The long-promised 10-minutes of gameplay footage for The Day Before has finally arrived, and while it's here, it's not doing much to inspire confidence.
The footage opens with a lengthy scene tracking a woman wandering through a largely abandoned town, though we see what look like other players also wandering around. She enters a building and starts using a crafting table, showing off the game's weapon customization. Then we get a bit more looting and exploration.
Then it's off to shoot zombies and explore the larger city. There are puzzles involving security systems with well-word number pads. More looting. More exploration. It's a long gameplay demo without a whole lot going on.
It's convincingly footage from a video game which, you know, exists and is playable, but I can't say that it's made a particularly strong impression on me. The YouTube chat during the footage's premiere was overwhelmingly filled with clown emojis, and the response on Reddit has not been much kinder.
"That was the most boring 'gameplay' I have ever seen in my entire life," Reddit user Kuroodo says. "If the point of this was to make me want to buy the game, it had the opposite intended effect."
"I mean it doesn't look that bad," konean says. "The problem is it looks pretty barebone for something that some weeks ago was about to release next month."
"I’m not going to be mad that this was boring because I was questioning if this thing was even real," matt6122 says. "Now don’t have to question if there is a game but just if it is good."
The devs provided 30 seconds of footage shot over the shoulder of somebody playing the game, as if to say 'yes, it's real.'
The Day Before made an incredible impression with a demo video back in 2021 and quickly became one of the most-wishlisted games on Steam, but it's been courting controversy ever since. The devs started looking for fans to "volunteer" in key roles back in 2022.
Fans have grown more and more skeptical over the game's state since then, and even the game's community managers began to question whether it's real product. Then the Steam page disappeared, the devs delayed the title nine months over a trademark dispute, then said the delay was going to happen anyway, and.... well, it's been a mess.
We'll learn whether the game itself can escape that controversy on November 10.
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