BEAST UNLEASHED

DYING LIGHT: THE BEAST is a pivotal game for Techland - both a sequel and a return to roots that could serve as a blueprint for future games in the series

- Robert Zak

Since the original Dying Light launched in 2015, Techland's rise has been meteoric - reflected in its impressive HQ on the outskirts of Wrocław, Poland. But numbers aren't everything for Dying Light's franchise director Tymon Smektała. He knows that Dying Light 2, for all its commercial success, didn't quite satiate series fans, and is determined for Dying Light: The Beast to set the series' course for the future.

Founded in 1999, Techland spent years slowly building its reputation with well regarded but largely unknown games mainly for the European market (to this day, the studio's in-house engine is named after its 2003 sci-fi shooter Chrome). Larger-scale success came with Call of Juarez - a trilogy of Wild West shooters released in the early 2010s and then Dead Island, but the studio really took flight with Dying Light in 2015, 16 years on from its founding (at a glance, the only independent developer with a similar path to success is Larian, which ticked along competently if unspectacularly for 12 years before its first major hit, Divinity: Original Sin, set it on the path to triple-A stardom).

But ever since Techland shook up the zombie genre by infusing it with parkour in a persistently threatening open-world environment, it's very much been the Dying Light studio, its offices in Poland's third-largest city a monument to the series' success. Stepping into the foyer, it's a cool combination of corporate slickness - a green wall next to a two-storey waterwall - with passionate geekery, represented by a life-size statue of a Volatile zombie looming over you as you enter the building.