Dying Light 2's new parkour challenges are providing a sublime endgame

Given its Dylan Thomas-referencing title, Dying Light 2 would be the last game you'd expect to go gentle into that good night. But during its final run of story missions, Techland entrapped players in a series of boring bunkers, cutting them off from the sky-touching parkour which had, until then, proved the highlight. The plot, meanwhile, concluded with a glut of b-movie clichés, punctuated by more off-screen deaths than Hamlet (the latter of which has never been formally reviewed by GamesRadar+, so we can't say for sure whether it's good or not).

No matter: while Dying Light 2 failed to burn and rave at close of day, its post-release content has been far brighter. Techland has made use of slightly shaky foundations to tip the balance of the game further towards its best feature: the movement.

Since Dying Light 2's launch in early February, the developer has wisely leaned on an existing format for its free updates – adding to the many zombieless parkour challenges which litter the city of Villedor. That might sound like extra busywork, tagged onto the end of an already overlong checklist, but the post-release challenges are the best of their kind – the product of a studio just now hitting its stride, quite literally. It's heartening to see Techland become more playful in its design, exploiting the abstract nature of the time trial to pull its city into new shapes.

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That's in contrast to the parkour challenges you may have encountered in the early part of Dying Light 2, which tended to be embedded clumsily into the fiction of its world. Take the NPC who asks you to deliver a batch of sausages that are, apparently, just minutes away from going off, presumably endangering both his customers and Tripadvisor rating. Or the couple whose relationship can only be saved, inexplicably, by a Prime-speed delivery of garlic and sardines. These half-baked premises were overtures to uninventive gate-chasing exercises – glued as they were to the existing routes and architecture of Old Villedor. None were tricky enough to demand thoughtful navigation or route memorisation, even with the limited moveset of a low-level character.

Fly by night

Thankfully, post-release challenges have instead followed the model of the Nightrunner Trials – those more formidable, late-game tests of skill and equipment that often went off-piste, sending you skidding down the sides of skyscrapers and swinging from lamppost to lamppost. At launch, the most notorious was Nightrunner Trial VIII – a breakneck charge across a grassy highway and through a ruined office complex. A gold medal time was only made possible by liberal use of the grapple hook's double tap, which yanks you forwards like a can tied to the rear bumper of a wedding car.

Dying Light 2's mid-March update picks up where Trial VIII left off, with Flying Scorpion – a high-wire act best traversed like a spider, jerking across great chasms on a string and letting the wind carry you the rest of the way. By the time you're through with it, you'll have truly mastered the hook, deploying it as casually as your own foot.

Techland has embraced this type of highly-specific skill test since, dedicating Stroll on the River to swimming, and My Whole World is a Glider to… well, the obvious. If you've long since capped out Dying Light 2's upgrade tree, these are welcome proving grounds – a way to demonstrate that it's not just XP you've gathered for tens of hours, but genuine experience too.

The key to the magic has been Techland's willingness to alter the open world on a temporary basis. Each new parkour challenge is its own pocket universe, home to gauntlets that couldn't belong in the main campaign's immersive city. It's an approach best exemplified by the fittingly named Suspension of Disbelief, which builds a course out of gravity-defying billboards and ropes dangling from the heavens. By augmenting Villedor's streets with impossible furniture, Techland enables you to chain breathless bounds over and over, without the necessity of connecting corridors or grueling climbs. Combined with the slow arc of your jump, all that wallrunning evokes Titanfall 2 – and it's not the only parkour classic that springs to mind.

Have faith

As Dying Light 2 leaves the city behind, it begins to recall endgame Mirror's Edge, with its wholly abstracted DLC made up of brightly coloured geometric blocks for players to slide and clamber over. There's a naked honesty to this approach – an acknowledgement that the freerunning mechanics are strong enough to stand by themselves, detached from sense and story. And for a post-release team working with reduced budgets, the simple art and absent cutscenes hold a clear appeal.

Since the Suspension, Techland has introduced three more reality-bending trials to Dying Light 2 – "abnormal scenarios that force you to run and think fast." Slam Dunk has you bouncing between what I can only think to describe as giant, wicker lilypads – collecting checkpoints in any order, like a flag-chaser in Assassin's Creed. Airbags Trial offers a series of springboards that set you on the same trajectory as Mario, only with the persistent horror of fall damage. The only potential disappointment is the third new addition, Train to Harran, which for weeks appeared to tease a return to the 2015 playground that defined the original game in the series. In actuality, it's nothing so lavish. But there's lots to like about its frantic, messy A to B through a course littered with railway obstacles.

Techland has provisionally promised half a decade's post-release support for Dying Light 2, and we have no way of knowing where that might take us. But so far, the studio has pushed forward in all the right places, building the kind of momentum that might just carry that enormous launch audience along with it. Pacifist movement challenges might not be the future many imagined for a zombie survival game – but they've been just the thing to dampen the memory of a tedious plot conclusion. With more challenge drops planned for the summer, and story DLC beyond, long may Dying Light 2 burn.

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