One of my favorite things to do in Dying Light 2: Stay Human is to sit down at a campfire and listen to the tales of past glories and tragedies that the survivors regale me with — and let’s be honest, that balance tips heavily to the side of tragedy. While I did find one story that mostly ends up mostly alright, Ariel’s story, for example, is pretty heavy.
But then I found Sara, who’s got a real bummer of a tale to tell. Buckle up, folks, because this might be the most depressing one yet. And unlike Ariel’s story, this one isn’t told with that charisma or charm that makes it feel more lighthearted than it actually is. No, this is a sob story for the ages.
Here’s the video in full:
Like the previous campfire stories, this one isn’t subtitled, so I’m going to take a stab at transcribing the whole thing.
“When… when I got here in 2024, I was young. All my short life, I’d lived in this little town. But eventually, like everyone else, I had to flee. And I, ugh…
“We heard that Villedor was still taking people in, so we walked for 40 days and 40 nights. Then we got here as they had just closed the gates. So we camped outside the walls, like thousands of other people. Infected swarmed us. We fought them off with rocks during the day. At night, they got more dangerous. Sometimes a sniper on the walls would have mercy and help.
“Eventually some guy showed up, told us he’d smuggle us in through the sewers. As soon as we got past the wall, he disappeared with all our stuff. Then a patrol caught us, packed us in a truck, laughing that they were taking us to ‘the mosh pit.’ That’s what they called the refugee camp at the stadium. We slept on pallet beds. Everyone fit for work dug latrines… and graves.
“One meal a day, no blankets — we were sick for almost a month. Then Jake got jaundice, don’t know where they buried him. Just me and a three-year-old son.
“One night, power went out in the entire stadium, black as the grave. There were 15,000 people there without UV light. Panic broke out. I took Ben and started to run. We fought through the crowd, and then I heard noises, like fireworks. People started to point at something. I looked and saw some buildings spewing this yellow cloud, and these things flying over the city like giant bees. Black Monday, January 6th, 2025.
“They started dropping chemical bombs, that yellow dust everywhere. The whole camp starts to run. I got knocked to the ground and I… I… I lost track of Ben. I was screaming his name, but the crowd was so thick. I remember people pushing me into the street. I remember the smell of fear filling the air, the sky covered in a yellow haze. I blacked out.
“I woke up at dusk, alone on an empty roof, between mangled bodies. I heard the infected feeding on corpses. I thought I would never see my son Ben again. I searched corpses for a week, looking for the body of my three-year-old son.
“Then somebody told me the local priest was keeping a list of people who were missing and had been found.”
At this point, another woman says, “Carl.” If you’ve spent some time in the Bazaar, you’ll know that Carl is the name of the priest there, so I assume this priest is the same person.
Sara continues: “Turned out that Ben had been found by a couple in the stadium crowd when we were pushed into the street.”
The other woman then says, “It’s okay, hon, let it out.” I don’t know, this seems kind of condescending to me.
But Sara keeps on with her story: “When I found him, I thought I would die from joy. We had survived. That’s what mattered. We survived.”
I guess this one does have a happy-ish ending, but it’s told with such sadness that the tragedy kind of just lingers. This one hits a bit harder than the other stories I’ve encountered, and the silence of my fellow campfire-sitters leads me to believe that we all kind of felt this way. This just reminds me that the world of Dying Light 2 is a very bleak one indeed.
