One of the coolest surprises from Sony’s E3 press conference was the announcement of Days Gone, a new open world survival adventure game.
Developed by Sony Bend, the PS4 exclusive follows a bounty hunter/biker named Deacon St. John, who travels through a post-apocalyptic world, fighting off infected humans and doing what he can to survive.
There’s more than a whiff of The Last of Us about the whole thing, and just a splash of State of Decay – so what sets Days Gone apart from the other bucket load of open world and/or zombie games coming out?
The hordes spring to mind. In Days Gone, you can encounter massive (and I mean massive) groups of infected wandering around. If you’ve ever seen The Walking Dead, then think of herds (except the se guys in Days Gone can run).
With so many beasts knocking about, your first instinct might be to jump back on your bike and get the hell out of town, but several missions will force you to clear out the undead scum. Joy.
Each enemy in the horde is singularly focused on coming after you. Shoot their mates, and they’ll simply clamber over the bodies and keep on coming. Still, they seem to move as one, flowing like water out of every door and window.
Thankfully, it seems like there are all kinds of ways to deal with the infected. You can use your environment to slow down the fiends, spray the bastards with bullets, or in classic videogame fashion, shoot some handily placed red barrels to blow ’em to hell.
Check out ten minutes of footage below . It shows off one of the missions from later in the game, and it is honestly one of the most arse clenchingly tense things I have ever seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W00ddRfiXyY
It’s fucking terrifying, in an entirely different way from more subtle horror like Resident Evil 7 or P.T. If even one grabs you and manages to slow you down, the rest of them will be all over you like a tramp on hot chips.
Sony Bend’s Ron Allen confirmed that the zombie hordes are far from the only dangers we’ll be facing in Days Gone (as if that wasn’t enough). Much like The Last of Us, we’ll also be bumping into humans who are desperate to survive.
He also explained a little bit about the game’s Oregon setting:
There’s a day/night cycle; being in the Pacific Northwest, there’s very extreme weather, and all of that affects the world… We’ve never seen a game set anywhere like that; there’s a ton of different regions–mountainous regions to lush forests.
There’s no word yet on exactly when Days Gone will be released, but I hope they take their time with it – this is one game that has the potential to be something really special.
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.