No, Days Gone Doesn’t Need a Rethink

Days Gone was one of my first finishes of 2025, so no surprise they released a remastered version just after. That’s brought up the old conversation about if it’s really a bad game again. Honestly, I expected a poorly scripted, mediocre open world zombie game that only the biggest Sony fan could love. And sure, it’s a diamond in the rough, but you ignore the rough at your peril.

Granted, I played it on PC a few years after release. I was seeing 120fps with ultra settings, and have had successive patches to smooth out whatever issues there were at launch. I paid £8.50 for it, not the full cost of getting in on day one. The diamond shone more brightly than it ever did.

And yet many of the complaints still hold up. The story is all over the place, with characters who seem to act one way in cutscenes and another in gameplay. The world isn’t especially interesting. It’s very pretty, sure, but not interesting.

By the end of the game, I was glad it was done. But the positives buried underneath it all have stuck with me. There was fun to be had.

The people who still care for this game still really care for it, and conversation has once again turned to whether Day’s Gone was fairly treated. Was its inherent qualities overshadowed by a bumpy landing?

And why do we never have conversations reminding people that it’s okay to like 6/10 games?

Riding the On-Ramp

There’s an often ignored rule in writing: start your story as late as possible. What is the last possible moment you can introduce us to your world and characters and still have everything make sense?

Day’s Gone breaks this rule. We meet Deek and Boozer way before the actual story starts. It’s a catchphrase you’ll see wherever this game is discussed. “Just wait til you get to Lost Lake. You’ll be glad you forced your way through.” That’s because the heart of the game sits at Lost Lake. Until that point you’re spinning your wheels. The people you meet are all some shade of terrible. Deek’s protests over getting too cosy with the camps are unconvincing, when as players we spend most of our time in them or doing work for them.

The world is brutal, and the kind don’t survive. That’s the message from the opening hours of Day’s Gone. But nothing sums that up better than the trip you take with Iron Mike soon after reuniting with him.

The mission structure could easily have been moved around to put its strongest foot first: Iron Mike, his camp and the relationships you build there. This is something The Walking Dead (and The Last of Us) proved a decade ago. People first.

There’s a more general gameplay issue here too. You’re a biker who is immediately stripped of his bike. You spend the entire game building it back up. It’s a common trope and it’s always annoying. Here it’s moreso. This isn’t a gun or a magic spell. You’re actively slowing me down for the sake of “progress”. You ignore the many better bikes. This one will be good one day, trust us.

Pick a Lane, Deek

Deek has the makings of an interesting character, but it frequently falls apart in Days Gone. Calm and collected, obviously very intelligent, but screaming his head off  in stealth sections and having 180 degree turns between a cutscene and the post-scene dialogue. How many times did Deek say something fairly reasonable in a video, only to say almost the opposite in his mind shortly afterwards?

The thing is, Deek isn’t the thug the game constantly tells you he is. He’s not the stoic hard man, the killer, the criminal. He isn’t going to explode at the slightest provocation. He’s very specifically not Grand Theft Auto V’s Trevor. He’s usually very likeable. Perfect? No, but no good character is.

He doesn’t kill unarmed women, you know.

The real problem with Deek is that the developers never commit to the kind of guy they tell us he is. They put unimportant stuff like that rule front and centre and then never build on it. There are two main characters in Days Gone. There’s the Deek you play as, saving people, having moral doubts about slavery, trying to make the world a better place by tackling Ubisoft side quests. Then there’s the one who does ridiculous things just because the story demands it of him. You shout “why are you doing this?!” at your telly too many times to count. We’re told that’s just who Deek is,  with characters regretting trusting him for a second time. Then he’s back to being a leader-of-men-in-training, with nary a consequence, just because.

Raising the Dead

There’s one thing that Days Gone does exceptionally well: the hoards. Each time you see a bigger crowd of zombies, you get a bigger feeling of dread as the weight of what you’re ultimately going to have to deal with hits you. There’s not a single other game that does this as well.

But the rest of the open space is, well, lifeless. Question marks appear and disappear before you’ve even turned to face them. Markers on your map point you to positions of interest, usually one of a couple of event types that have you killing one kind of person or another. Again, if we were to take massive umbrage with Day’s Gone on this, we’d have to take it on half the major games released last year. It’s just how it is.

How do you break out of that pattern when it’s so normalised? Especially in 2019, when we weren’t quite as tired with the format as we are now.

The truth is, here, that Day’s Gone isn’t bad. It’s not bland. It’s just safe. It shies away from the things that it does well so that only a few instances really scare you. When something happens, it’s stellar. If you’re sneaking out of a mission and suddenly come across a hoard it can change the way you play completely. But then you die and the hoard is gone.

Days Gone – Conclusion

People have returned to Days Gone with this remaster and they’re realising it’s not a 1/10 game. It does some things well, better than anything else out there. But its messy narrative, its safe gameplay, its RPG systems – these are things that drag its score down, especially for those who never bother to get to Lost Lake. It doesn’t need a critical rethink. We just need to accept the rough along with the diamond. And maybe, just maybe, we can one day also look at games not published by Sony.