In 2021, out of nowhere, a new phenomenon emerged: ‘The day before’, a zombie game that promised to be an MMO that was going to compete with the best in the genre. In fact, it immediately became the number one title on Steam’s wishlists, although some people said that its intentions were perhaps too much for an indie studio like Fntastic. Doomsayers, no doubt. Unless…
A dead game in life
After several delays, ‘The day before’ could be played for the first time yesterday… And drama took over the gaming community. No open world, no MMO, no nothing: it is a simple extraction game that could perfectly be a free to play that, to top it off, does not connect to the servers in time to be able to play games more or less constantly.
To top it off, the game is full of bugs, from those that make you fly through the walls to those that leave you in a kind of invisible box that prevents you from continuing your game normally… or, even worse, those that make you fall down the side of the map the very second the game starts. The contest for worst game of the year was won by ‘Gollum‘ and ‘King Kong‘, but ‘The day before’ has arrived at the last minute to stand up to them.
To tell the truth, the thing already smelled bad: the game’s trailer plagiarized other similar ones, the videos that the studio uploaded to YouTube were fake and, in the end, it has been a hit on Twitch for the wrong reasons. Logically, all streamers have wanted to connect with a burning train about to have an accident. It certainly has a lot of fixing to do if it wants to be seen as something more in the future… And it’s not at all clear that it’s going to do that.
It should be noted that many believed the game didn’t even exist, so at least seeing it in motion has been a surprise. Fntastic itself, before the debacle, wrote “We’ve made this for you to enjoy the game and make it a celebration. Together, we will continue to improve it and add content.” A celebration it certainly was… but not how they imagined.
