Dying Light: The Beast is a new spinoff of the horror series featuring a new open-world area, 20 hours of content, and a returning protagonist

Techland has Dying Light: The Beast, a standalone spinoff of the open-world survival horror series that brings back the protagonist from the first game, Kyle Crane.

Revealed during Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024, Dying Light: The Beast centers around the agent of the Global Relief Effort who went undercover in the fictional Middle Eastern city of Harran in the original 2015 Dying Light. Crane was also the protagonist in the 2016 DLC Dying Light: The Following, at the end of which he dies either by infection or nuclear explosion depending on the version of the ending the player reaches.

Dying Light: The Beast takes place 13 years after the events of the original Dying Light and before Dying Light 2. Crane has endured more than a decade of experiments and has finally escaped his captors and now seeks retribution for their brutality. Thanks to those experiments, Crane now has Zombie DNA mixed into his blood, which gives him "a beast-like power" we caught a few glimpses of in the trailer.

The setting is in the once-bustling tourist destination Castor Woods, which is now host to multiple different factions, some friendly and others hostile. "And that’s not to mention the mysterious creature that’s turned the woods into its personal hunting grounds," reads the Steam description.

Also returning with Crane is the day/night cycle that increases the intensity of the horde and a co-op mode that lets you tackle the game with a friend. Dying Light franchise director Tymon Smektala told PC Gamer "it's going to be basically a fully fledged open world adventure in the world of Dying Light, very similar to Dying Light 1 or Dying Light 2, though slightly more compact".

The story should only take about 10 hours to complete if you blitz your way through it without doing a whole lot of exploring and side content, but with everything included there should be about 20 hours of content, which is about half the size of the first two games.

There's no release date yet, but we do know Dying