In fact, let’s start with Harran. Where is it? That might seem like a simple question, but the reality is that we are never given a reference point. As a fictional city, that’s kind of the point, but without knowing where it is supposed to be we’re left with this strange, context-less city. I actually looked it up on the game’s Wikipedia page to make sure Dying Light actually took place on Earth rather than a different planet or reality. It appears that it is a city-state on the coast of the Mediterranean somewhere near Turkey. Why is this important or why might we care about this in the context of the game? Because the political ramifications of a major city like Harran becoming the epicenter of a potentially apocalyptic zombie outbreak would be important and interesting. However, in-game Harran seems to be completely isolated from the outside world, aside from airdrops of supplies and a miracle drug that stops infected survivors from becoming biters. The opening cinematic tells us that no one knows if people are even still alive in the city. This is the setting for the entire game and it begs so many questions: How was Harran so easily quarantined? Did it involve some sort of unethical application of military force? Why does that quarantine appear to be run by an organization unaffiliated with Harran’s political leadership? Who is in charge? Why can no one confirm that there are still survivors? Why aren’t survivors being airlifted out of the quarantine if they have a medicine that indefinitely keeps people from becoming zombies? Why does it seem to have an airforce that is willing to destroy the city-state? Attempting to answer any of these questions could have provided some great insight into the situation in which Kyle Crane finds himself.

Enter our protagonist, Kyle Crane, another one of those faceless, blank slates onto which players are supposed to project themselves. Nebulously described as an “operative,” Crane works for the Global Relief Effort (GRE), the organization that airdrops food and medicine into Harran. He apparently enters Dying Light with no past or connections to the outside world. At no point do we hear him talk about a family or friends or why he accepted a mission to go into a zombie infested city alone. He makes no decisions for himself, instead allowing himself and the plot to be propelled by the people giving him orders. Crane’s mission is to infiltrate the groups of survivors in Harran (groups that GRE apparently knows about, despite the opening cinematic’s words to the contrary) and discover who holds a file that contains information which could destroy the world in the wrong hands. None of the survivors who rescue him question why he airdropped into the city, who he is, where he came from, or any other circumstance of his existence. He seems to win everyone over after sharing his name, lying about being a tourist, and doing helpful chores. Crane’s value to everyone around him stems from what he can do physically, not from any virtue he may or may not possess. He offers no insight into events other than enabling other characters to dump exposition to the player. Crane’s sole character trait seems to be making frustrated quips and remarks after people tell him to go do something unpleasant.

We get almost no information about the Global Relief Effort. From the name, it presumably operates globally. Dying Light describes GRE as a humanitarian organization at some point. That’s about all we have to go on, but so much is left strangely unexplained. Why does a single humanitarian organization handle the entire operation of supplying food and medicine to a massive city? It seems to me that having an entire city quarantined would at least summon three or four, maybe some human rights groups to oversee that nothing fishy was going on, possibly a UN envoy. Why does a humanitarian organization have or even need secret operatives? I’d be fine with this if it ever satisfyingly tied into the plot at all, but it doesn’t. Why would they expect one operative to be fine in the middle of a city overrun with zombies? No, seriously why would GRE expect this? Kyle Crane might be the most competent person in the universe, but he is one guy in a city with a population in the hundreds of thousands, almost all of which are now walking dead. What reasonable person would think that he’d be able to get the job done? In fact, at one point it seemed like GRE was both willing and able to bomb the entire city into ash. How on earth are they able to keep up the façade of being a humanitarian organization if they are able to call in massive airstrikes to level the city that they alone seem to control? Am I on crazy pills?