I’ll admit it, I didn’t think The Day Before was a real game. Fntastic’s much-hyped MMO survival shooter set in a zombie apocalypse has a promising premise, but as we approached the release date without a single extended look at the gameplay, it began to look like The Day Before didn’t actually exist. Two weeks ago, the developer shared a bizarre update, claiming a trademark dispute over the title was going to prevent the game from launching on time. At that point, I was convinced we were in for another Blue Box/Abandoned scenario with a developer pretending it was making a game while kicking the release date further and further down the road. But lo and behold, Fntastic finally gave us a look at The Day Before last week. Does this prove it’s a real game? I’m still not entirely sure.
IGN posted ten minutes of gameplay on YouTube last Thursday, in which you can see two characters walking, looting, and shooting zombies. Those are certainly things that happen in video games, so I’m inclined to think The Day Before is one. At the same time, that’s all that happens in this gameplay trailer. There’s an eerie quiet hanging over the whole thing, both literally and figuratively.
No one talks in the trailer, there’s no score, and the only sounds you hear in the city are the occasional bird chirp and zombie scream. Our characters stumble upon a crafting bench where a radio plays the most grating elevator muzak you’ll ever hear, and there’s a store with an evacuation notice blaring over the speakers, but otherwise audio accompanying the gameplay is the sound of your own footsteps. Similarly, the city itself is barren. There are awkwardly placed military vehicles and trash on the streets, but it's otherwise empty. There are no piles of gore or rotting corpses, no hordes of undead, and nothing to really indicate that millions of people lived and died here.
It looks like an empty world in an empty game, which gives the impression that this is less ‘raw gameplay’ and more like alpha footage. There is no HUD, other than the occasional flash of a bullet count, nor are there any quest markers or indications that our characters have a goal. Crafting and weapon customization is primitive, and I have no idea if the second character was another player or an NPC. It certainly looks like a game in a screenshot, but in motion it only vaguely resembles the idea of a video game.
I’ve seen other outlets compare it to The Last of Us and The Division, which is generous if I’m being generous, and misleading if not. It’s third-person, there are zombies, and it’s in a city, but that’s where any similarities to those games end. The Last of Us is a story about people, which this does not seem to be, and The Division is an RPG, which this doesn’t seem to be either. There are no damage numbers floating off of the zombies when they get shot, there are no XP gains, skill bars, or abilities – at least none we’ve seen yet. Normally, I wouldn’t extrapolate so much about a game from just ten minutes of gameplay, but given everything we know about The Day Before already, the artificiality of it all is hard to ignore.
Unlike Abandoned, I do think The Day Before is a video game that a group of developers are currently making. I don’t think it’s a nearly-complete open-world MMO that would have been ready to release in March if not for these supposed trademark issues. A game has to be a lot more than a virtual space to walk around and shoot at zombies in, but as far as we know right now, that’s all The Day Before is.
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