In case you missed it, The Day Before was finally released by FNTASTIC on December 7, after years of people believing it didn’t even exist in the first place. Well, fast-forward to today, and the consensus is that it’d have been better if it did turn out to be nothing more than vaporware. With 13,500 ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ reviews on Steam just three days after it was released, The Day Before is experiencing the fastest and most well-documented implosion of any game so far this year.
And with games like Rise of Kong, Gollum, and The Walking Dead: Destinies having been released throughout 2023, that’s a tough title to achieve.
Overwhelming Flop
When The Day Before went live on Steam, it quickly gathered a peak player count of around 30,000 users. If we fast-forward just twenty-four hours, we can see that peak player count dipped to just 6,600. That’s mostly because the game’s servers were borderline inaccessible, but there are other factors at play as well.
For instance, The Day Before is already notoriously buggy, even for an early-access game. It lacks key features – like melee combat – and it features strange, almost AI-generated in-game advertisements. It’s not an MMO, as FNTASTIC claimed for so long, but instead, it’s more of an extraction shooter. When the base concept of the game changes just as it launches, you know there’s something seriously wrong with the project.
At the time of writing, The Day Before sits in 7th place overall on the ‘Worst-Rated Steam Games’ chart. It’s nestled in between Uriel’s Chasm and Identity, and sitting a few spots behind Modern Warfare II (2022) and Overwatch 2.
Before the game went live, FNTASTIC posted a pre-emptive statement to Twitter that kindly requested gamers refrain from accusing them of ‘scamming’. Make of that what you will.
Have you played The Day Before yet?
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