Developer/publisher Techland

Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series

Release Out now

There’s a deflated feeling, usually associated with the penultimate episode of a pot-luck Netflix miniseries, that comes once you realise you’re no longer in narratively safe hands. Payoff is not coming.Your investment, emotional and mental, has been for naught. The journey to plot conclusion will be a slow exhalation of disappointment and relief. With the burden of caring lifted, the brain is freed for more pertinent questions: what else is on? (Do we need toilet roll?)

It’s a mercy that this realisation comes early in Dying Light 2. During a drawn-out intro that demonstrates the limits of parkour in a countryside setting, Techland lays out its pitch for the inner-world intrigue that’s supposed to propel you through the next 50 to 500 hours. Aiden, a white-loaf triple-A protagonist performed in the Troy-Bakercore style by actor Jonah Scott, has spent his life wandering mainland Europe in search of sister Mia, from whom he was separated during a series of brutal childhood experiments.

These events are represented in flashbacks to grey hospital wards, shaved heads, and manhandling by gruff orderlies, while Mia herself is voiced in a sing-song giggle that would fail to convince anyone who has even briefly passed through youth. It’s the stuff of B-movies – not a strong backbone for a grand, nonlinear adventure. How will any of our choices matter a jot if the spine of the story is askew?

That Dying Light 2 turns it around so swiftly upon our arrival in Villedor is testament to the city itself – as well as the winning squint and raised eyebrow of Hakon, our rakish rooftop guide with a bafflingly sanguine outlook on the end of the world. He’s the kind of man who can find an enjoyable irony in the fact that, while Europe first cut Villedor off to contain an infection, the isolation ended up saving its residents when the wider world fell. The place is a feudal-futurist culture unto itself: American peasants, cockney cops, Parisian tiles. Gaelic folk songs travel on the breeze that turns the windmills, and new acquaintances sometimes call you ‘gadjo’ – Romani for an outsider in the community.