Dying Light: The Beast's new mode means the zombies you kill won't respawn… but neither will all the loot you need to survive

It always felt a little odd to me in Dying Light: The Beast that Kyle Crane could arrive in the little town of Castor Woods, spend all his spare time stomping and slashing thousand zombies into goop… and have essentially no effect on anything.

Every time Kyle steps out of Town Hall, the plaza is filled with zombies again. Clear out a building and the next day it's swarming with infected as if nothing had happened. Crane is the most badass zombie-killer in history, but he's proof positive that one man can't make a difference.

Until now. A free update to Dying Light: The Beast called Restored Land adds an interesting twist to Kyle's zombie parkour adventure. In this new mode, if you kill a zombie, it stays dead. Forever. Clear a building and it'll stay cleared. Wipe out the monsters in dark zones, hives, and convoys, and they'll never come back. Finally, Kyle's zombie-stomping boots have a permanent effect on the world.

Here's the tough part of the deal, though: while those dead zeds won't respawn, neither will all the loot Kyle uses to craft gear, weapons, and supplies. That little shop a block from Town Hall you'd crouch-slide into every day to fill your pockets with resources? You can only raid that store once. After that, it stays empty. Killing every zombie on the map just got a bit harder, huh?

Loot is also scarcer in general, with containers giving up fewer resources and vendors selling reduced stock at higher prices. Kyle will also need to "manage hunger and replace depleted flashlight batteries," developer Techland says, so I imagine players will need to carefully keep track of the areas they've looted, with each trip taking them farther and farther into the world just to scrounge up the bare necessities to survive.

If that doesn't sound hard enough as it is, there's another option you can enable called One Life. That means if you die, you're done: your save file is wiped and you'll need to start over. Poor Kyle won't even respawn in this mode.

At least one resource will still respawn as usual in Restored Land: cars. With such a sprawling map and no speedy way to get around, Techland decided to keep the car spawning system as it is. Speaking of cars, the update adds a mode called Roadkill Rallies, which the devs describe as "Carmageddon in Dying Light": speed around in a beefed-up vehicle ramming as many zombies as you can.

The Restored Land update is free for all players who own Dying Light: The Beast, and is out today.