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It’s difficult to forgive that on its own, but it’s even harder still when you realize there’s genuinely no story content after the first thirty or so minutes it takes to complete the tutorial. It’s significantly less cool, however, that the hub area’s NPCs – the only NPCs in The Day Before, mind you – are so dryly written and unenthusiastically voice-acted that they sound like the poor result of a generative AI. It’s cool that it’s also populated by other players between loot runs, and it’s great that you can team up with anyone while you’re in this hub. There are merchants, a few NPCs that spout bland set-dressing dialogue, and a storage area for your loose gear and currency. That zone is set up well enough, with a clear layout to keep you situated. This is done at the main outpost, Woodberry, which serves as a headquarters for your daily operations. You at least get a small bit of currency if you didn’t have any left in your storage after dying to offset this, which is enough to buy one little handgun and a few bullets. You don’t respawn with a weapon or any basic gear, so in theory, it would only take three or four early deaths to end up with a useless character. If you somehow die before making it home (which is the norm thanks to an unrestricted free-for-all PvP system) you lose everything you had on your body – meaning you’ll often progress backward as the small number of coins provided to every new character dwindles. There’s no persistent progression system at all, and the only things you carry over between runs are any gear you manage to take with you, as well as any currency you save up by selling the scraps of loot you successfully schlep back to base.

Instead, it’s fundamentally an extraction shooter with only one goal: sluggishly run around the (mostly empty) city, grab some loot, and get to one of the extraction points before you die.

The Day Before is not an MMO, or even an open world, despite claims from its developer that it would be both of those things. That’s right: if you find yourself running around without a gun for some reason, good luck outrunning these absolutely brainless zombies because your hands and feet are useless.

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Since there isn’t much guidance at all, I had to find out the hard way that The Day Before wasn’t simply not telling me how to do certain things – like melee combat, or setting up camp in the alleged “open world” – it literally doesn’t have those features at all. I’d have had a more enjoyable time actually hiding under a dumpster surrounded by zombies than waiting for The Day Before’s multiplayer to work right. At least you can communicate with your party in a rudimentary in-game chat window, but even getting that to work properly is an exercise in patience. Not only is there no multiplayer menu – there’s no voice chat either, so if you really want to you’ll have to friend up and use Steam’s chat or Discord. The inventory screen is also barebones, and even if you manage to find yourself in the same squad with other players, it’s almost impossible to figure out where they are or even if they’re still on your team. Sure, there’s a touchscreen display for your quests – which you can only track one of at a time – as well as a makeshift map, which is clunky to use because (after the long animation to set it up) you have to navigate it exclusively with your WASD keys, leaving your character a sitting duck while you do.

What shocked me most about The Day Before was the notable absence of almost any UI. You might find a zombie or two while scavenging for loot, but they rarely pose any threat. Gone are the dynamic environments and tight firefights shown off in its now mysteriously absent trailers instead, you’ll mostly spend your time running around a static cityscape that looks pretty at first glance… but offers absolutely no depth. (Is it? That’s for the courts to decide.) Unfortunately, its generic survivors seem to take its zombie outbreak seriously, though it’s unclear where the zombies are coming from or why I should care about what happened to this unimaginative world.Īfter a decently-paced tutorial, The Day Before comes up short on even the most basic features one would expect in any survival game. It’s filled with questionable artwork and decals that look precariously similar to existing logos used by real-world businesses, but that might be forgivable if it was a parody. There’s a basic yet functional story here: you wake up on a makeshift hospital bed in a ramshackle survivor camp in a decently-sized metropolis based loosely on New York City.

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