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The Day Before early access review: you won’t be missedWorstest Worst
Worstest Worst
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mytona
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mytona
Now, days after releasing into early access, developers Fntastic have shut down and you can’t purchase the game anymore. Does it come as a surprise? Not really, considering the final product wasn’t what they promised - not even close. Instead of an MMO, it wasbarelyan extraction shooter. Consider my words below a record of a rancid time had across its short-lived early access release, then. A time when I would’ve rather handed a stinging nettle £40 to line my socks than spend another minute in this empty husk.
The Day Before experience summed up in four images. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mytona
If you managed to get into a server on the first try, you’d have borne witness to a miracle. It never happened for me, instead giving me error code after error code. I like imagine this was because the server infrastructure was wired to a potato in someone’s drawer and as it sprouted, the two clips latched to the skin got shunted out of the way. To get in, you could spend a few minutes just clicking on servers and hoping you didn’t get served another dreaded error.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mytona
Once you did, finally, make it through the barrage of errors, you awoke on a doctor’s table in some resistance camp. Then after a swift introduction, you were encouraged to speak to everyone one after the other. The ammo person. The barman. The lady who looked after your stash. On and on and on it went. Speak to this person, that person. All of the inane chats eating into, at the time, your 30-minute refund window. Eventually you’re forced to visit your “land plot”, a separate instance away from the city and the camp that you could upgrade with furniture. The idea being that you’d come back here after your excursions, then spend money to make your house pretty and… not much else.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mytona
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mytona
Time will hopefully grant us concrete evidence as to whether Fntastic genuinely tried to make The Day Before into anything like the survival MMO shown off in the reveal trailer (or subsequent devlog that’s been preservedhere), or whether it was always destined for the garbage bin. Either way, I’m glad you can’t buy it now and I hope people get their refunds. What a tiring mess.
