zen and the art of running zombies over with your motorcycle
...wait that doesn't sound right. huh.
feel like this game fundamentally misunderstands its biggest virtue: the zen of riding a motorcycle through picturesque Oregon wilderness. it sort of loses all its charm when you encounter a zombie -- or a "freaker". just sort of reminds me of how tiresome zombies are, especially in a post-apocalyptic setting. ever seen Mad Max? ever read the Road? ever lived through a pandemic? all stuff that evokes the end of the world, none feature zombies.
zombie stories can be fine, i guess, but usually when you're telling a mostly end of the world serious human drama the way this game is, the zombies are simply another faction between the several human ones and the wilderness itself. and this game isn't quite the last of us levels of nature is taking back the planet. this game is set 2 years after the outbreak, not 20. a lot of civilisation still exists in pockets.
i don't know why the zombies really bothered me. at a certain point i did stop noticing them. this isn't resident evil or dying light, they really are just background noise. in fact, for about 25 hours, i didn't even engage this game's big selling point: the hordes. i completely ignored them. and when i had to face them in late-game story missions, i simply failed the missions enough times in order to skip them because i was so not interested. i cleared zero infestation zones as well.
this game really failed to engage me on the zombie front in any meaningful way. it did spark my interest with its human characters tho. at least in act 2. i stopped playing this game for about 2 years because the zombie stuff bored me to tears and the early area characters you encounter are all various degrees of boring and despicable. you really have to push forward to its second act camp - lost lake - until you begin encountering oddly compelling characters like Rikki and Iron Mike, and even antagonist Skizzo.
i say "oddly" compelling because this is a game with characters named Iron Mike and Skizzo. its lead character is a devoted backwards baseball cap wearing former biker named Deacon St. John - one of the most ridiculous and beautiful character names in gaming history. his best friend is Boozer.
i wouldn't say Days Gone gets you to care about any of its characters, not too much. they're not loveable. you're not going to find much sparking fan art of them. but what i like about most of the characters in this game from act 2 onward is how real they're portrayed. in similiar open world games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima or any modern Far Cry or Just Cause, you're going to find a litany of stock archetypes; charmless sidekicks and maybe only slightly more charming but redundant quest givers. Days Gones has limited dramatic ambitions. it's mostly trying its darndest to evoke cable TV shows like Sons of Anarchy and the Walking Dead. but that's a step up from most video games, imo. this game has characters who feel closer to real people than most, and for that i do respect this game. narratively, it does wind up forcing these characters down some really cliched paths, but thems the breaks.
i really wish this game's open world busywork was more character focused. it's such a shame to have these rich vistas, these rich characters, and then litter the game with thankless, mindless empty busywork. clear out these zombies. chase these idiots on bikes. very few scenes of you just riding with a companion and getting to know anyone personally. especially because Deacon is the loner/drifter at heart, who's clearly keeping people out but obviously the game wants to say "but he has a heart of gold". but does he? he does wind up spending most of the game alone, listening to a truther on the radio and then yelling at the radio. so many exchanges he has in this game with another human, he's curt, rude and dismissive. he feels like he was written by two different people. he feels like all his voice lines were re-recorded for cutscenes because in-game he's a real jerk.
part of me wanted to end really positive on this game but it's kind of hard when it ends by kind of walking back on all the goodwill it built just to get its very easy and cheap conflict-centered ending. there's a really interesting moral choice made by Iron Mike about halfway through that the game just winds up using to slap him in the face with that felt incredibly misguided. at the end of the day, it just felt like it wanted to justify all of the libertarian/truther bullshit it had been yelling back at for a majority of the game.
it's a game about the frontier. and frontier justice is rewarded. a lot of this game reminded me of a non-descript western. Deke's bike is his horse. his search for his wife Sarah not too dissimilar for Ethan Edwards search for Debbie in The Searchers. the hordes of zombies are, well... i don't want to say they're Native Americans, but the game does outright link the hordes of zombies to hordes of refugees so it invites this idea of thinking of the zombies in terms of "savages". it has characters lament how the zombie destruction isn't unlike how tourists used to clog up the idyllic Oregon wilderness. calling them Freakers too sounds like tweakers and the game's radio truther has a rant about the government using drugs to weaken (white) Americans. there are some pretty horrible implications going on here but Days Gone isn't nearly introspective enough to really say anything but it certainly winds up feeling like the libertarian's wet dream in game form.
eh. idk. i hated so much of the gameplay here but i wound up enjoying riding my dumb Aloy from HZD-skinned bike around maybe the second best looking video game American wilderness (behind RDR2) and thinking about how this game features one of the better wife characters. it's a rare good wifeguy game.
...wait that doesn't sound right. huh.
feel like this game fundamentally misunderstands its biggest virtue: the zen of riding a motorcycle through picturesque Oregon wilderness. it sort of loses all its charm when you encounter a zombie -- or a "freaker". just sort of reminds me of how tiresome zombies are, especially in a post-apocalyptic setting. ever seen Mad Max? ever read the Road? ever lived through a pandemic? all stuff that evokes the end of the world, none feature zombies.
zombie stories can be fine, i guess, but usually when you're telling a mostly end of the world serious human drama the way this game is, the zombies are simply another faction between the several human ones and the wilderness itself. and this game isn't quite the last of us levels of nature is taking back the planet. this game is set 2 years after the outbreak, not 20. a lot of civilisation still exists in pockets.
i don't know why the zombies really bothered me. at a certain point i did stop noticing them. this isn't resident evil or dying light, they really are just background noise. in fact, for about 25 hours, i didn't even engage this game's big selling point: the hordes. i completely ignored them. and when i had to face them in late-game story missions, i simply failed the missions enough times in order to skip them because i was so not interested. i cleared zero infestation zones as well.
this game really failed to engage me on the zombie front in any meaningful way. it did spark my interest with its human characters tho. at least in act 2. i stopped playing this game for about 2 years because the zombie stuff bored me to tears and the early area characters you encounter are all various degrees of boring and despicable. you really have to push forward to its second act camp - lost lake - until you begin encountering oddly compelling characters like Rikki and Iron Mike, and even antagonist Skizzo.
i say "oddly" compelling because this is a game with characters named Iron Mike and Skizzo. its lead character is a devoted backwards baseball cap wearing former biker named Deacon St. John - one of the most ridiculous and beautiful character names in gaming history. his best friend is Boozer.
i wouldn't say Days Gone gets you to care about any of its characters, not too much. they're not loveable. you're not going to find much sparking fan art of them. but what i like about most of the characters in this game from act 2 onward is how real they're portrayed. in similiar open world games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima or any modern Far Cry or Just Cause, you're going to find a litany of stock archetypes; charmless sidekicks and maybe only slightly more charming but redundant quest givers. Days Gones has limited dramatic ambitions. it's mostly trying its darndest to evoke cable TV shows like Sons of Anarchy and the Walking Dead. but that's a step up from most video games, imo. this game has characters who feel closer to real people than most, and for that i do respect this game. narratively, it does wind up forcing these characters down some really cliched paths, but thems the breaks.
i really wish this game's open world busywork was more character focused. it's such a shame to have these rich vistas, these rich characters, and then litter the game with thankless, mindless empty busywork. clear out these zombies. chase these idiots on bikes. very few scenes of you just riding with a companion and getting to know anyone personally. especially because Deacon is the loner/drifter at heart, who's clearly keeping people out but obviously the game wants to say "but he has a heart of gold". but does he? he does wind up spending most of the game alone, listening to a truther on the radio and then yelling at the radio. so many exchanges he has in this game with another human, he's curt, rude and dismissive. he feels like he was written by two different people. he feels like all his voice lines were re-recorded for cutscenes because in-game he's a real jerk.
part of me wanted to end really positive on this game but it's kind of hard when it ends by kind of walking back on all the goodwill it built just to get its very easy and cheap conflict-centered ending. there's a really interesting moral choice made by Iron Mike about halfway through that the game just winds up using to slap him in the face with that felt incredibly misguided. at the end of the day, it just felt like it wanted to justify all of the libertarian/truther bullshit it had been yelling back at for a majority of the game.
it's a game about the frontier. and frontier justice is rewarded. a lot of this game reminded me of a non-descript western. Deke's bike is his horse. his search for his wife Sarah not too dissimilar for Ethan Edwards search for Debbie in The Searchers. the hordes of zombies are, well... i don't want to say they're Native Americans, but the game does outright link the hordes of zombies to hordes of refugees so it invites this idea of thinking of the zombies in terms of "savages". it has characters lament how the zombie destruction isn't unlike how tourists used to clog up the idyllic Oregon wilderness. calling them Freakers too sounds like tweakers and the game's radio truther has a rant about the government using drugs to weaken (white) Americans. there are some pretty horrible implications going on here but Days Gone isn't nearly introspective enough to really say anything but it certainly winds up feeling like the libertarian's wet dream in game form.
eh. idk. i hated so much of the gameplay here but i wound up enjoying riding my dumb Aloy from HZD-skinned bike around maybe the second best looking video game American wilderness (behind RDR2) and thinking about how this game features one of the better wife characters. it's a rare good wifeguy game.