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Think of the number of people around you who are waiting for the end of the world. There are people who have to do it for a living: government employees who specialize in disaster relief and crisis response, civil engineers, military personnel – people who have to imagine the end for themselves. make sure that it will never happen. But there are others: fundamentalist evangelists waiting for an abduction. The libertarian preppers who flee the government and are proud of their self-sufficiency. Conspiracy theorists and Internet nihilists. Anyone worried about the future of the planet.
For most people, it's optional. You choose to be someone who thinks in the end, and this choice colors your attitude in the present, for better or for worse. In video games, however, the fate of civilization is old hat. It's so familiar that we passed by him, putting a name of genre on what comes next: The post-apocalypse, where we find games like the new single player game exclusive to the PlayStation 4 Days gone.
Post-apocalyptic stories are an easy reference for video games, precisely because they justify all sorts of behaviors that are difficult to manage in another context. For developers interested in rooting video games in credible stories, they release. They provide a context in which violent people with sticky fingers seem quite reasonable. The problem, then, arises when a game tells a story in this familiar context and is finally trapped by its tropes. Past days displays few things that go beyond his many influences and his contemporaries, being content rather to be a hollow simulacrum.
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In Past days You play as a man named Deacon St. John. It survives in the forests of rural Oregon after the end of the world, when hordes of zombie-like rabid monsters, called Freakers, invaded everything, causing the collapse of society. Deacon's past life as a member of the Mongrels TM biker gang makes him perfectly suited to life in The Shit, as they call him, and perfectly suited to be a protagonist of the video game. He has a motorcycle, he drives it, takes care of it and improves. He masters guns and has no qualms about using them. He has a nice past, where he is separated from his wife at the end of everything and presumes it dead. And it has a code, which primarily involves rage against anyone who dares to point a gun at an unarmed woman.
Deacon does not have much that does not seem to be there to make a video game, and a very specific type of video game. You know what kind of game, because you've probably played it more than once: a third-person action game with guns for shooting, cudgels for swing and recipes for making weapons. A game in which you search for vague resources like "scrap" and "rags", meet different factions of human beings who want your death, and various phenotypes of Freaker who are suspicious and, between them, countless corpses to loot. And, of course, there are experience points and skill trees with abilities to unlock.
These systems are all part of the standard of big budget video games. It's like a laugh in a sitcom – a standard procedure for mass work, even if it indicates creative complacency. Including them is fine, but it puts more pressure on other aspects of a game to elevate the whole thing.
There is not much to report in Past days if you were looking for a phone card, use a signature that makes it distinctive. The best place to look for this is in the bike you use as a deacon. It can be upgraded even if there are only a few improvements left for each main element, including speed, traction, damage resistance and fuel tank size. The cosmetic improvements are more numerous but also limited: you can paint only part of the frame of the bike or apply a single skin wholesale. You do not specify the bike to handle different situations. It is naturally improved when the game offers you new parts and a faster and more robust bike would be useful.
Since Past days requires you to be near your bike to save or travel fast, and as you need enough fuel in the tank to make the trip, you must be responsible for managing the fuel supply. You must also stop and make repairs when your bike suffers too much damage. It is implicit that your potential interactions with your bike could give something meaningful and distinct, a bike that goes well beyond a painting and a headlamp. Instead, the game treats the bike in the same way that other games treat horses. It is your turn. The work is done with such efficiency that you might forget that motorcycles are, in fact, great.
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The overabundance of post-apocalyptic fiction in pop culture in general and in video games in particular has led to a set of beliefs and tropes that have become the cornerstone of these stories: a moral nihilism that places compassion as a weakness , that the end justifies the mean, that there is a thin line that protects us from them and that extends directly from the barrel of a firearm. In the post-apocalypse, we take these truths for granted, but to challenge them is to fight against gravity.
Past days almost dare to argue with that, arguing that it may be wise to oppose the basic calculation of survival that we have come to recognize as necessary and obvious, something more for the preservation of the society only firearms that believe in order and rule of law. He puts these notions in the mouths of characters who quarrel with Deacon, a vagabond for whom being seduced is the only thing that matters.
Towards the end of the first act of the game, you will meet the most famous voice that contradicts the Deacon dictator's philosophy: Iron Mike, a man who has concluded a treaty with the most hostile human enemies of the game and who believes in holiness life for all, even the monstrous. "You will get killed," Deacon told him, believing that Iron Mike was a fool. "Do not worry about yourself, you'll be killed so easily," he replies.
Instead of asking Deacon to debate these ideas and give the players constructive ways to engage with them, the game introduces a series of antagonists that are unquestionably worse than the existential threat of Freaker hordes and Deacon's ambiguous morality. , bad guys who force everyone to put these debates aside. , or even yield to the tropes of survival and their tired absolutes. He removes any sense of self-examination that his story might entail and buries it further by plunging it into a story of love, fraternity, and vagabond learning to return home. It is a saccharine framework that attempts to write on disordered and incoherent themes with feeling, to draw more attention to them.
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Playing Past days is a bit like playing most other games of his stature. You will visit merchant camps to buy equipment and characters to talk to. These characters will send you jobs, usually involving finding something or someone or killing something or someone. They are all solid, with the exception of the frequent and confusing stealth missions in which you must spy on government researchers, while remaining close enough to spy on you while avoiding their armed escorts. Stealth in Past days Hilarity is fundamental – crouch down in a bush to Deacon's neck and every character will think you're invisible – but these missions are frustrating by making the guards unconquerable and arbitrarily forbidding you to use stones to distract them. Be spotted once, and you have to restart them.
Except if low, most of the main and secondary missions of the game are stable. The best missions are hordes of mostly optional freakers. Hordes are the most technically impressive thing Past daysmassive, frightening swarms of monsters that seem to number in the hundreds. (It's impossible to count them, but you can guess how many bonuses they leave behind, a horde left more than 200.) The hordes freakers must be planned to be eliminated and will invade you if all that what you do is square. with a very big gun. They also have the means to walk around places that deserve to be assigned to other missions and have the pleasant effect of being the only truly frightening and soothing thing in a game that evokes the apocalypse of zombies. Confronting a horde is exciting and fun, giving the impression that everything else is trite.
There are some small touches in its design that suggest Past daysThe developers have sympathy for the player of big budget games. Instead of a standard quest log, Past days follow your progress through various "stories". Some, such as the one that is responsible for the optional task of cleaning the Freaker nests that you find in the world, are glorified task lists. Most, however, constitute a real attempt to keep track of how each mission advances each secondary plot and character arc, thus doubling a good way to remind you of the beats of a story after the 39; another. Each of them clearly indicates your reward for each mission and does a lot to help you prioritize what is worthwhile in a given session and what is best saved for later, or completely ignored.
On the other hand, there are times when Past days seems barely holding up, with frequent bugs that range from fun to frustrating. A puddle on a bridge became like an ocean, swallowing me and drowning me in the river below. The frequency of images stuttered and sometimes froze squarely for a few seconds. And the audio was generally messy, with sometimes silent gunshots, my motorcycle engine idling and dialogs going into volumes making it difficult to determine who is talking: too low for long strolls on a motorcycle or too noisy comparison with the sound of the engine that suddenly plunged for no reason.
During all this time, the game remained playable and it only crashed once on my Playstation 4 Pro, late in my 30 hours of play, by corrupting a backup file that I had created just before things do not go wrong. Fortunately, Past days is generous with autosaves, and I have never felt in danger of losing a lot of progress.
Despite its huge bugginess, there is an efficiency in the design of Past days. It's very easy to continue playing, as unoriginal as it is.
***
But we were talking about the end of the world.
One possible explanation for the love affair of video games with the post-apocalypse oxymoron is that it is reductive: Doomsday means the end of almost everything, and that means we can erase all the complicated rules and feelings, contradictory and disordered with humanity and in their place, replace them with something more primal. Have you survived or not? It's a simple binary, and as elaborate systems run by computers, video games are very effective at handling binaries.
The problem occurs when video games force the score. Past days It's a third-person action game with a cooked survival layer. It's about taking pictures and looking for useful materials to improve your chances of staying alive in an increasingly hostile environment. These are expressed by the game, and even when said game is derived as Past days is, he can always be convincing.
Decide what it's like means through the narrative is quite another thing, and where the tropes of the post-apocalypse become more squeaky. In Past daysDeacon St. John did horrible things, and all the others too. Deacon and his cohorts would like things to not happen that way, but they are, and they are the breaks. And it's tiring. It is exhausting to see another gruff white man experiencing the extremes of humanity brought on by disaster, being torn between a pure and reliable personal interest and the fragile strength of the community, as if it were the only two ways of be. It is the discharge of water into the ocean, without proposing anything new in favor of a formless fusion in the arguments advanced by ten years of war. The dead who walk and countless post-apocalyptic games of his ilk. Look no further than game developers calling the zombies "freakers" and waiting for us to take this as something new.
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