‘The Day Before’ Is Real, But Lied About Everything Else

Since the absurd saga of Abandoned, the vaporware game that somehow landed its own PlayStation feature before it was revealed it was nothing but air, similar concerns have been raised over The Day Before. The game promised a sprawling survival MMO in the vein of The Division from a very small team, and its trailer suggested some sort of epic release years in the making. But many began to suspect that, like Abandoned, it would turn out to be some sort of grift.

Well, it turns out The Day Before is a real game. Technically. It did in fact release yesterday, hitting Steam for $40, and half a million people were watching streams of it, which included huge-name creators giving it a shot.

The Day Before, however, has immediately plunged headfirst into contention for the worst game of 2023, squeezing in at just the last minute here. While it is a game that exists, it is not even remotely like what it would say it would be, with even the overall genre changing. Players believe they were just straight up lied to.

The core concept of The Day Before was that it was meant to be an MMO survival game. Instead, it’s not that at all. It’s an entirely different game, an extraction shooter, where you kill things, get loot and extract to safe zones. It’s not a survival MMO in the least unless you count MMO as “it’s multiplayer” and survival as “well you try not to die.”

Then there’s what the game actually looks and plays like, infinitely worse and smaller scale than any of its past, far more polished trailers suggested. It looks terrible, is almost an entirely empty cityscape where you’re lucky if you run into more than a few zombies at a time (also, it’s a zombie game without melee combat, incredible), and it is full of absolutely absurd bugs that are honestly probably the best thing about it.

I have been dying watching clips from the game which include some of the goofiest bugs I’ve seen all year:

No one is…reacting kindly to this. Streamers are positively roasting the game and will not play once the terribleness of it stops being funny. Steam reviews have immediately nosedived into Overwhelmingly Negative for a game that would dare charge $40 for this mess.

So no, The Day Before was not a scam in the sense that it did not exist. But it is a scam in the sense that it did not remotely deliver anything it said it would and did so in such an unpolished packaged it’s almost unplayable and only worth booting up for the memes. Another cautionary tale.

I’ve reached out to its developer, Fntastic, about all this and will update if I hear back.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.