A new Dying Light game is on the way, starring original protagonist Kyle Crane

A new Dying Light game was announced Tuesday at Gamescom, and it has the original protagonist making a daring return. Dying Light: The Beast is the title, and developer Techland showed off a brief trailer featuring some of the hallmarks of the franchise: parkour, big mutated zombies, and hostilities with other humans.

The first Dying Light released in 2015; the sequel Dying Light 2: Stay Human followed in 2022. The Beast takes place in-between these two games, years after Kyle Crane’s story originally concluded. What’s interesting is that Crane faced a couple of truly awful fates at the end of the first game — he could turn into a big monster, or trigger a warhead and sacrifice himself in the fallout. So Crane return’s return is a surprise, and the title and trailer dialogue seem to imply he’s changed to a degree that makes him, well, a little bestial.

The trailer shows us some of the challenges that Crane will face in this new story, including human groups standing in his way, military hunting him down, and various monsters roaming the landscape. Luckily, Crane has access to an armory of firepower, a big ol’ truck to mow through the hordes, and an upgrade tree.

While early promotion for Dying Light 2 focused on the breadth of the game and the amount of time one could spend in the world, The Beast seems to be a much more compact entry to the franchise. There is no release date announced yet for the game, but it’s interesting to see a new Dying Light game on the way while Dying Light 2 is still set to get post-launch DLC in the future.