I’m Trying Not to Get Too Hyped For The Day Before

There are certain games that just speak to you.

These games might not come around all that often, but the moment they cross your path, you just know. It happened to me with games like The Long Dark, Cities Skylines, Days Gone, and Ghostwire: Tokyo. These are just a few entries on my personal list, though there are a number of other entries I could add to it.

The first time I saw The Day Before in action, I saw the potential for this to be the next one. And even though I haven’t seen nearly enough of the actual game, and I haven’t played it for a single second, there is just something there that is ticking off all the right boxes for me.

In a lot of ways, The Day Before looks like what I wanted from a game like The Division (which I never actually got from playing both of The Division games). There are also hints of games like State of Decay and DayZ in the footage I’ve seen so far. The problem is, there isn’t enough concrete info, other than what is shown off in the (admittedly incredible) trailers that have trickled out over the last year or two, to say for sure if The Day Before will actually be any good. Hell, it’s hard to say for sure if it will actually come out. 

Only time will tell. The game is slated for June 21, 2022 — a rare, incredibly specific release date, with no indication of a delay yet on the horizon. But even though there is a firm release date, it seems like nothing much has been reported on the progress of the game in recent months, other than the official RTX 4K gameplay trailer from January of this year. And before that, the last update, at least on the Steam page, was merely a screenshot.

I personally don’t need a ton of exhaustive gameplay trailers or developer interviews or television commercials (not that I even watch live TV anymore) in order to prove that a game exists. I’m not one who needs to see every bit of a game before it releases; I do like to leave some things to be discovered while playing.

On the other hand, I also like to see a solid, uninterrupted chunk of gameplay so I can get a feel for how it runs. I want to know a bit about the moment-to-moment beats: how I’ll interact with the game world and its mechanics, how driving looks, how the gunplay looks, what a mission structure might look like, and so on. And so far, we haven’t really gotten enough of that to give me a good feeling. 

I ran into a similar thing with Ghostwire: Tokyo. Leading up to that game’s release, there were snippets of gameplay shown in trailers, with very little moment-to-moment action. It wasn’t even clear if there were missions in the game. But once I started to see gameplay impressions and not just presser B-roll footage, I could tell that it was a game for me — even though those aforementioned impressions weren’t exactly glowing.

I’m hoping a similar scenario will play out with The Day Before. The comparison isn’t one-to-one, considering this will be an online multiplayer experience whereas a game like Ghostwire was an offline single-player experience. But even so, if larger chunks of gameplay impressions and previews start rolling out, I might at least be able to detect control jank or other issues like clipping or stuttering, which could be early warning signs.

I will hopefully know before launch day whether or not this one’s for me. In the meantime, I’m just waiting for that “aha” moment when I know my excitement is justified, or that dreadful “oh no” moment when I realize it’s not.