This article may contain spoilers for Dying Light.
You spent years waiting for developers to hurry up and release a big game. You buy it, take it home, and play through it in a couple of days. It’s awesome.
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Read+Watch+Listen is about other material you might want to check out if you’re just not ready to move on. We’ll suggest media that share something in common with a particular game and tell you why it might be of interest. This time, we’re extending your time in the quarantine zone in Dying Light, which is out now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Linux.
‘Jump London’ and ‘Jump Britain’
If you couldn’t get enough of: “Parkour!”
Free-running is central to getting around undead-infested Harran in Dying Light, especially if you’d like to do so without having to explain those awkward zombie hickies to your friends back at the Tower. In fact, the game takes time to point out that Brecken, the leader of that more civilized settlement, came to the city as a parkour instructor and passed on his knowledge to his runners so that they might return from their supply runs in Zombie Town unscathed.
If you’re interested in the art and practice of high-efficiency foot travel, check out these two documentaries that come courtesy of director Mike Christie and you’ll learn everything you need to know. Especially look out for Sebastien Foucanl, the cofounder of the sport and whom you might remember as the ridiculously nimble bomb maker from the beginning of James Bond-series reboot Casino Royale.
‘World War Z’
If you couldn’t get enough of: First-hand accounts of zombie shenanigans.
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Above: Just head-slappingly dumb, that movie.
Writer Max Brooks’ “Oral history of the Zombie War” is worth checking out whether you love walking corpses or think that the subgenre has gone a bit stiff. It’s a fascinating and reasonably plausible (other than the part where the dead return to life) novel about how various world governments would react to a global outbreak of contagious cannibalism.
Interestingly enough, Dying Light reaches a lot of the same conclusions — albeit on a much smaller scale — including how authorities will control the flow of information and when it might be time to just give up and drop the bombs.
You can go ahead and ignore that Brad Pitt movie of the same name, by the way. It’s just not worth it.
If you’re looking for something more practical, Brooks’ companion book, The Zombie Survival Guide, offers advice on weapons, avoidance, and great places to hide should the end of the world ever come shambling toward you.
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Murrow versus McCarthy on ‘See It Now’
If you couldn’t get enough of: Voices of reason in a world gone mad (and the game’s catchphrase).
Legendary CBS anchor Edward R. Murrow ended his World War II broadcasts from London with the phrase “Good night, and good luck.” He cribbed it from the locals and liked it so much that he brought it home with him. It’s a phrase meant to inspire hope and support during uncertain times, and it’s equally appropriate to the London Blitz and the Red Scare that emerged in America the following decade.
Dying Light developer Techland likes the phrase so much that it’s often the last thing you hear over your radio in the game before night falls. And in this case, “night” means “the part of the day when the horrifying Super Zombies emerge from their lairs to chase, terrify, and murder everything they see.”
But if you want to hear the more traditional application of the saying, check out this back-and-forth from Murrow’s program See It Now, on which the newsman set aside several episodes to call out and discredit Senator Joseph McCarthy and his toxic crusade against Communism.
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I haven’t read, watched, and listened to everything, obviously. Do you have another piece of media that goes with Dying Light? Feel free to share in the comments. And be sure to check out the other entries in this series here.