This underrated zombie game brings back a fan-favorite (and surprisingly wholesome) event

When your city has been overrun by zombies and survival is a brutal daily grind, you wouldn’t expect there to be much time for seasonal festivities. Well, despite it being a huge tonal shift, Dying Light 2 insists that even the infested city of Villedor should celebrate Christmas, and Techland has brought back its Winter Tales event once again.

Returning for another year, this fan-favorite event sprinkles more than just a dusting of snow over Dying Light 2’s blood-soaked streets. For Aiden Caldwell, his priorities have just changed, and now his number one goal is to decorate a depressingly-barren Christmas tree. While Winter Tales 2024 is largely similar to what fans of the parkour zombie game enjoyed last year, many will still be happy to see it return. Plus, with recent sales making it pretty cheap, there are plenty of new players in Dying Light 2 that will get to experience the event for the first time.

In Aiden’s quest for tree decorations, your main port of call is going to be Baka, the festive vendor who you need to rank up your reputation level with. Baka will give you a stack of bounties to complete, and when you do, he’ll give you some ornaments in exchange. You can also trade in Winter Sweets, a currency for the event, in order to get some unique items such as the throwable Skoll melee weapon.

As you collect more decorations and place them upon your tree, you’ll not only feel all wholesome and Christmassy inside, but you’ll get loads of rewards too, including the Killer Krampus outfit.

On top of all these earnable rewards, sending a wishlist to Santa via the mailbox located next to Baka’s stall will also see some Killer Krampus gear airdropped into Villedor by the big man himself. So that you don’t miss out on Santa’s gifts, you’ll need to hotfoot it to these drops to claim the rewards.

One new element to this year’s Winter Tales event is a second festive enemy type. The Uncle Snows return, but alongside them will be the Ice Spitters, a type of zombie that can – you guessed it – spit shards of ice at you. Killing these “Naughty Infected,” as Techland calls them, also give you the chance to earn Winter Boons, which are buffs that can make your slaying even more effective.

As one final Christmas gift, Techland is giving away the Above the Law bundle to all players for free, which includes the Peacekeeper skin and the two-handed Seesaw melee weapon.

The Winter Tales event in Dying Light 2 is live right now and wraps up on Thursday, January 2, 2025. Also dropping today is Patch 1.20 for Dying Light 2, which makes some big improvements to the game’s prologue to help new players settle in and deploys plenty of bug fixes. Full patch notes can be found here if you want to see exactly what’s changed, but it’s a fairly small update.

For those that love slaying zombies, Dying Light 2 is right up there as one of the most enjoyable experiences around. It often gets overlooked, and while I’m not saying it’s a genre-defining, essential play by any means, it’s one that’s hard to have a bad time with.

For more awesome titles like Dying Light 2, check out our lists of the best parkour games and the best open-world games.

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