The in-development open-world MMO, The Day Before, has always smelled a little bit off to me. The trailers, depicting generic scenes of post-apocalyptic shootouts and weightless ragdoll zombies getting gunned down, gave me serious flashbacks to those dodgy zombie survival games from the early days of Kickstarter that shamelessly cashed in on the survival sandbox craze – The War Z, The Slaughtering Grounds, The Dead Linger… any other name-and-shames that I’ve missed? 

It seems that the best part of a decade on, the gaming public is still not out of its braindead love-in with those buzzwords, because The Day Before, an terribly bland-looking game, remains at the top of Steam wishlists as of this day; chuck in the words ‘zombie,’ ‘survival,’ ‘infested,’ and ‘post-pandemic’ (how topical), and the masses will flock to it like the walking dead to a shopping mall.

Even the typeface and cover art are utterly devoid of originality, making The Day Before look like a poor person’s The Last of Us; if you’re willing to go a step further with me (there lies the realm of crackpot paranoia), I’d argue that the very title ‘The Day Before’ even has a linguistic and phonetic structure so similar to ‘The Last of Us’ that it subliminally brainwashes us into associating it with Naughty Dog’s piece de resistance.

This game is trying to burrow its way into our subconscious, and we mustn’t let it. 

Thankfully, there’s a growing number of telltale signs that this game may not be all it promises to be, which should hopefully start snapping the gaming public out of its stupor, unwishlisting the game, and waiting until it actually comes out (not just into Early Access, but out out) before committing any kind of money to it.

First, there’s the fact that every trailer we’ve seen so far has been scripted, with no evidence of how it plays in the hands of a regular person. Each scene seems carefully choreographed to show the game ‘in action,’ while telling us very little about what it’s really about. There are lots of still ‘post-apocalyptic’ scenes, a car driving through some countryside, some very bland-looking gunplay with no standout mechanics to note, and a shopping mall that seems to contain a Cineworld, complete with the exact Cineworld logo, but tweaked ever so slightly to be called ‘Cinema World.’ In a weird way, that sums up my problem with what I’m seeing; everything looks derivative, borderline copycatting, and there’s a distinct lack of substance to any of the footage other than some graphical pizazz.

The game has also been delayed several times, with the latest pushback coming last month, when developer Fntastic said that it’s being delayed until March 2023 due to it being moved over to Unreal Engine 5. Now, upgrading a game to a new engine sounds like a good thing. It should mean that the game will look better, feel better, and be designed to take advantage of all the fanciness that Unreal Engine 5 offers, such as improved lighting, Nanite rendering (great for models and faces), and better programming tools that should generally make it easier for the developers to make the whole thing look good – even photorealistic. 

But a mid-development engine change is always a risky proposition. Resources need to be spent on getting the dev team comfortable with the new engine, and as we’ve just learned from Well Played (via PC Games N), it looks like The Day Before is – at least partly – being made by volunteers.

Following a redesign of their site, Fntastic have added a new ‘Volunteer’ page, which says that “every Fntastic member is a volunteer,” accompanied by this weirdly propagandistic-sounding video that talks about how “Being a volunteer means that you willingly take part in the idea of working for common goals” and “… Become a person who says ‘Yes’ to life. Volunteering means that in every action you take, you bring a certain pleasantness.”

Now, maybe something just got a little lost in translation in that video, and maybe those guys aren’t espousing the virtues of volunteering at gunpoint, but the rest of the information on the page is kind of confusing. 

First, there are “full-time volunteers” who “work for salaries,” then there are “part-time volunteers” like moderators, translators or people who can ‘create new special features to improve our projects’ (which sounds an awful lot like actual development, doesn’t it?). As a part-time volunteer, you apparently get paid in “cool rewards, participation certificates, and free codes.” It’s all kind of bizarre, and raises questions about whether this game is being made by a properly paid staff.  

On a sidenote, I’m quite tickled by the idea that as a reward for being, say, a community moderator, you get ‘rewarded’ with ‘free codes.’ I envision this being a free alpha code for The Day Before that essentially turns you into a volunteer playtester for the game. But hey, as they probably say at Fntastic: Volunteering is God. Volunteering is Life.

Silliness aside, the whole volunteer schpiel is just the latest in a long line of things that should make prospective buyers seriously scrutinise the credentials of The Day Before. Outside of the investor-friendly factoid that it’s the most wishlisted game on Steam, there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that this game will justify its pre-release popularity, or even that it really exists at all. 

It has all the feel of one of those PlayWay games you see advertised on Facebook, with scripted footage and prerendered trailers designed to generate the maximum amount of interest with the minimal amount of development input. The reality of those games is that they don’t properly enter development until there’s enough online hype around them (Facebook likes, Steam wishlists etc.). Some of those games do end up getting made in the end, but usually they’re relatively low-budget affairs that don’t live up to the initial impressions. If The Day Before is being made on that basis, then development should be well underway given that it’s inexplicably topped Steam wishlists, but there’s just very little sign of actual progress being made.

So what does The Day Before have going for it? Well, Fntastic isn’t a completely obscure developer, and has knocked out some half-decent games like the momentary Twitch craze Propnight, and co-op survival game The Wild Eight. So there’s that. Also, it’s being published by MYTONA, a Singaporean publisher best known for making some pretty big mobile games. That doesn’t say much about the publisher’s chops in making a seemingly big game like The Day Before claims it will be, but it does at least suggest that there’s some money behind this whole operation.

Perhaps most importantly, The Day Before isn’t crowdfunded (yet) and it’s not on preorder, so it hasn’t taken consumers’ money. Should either of those things happen, I’ll be the first to sound the alarm and warn gamers not to hand anything over until this game is out the door. In the meantime, whether or not this game comes to fruition shouldn’t worry us too much. If you’re one of the millions who’ve wishlisted it and is now waiting with bated breath for more news, I’ll just say this: ‘Manage your expectations. Manage them hard.’