#DAYS GONE VOICE CAST CODE#

It’s one thing to present players with a character they’re supposed to feel conflicted about, but what am I supposed to do with a person who says you “can’t shoot a woman unless you have to,” while later selling a woman he saved to a labor camp, knowing she’ll spend her whole life digging ditches for the tyrant running the place? He doesn’t just suck because he moves around the world as if he’s just learning to walk and super frustrating to control around packs of zombies, he sucks because the game tries to present him as a morally complex anti-hero and it doesn’t land. When they’re given moments to play off one another, each sells the relationship. (Much credit, though, to the actors-especially the central trio of Sam Witwer (Deacon), Jim Pirri (Boozer), and Courtnee Draper (Sarah)-for imbuing their characters with enough humanity in key moments to sometimes paper over the compromised writing. It’s not hard to imagine a much stronger game where those three were playing off one another, and it’s wild how much this extremely long game simultaneously feels deeply underwritten. Boozer? He’s sidelined for Story Reasons in the opening hour of the game. We never get such generous time with anyone in Days Gone. Fast forward two years into the future, and it’s Deacon and Boozer on the road. Deacon shoves Sarah on the chopper, and in a moment meant to lay the groundwork for Deacon’s inherent goodness, he stays behind with Boozer, fearing he won’t survive what comes next. Deacon and Boozer, his biker buddy, track down a government helicopter, but it only has room for-wait for it-two. Deacon’s wife, Sarah, has been stabbed and is bleeding out. The game opens in the midst of the freaker panic. Days Gone has neither, despite what its many hours of dour cutscenes with people acting extremely serious tries to suggest.

But that itself is selling the narrative failings of Days Gone-and Deacon himself-way short.Ī moral code, applying old norms in a world without “rules,” is a post-apocalyptic trope because it’s classically effective at drawing tension from the base premise: life would be easier if you treated everyone like disposable garbage, but what’s that mean for the soul? But using this trope effectively requires either careful setup or especially sharp execution, and ideally both.

#DAYS GONE VOICE CAST CODE#

John, who roams the world in the years after an event turned the whole world to shit, claiming to operate by a “code” but refusing to allow said code to operationally manifest into action. This is true of both the clumsy mechanics, which are ever present and impossible to ignore, and its story, following the boring moral compass of biker Deacon St. Rather than settling on a direction, it proceeds in all directions, hoping a more-is-better philosophy will prove blinding. It’s a hodgepodge bucket list of Stuff You Expect in Open World Games, half-baked ideas executed better elsewhere-several in another game published by Sony, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us-and a failed morality tale whose emotional stakes are constantly undermined.ĭays Gone refuses to settle on what it wants to be or what it wants to say. But after more than 20 hours roaming Sony’s unnecessarily sprawling and achingly misguided open world zombie game, I’m numb. These moments, among others, gave me pause during my earliest hours with Days Gone, the first original franchise from developer Sony Bend since 1999’s Syphon Filter for the original PlayStation.

Days gone voice cast