Games I Didn't Finish: Days Gone

There are many ways one could describe Days Gone, the open world survival game from developer Bend that came out for the PS4 last year. “The video game equivalent of a Nickelback song” would be one way. “The direct to DVD knock off of The Last Of Us” would be another. Both of these are completely accurate, but I prefer to compare the game not to music or other video games, but to food. Days Gone is a big cake that looks delicious on the outside, but is severely underbaked on the inside. With each bite the problem becomes more and more apparent, until eventually you take another look at that fabulously-decorated exterior and see the dead cockroach that you somehow failed to notice at first glance.

Taking place two years after a virus or something has turned most of the world’s population into violent “freakers”, Days Gone follows outlaw biker Deacon St. John and his friend Boozer as they traverse the dangers of The Shit, the violent world outside of...

You know what, I’m going to break from my usual plot summary format, partially because the game’s premise and setup is just “insert zombie story” but mostly because I can’t describe this game in the way that it describes itself without stopping to comment on it.

Our main character is a biker named Deacon St. John. His best friend, whose survival is your primary motivation for a large portion of the game, is named Boozer.

Boozer.

And yes, the lawless zone beyond the boundaries of the few safe settlements is universally referred to as “the shit”. Deacon St. John and Boozer, riding around the shit killing freakers. If this game’s story and dialogue had a smell, it would be cheap beer and cigarette butts.

To be fair, this is partially intentional. Days Gone is grimy and nasty in a way that I found far more depressing than The Last Of Us 2’s violence, depicting a world where everything is dirty and miserable and the only humans left are violent oppressors and the helpless victims they keep alive for pragmatic reasons (because--are sitting down for this?--it turns out that humans are the real monsters). There are no thriving settlements here, just squalid camps littered with rubbish that seem like they’re one big zombie attack away from oblivion.

The game’s commitment to this grimdark sensibility extends all the way to Deacon himself, who has no qualms about taking part in literal slavery if it will serve his own ends.

Kind of. I think. It’s sort of unclear.

See, you find out that Deacon has been working for a woman who runs a forced labour camp, whose “residents” are kept under armed guard and aren’t allowed to leave. It’s evident from your first visit that conditions in the camp aren’t exactly rainbows and sunshine--workers getting beaten by guards seems to be a common occurrence--but it’s not immediately clear that the workers didn’t sign up to this arrangement voluntarily in exchange for protection from the freakers. One of your first missions for the camp is to “rescue” a teenage girl who’s hiding in a heavily infested area, who Deacon then gets all uwu over because she reminds him of his girlfriend’s dead sister. This leads to a frankly baffling series of conversations with the camp’s leader where it seems like Deacon isn’t supposed to know that the people in the camp aren’t staying there voluntarily and the camp leader is trying to avoid him finding out, even though there’s absolutely no way he couldn’t know this, and previous scenes seem to directly state that he does.

I suspect this is less the developers hastily trying to make Deacon more sympathetic and more a sign of the game’s troubled development. After several extensive delays, it came out noticeably half-baked and riddled with bugs that still haven’t been fixed. During my time with the game I experienced broken enemy AI, audio glitches including dialogue de-syncing and repeating, enemies and objects popping in and out of existence, story events and objectives failing to trigger, and more. Some of this, like the busted physics that sometimes made my melee attacks send enemies hurtling through the air, were entertaining, but mostly they were just aggravating. 

These issues actively pushed me away from completing the game, and the story did nothing to draw me back. The plot revolves around Deacon’s quest to find his girlfriend Sarah, who he assumes was killed during a zombie attack on a refugee camp until he discovers information indicating that she might actually be alive. The relationship between Deacon and Sarah as revealed by flashbacks is actually kind of cute, but Deacon’s search for her in the present mostly consists of him dicking around doing fetch quests for people while waiting for information to fall into his lap.

Days Gone had the misfortune of being announced shortly before The Last Of Us 2, a problem that the developers exacerbated by blatantly copying the first game. From the environments to the dialogue style down to individual scenes, this game is clearly trying to be The Last Of Us: Open World Edition, and it not only fails at this but also makes The Last Of Us 2 look better by comparison. In my review of that game I complained that the Seraphites are kind of underdeveloped and generic; this game’s version of a post-apocalyptic religious order are the Rippers, cultists who carve “RIP” into their foreheads and go around torturing and murdering people for nebulous reasons. Hilariously, someone decided that the Rippers should always speak in “evil voice” even when they’re delivering generic NPC dialogue like “I’m reloading” or “I’m going to try to and flank him, cover me”; I didn’t manage to get a recording of this, but it’s extremely funny for all the wrong reasons.

Deacon himself is a black hole whose surface absorbs all charisma in a million-lightyear radius, a perfect throwback to that PS2 to Xbox 360 era where game developers thought people wanted to play as growling assholes all the time. He walks around with a constant snear, responds to nearly any verbal interaction with acerbic comments and insults, and generally acts like a grumpy teenager being dragged along unwillingly on a family holiday. At some point it was decided that he should regularly comment on things happening in the game, and his voice actor’s bizarre Nicholas Cage-esque delivery of these lines is truly something to behold (he’s fine in the cut-scenes, so I suspect the actor was either directed to speak like this or didn’t have any idea what he was supposed to be reacting to).

All that aside, Days Gone isn’t a terrible game. In fact, there’s a lot to like about it. The graphics are frequently gorgeous, used to render beautiful forested vistas and some really amazing lighting and weather effects. It’s a real testament to what you can achieve even on very dated hardware.

The much-vaunted giant horde mechanics weren’t actually something I got to experience much--apparently they only really come into play later in the game--but I did see some smaller instances of the idea. It’s a trick, but it’s a neat trick, and it plays into a refreshing willingness to let players get into sticky situations. The interlocking mechanics of zombie hordes, resource scarcity and fuel can combine to create some unique challenges.

That said, the actual freakers aren’t all that interesting. They’re basically just lumpy versions of the rage zombies from 48 Days Later, and they look hilariously similar to the Chad from the Chad vs Virgin meme during some of their animations.

My overall feeling on Days Gone is less hatred or scorn and more disappointment. There are a lot of good ideas in here and some fun gameplay, but the execution just didn’t have the time or attention it needed. I eventually stopped playing it not because of any one glaring issue, but because the uninteresting story and dull missions were boring me. Based on the Wikipedia plot summary, I don’t think I missed much.