Days Gone is a new PlayStation 4 exclusive title by Bend Studios. It was first revealed at on Sony’s E3 stage and quickly raise many questions among fans, the most prominent of which was “do we really want another zombie apocalypse game?”
Well, first of all, the zombies in Days Gone aren’t really zombies but Freakers – mindless, feral creatures that are animal than human. Most importantly, they are not dead and are still continuing to evolve. These Freakers are the aftermath of a global pandemic that killed nearly all of the world’s population.
Set two years after this pandemic in the Pacific Northwest, the game stars Deacon St. John, a biker and bounty hunter that prefers the open road over the relative safety of a settlement. We first meet Deacon as he narrates the game’s dramatic announcement trailer, and we learn a little about him and his motivations. Then, we see him in action in the E3 gameplay demo you can watch below.
In this demo, Deacon is going after a bounty target named Two-dog. In his searches, he comes across a not-so-abandoned lumber mill, where we first see the Freakers up close and personal. First, we meet a Newt – an adolescent Freaker that uses hit and run tactics and slowly take down its prey. Afterward, Deacon encounters the terrifying Horde. A Horde is made out of hundreds of individual Freakers who move, eat and attack as one. With so many Freakers charging towards him, all Deacon can do is run.
Where Deacon will run and how he will escape the tendentious Horde is completely up to the player. We can see that simply shooting down the hungry infected doesn’t do a lot to slow them down, but a combination of explosives, molotovs, makeshift obstacles and quick-thinking just might do the trick. Players can close metal doors behind them, collapse piles of logs on top of the Horde using crafted bombs, or lure it close enough to explosive barrels. The open world provides plenty of way to try and escape, and leaves the decision up to the player.
The E3 demo covers only a very small portion of the open world and gameplay of Days Gone. We’ll probably see much more of the game before its launch exclusively on the PlayStation 4.
