If The Last of Us and State of Decay had a baby, it might look a little bit like Days Gone, the new open world survival game from Sony Bend, exclusive to the PS4.
Days Gone is a survival title with a focus on action-adventure set in the wilderness two years after a devastating global pandemic. We’ll play as Deacon St. John, a Drifter and bounty hunter who “rides the broken road, fighting to survive while searching for a reason to live”.
If it were a movie, I’d be violently rolling my eyes at the amount of cliches there – but this is a videogame, so I’m on board.
Though you don’t see them in the trailer (unless I missed them somehow), this post-pandemic world is infested by zombie like creatures called Freakers.
These Freakers come in several flavours, as described on the PlayStation blog:
In the demo you saw two types of Freaks – Newts, which were adolescents when infected, are opportunistic hunters, preferring to hit and run from the shadows; and a Horde. Made up of hundreds of individual Freakers, Hordes eat, move and attack together, almost as one. Some Hordes roam the highways at night, while others, like the one in the demo, have found a food source that keeps it in a single location.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Olc5WFwF1y4
In a world where horror fans are desperate for subtle chills and psychological thrills, I think we forget that sometimes the obvious scares work, and being chased down by hundreds of infected feral monsters definitely qualifies as obviously fucking scary.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.