer to revulsion at the grotesque nature of everything else that went into this game.
But then there’s the other kind of physical reaction that I had to Dying Light 2, one that’s close to the anxiety I felt while jumping across rooftops but not quite as thrilling. But Dying Light 2 doesn’t really need to accomplish that symbolically if you’re like me, you will feel it.
The way the music subtly cuts out and cuts back in when taking off and landing a jump symbolizes that bass-drop feeling you get in your stomach when slightly lifting off from your seat in a car or a rollercoaster. Techland is its most artistic when portraying the feeling of parkour.
That you can level up your character’s parkour skills by simply engaging with the game’s movement mechanics, without having to complete specific challenges or jump through hoops, makes it all the more liberating. Ironically, where most open-world games feel inhibitive in how they force you to traverse their maps, Dying Light 2 feels freeing, even without an easily accessible fast travel. Still, that doesn’t matter so much when hopping, skipping, and jumping around, as Dying Light 2 projects the parkour spirit of expressively, artistically turning urban modernity into a playground.
Dying light volatile jump on me how to#
But that’s mostly in confined areas or when climbing the Far Cry–esque windmills.Īnd there are places in the city that feel, as John Wilson would put it in his How To episode about scaffolding, as if the buildings all shopped at the same store. The game does guide you in some ways with the color yellow: yellow-painted ledges, yellow-painted signs, and so on. I guess that makes sense, as Dying Light 2’s approach to level design is to shave off the rough edges of the real world just enough to fit into the kind of modularity required to create a satisfying platformer. Uness it’s a tree for some reason, you can’t climb trees at all. Chances are, if you think you can climb up or jump onto something, you can. Part of what makes Dying Light 2’s parkour so effective is its world design. There are moments when, in real life, letting go of a rope at a certain angle would certainly result in falling into the gap you were most assuredly trying not to fall into, but Dying Light 2 massages your momentum just enough so that you can have slightly more control than you would expect. The first-person action in Dying Light 2 feels grounded and physical even with a paraglider that magically refolds itself whenever you’re done using it, but it also breaks from the confines of reality in more subtle ways to make sure it’s still fun. Later, when you unlock a paraglider and a grappling hook, Dying Light 2’s parkour feels a little more videogamey, but the feeling of vertigo never went away, no matter how many tools I had to fight against gravity. I’m not going to Mario-style triple-jump around the city or swing on webs like Spidey, but I sure as hell could at least attempt some jumps the way they’re presented in Dying Light 2. Dying Light 2’s parkour is great because it often feels like something I (well, not me personally, but someone in actual good shape) could do in real life, and it also feels like something I could die while doing in real life. To say that I enjoyed the anxiety-inducing moments of Dying Light 2 would be an overstatement, but I can at least appreciate the craft that went into making such an unpleasant, physical response possible.
The most basic video game maneuver suddenly had new meaning. Even falling to my death many, many times and respawning like nothing had happened didn’t cure me of the fear of missing a jump. I’ve had games like Alien: Isolation and Silent Hill beat on my amygdala like it was a speed bag before, but never did it feel so personal. For someone with an intense visual height intolerance verging on acrophobia, Dying Light 2’s sense of scale was panic-inducing I literally had to stop and take deep breaths between certain jumps. Dying Light 2 Stay Human elicited involuntary, physical responses so often throughout my playthrough that I began to dread having to sit down and consume more.
0 kommentar(er)
