Those radio conversations, as well as the chats Deacon has with passengers on the back of his bike, clearly weren’t performance captured. As you explore the open world, radio transmissions come through from characters you’ve met, and there’s so many of them that the game seems to get confused about which ones it’s already played. It constantly replays conversations for no reason at all. Listening to the same dialogue on repeat is Days Gone’s kink. They’re easy enough, but they’re repeated far too often and your only punishment for failure is having to listen to the same dialogue again and again. These quests have you infiltrating government agency landing zones and eavesdropping on scientists. To earn these flashbacks, you either drive to a grave site and listen to Deacon monologue about accountants and other mundane stuff, or you tackle one of many instant-fail stealth missions. You also see how Deacon and his wife were separated in a sequence that feels like a straight-to-DVD rip-off of The Last of Us’s prologue.
You’re told Deacon’s backstory via flashbacks of the world before a virus turned everyone into incontinent zombies. While you wait for your buddy, Boozer (I swear I’m not making these names up), you ride between encampments and do odd jobs, all while trying to find out what happened to your wife. The plot’s driving force for the first third of the game has you waiting for your best friend to recover from an injury so you can ride north. The hordes are visually impressive, stressful and exciting to deal with, but woefully underused. The bike is genuinely refreshing - deserts, mountains, and mud-tracked forests take advantage of your maneuverability, and you feel every bump and slide. There are two things that set Days Gone apart from other open world games: the fact that a motorbike is your main form of transportation, and there are sometimes thousands of zombies on-screen. Apparently this particular breed of freakers were steroid abusers before being infected. It’s a world where the anatomy of the big, brutish not-zombies (they’re called freakers and they’re functionally identical to zombies, but they shit themselves) is explained in an audio recording. “There’s this rare plant called lavender,” says another. “Those anti-whatever-they’re-called,” multiple characters say. This is a world where many of the characters inexplicably don’t know what antibiotics and lavender are. In my playthrough, I clear the holy site with an LMG and grenades, then Deacon does the only logical thing: firebombs the church so nobody can vandalise it ever again. He’s like a sexist, murderous Batman who wears a backwards cap and a biker gang cut. He never hesitates to use his gun, though he doesn’t shoot women unless he has to - it’s his code. John, finds looters wrecking the church where he married his missing wife.ĭeacon is a drifter who makes a living hunting bounties across the Pacific Northwest, monetising the post-apocalypse.
There’s a point about a quarter way into Days Gone where our hero, Deacon St.