Developer Fntastic announced in late January that it would be throwing its hat into the zombie survival genre with its upcoming title, The Day Before. The gameplay looks like a mix between Day Z and The Last of Us, and the trailers have showcased some exciting moments so far. Seeing as the game will be dropping players' custom characters into a zombie infested open-world, there has to be an origin for each player that enters the game. Well, it turns out that The Day Before will start players out by using a familiar trope in horror, and even more familiar to the past hit zombie TV show The Walking Dead.
The initial protagonist in The Walking Dead, Rick Grimes, wakes up in a hospital after a horrible injury has left him in a coma for over a month. As Rick was kept alive through intravenous fluids and remnant staff, society collapsed and a lot of people died around him. It seems that The Day Before will be taking a note from this origin, dropping the players in a character who is just waking up in the zombie apocalypse. The world is beautifully detailed, and the players will likely have to figure out what happened. This isn't a unique trope to a new character in a game, and has been used in one form or other in the past.
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In The Walking Dead, Rick wakes up in the hospital weakened from the atrophy, and fatigued from lack of water and nutrition. As he finds his bearings, he quickly realizes that something really big has happened and he is at a serious disadvantage. This plays into a classic horror trend of not being present for the actual action itself, but waking up in time to deal with the aftermath. In the first season of the series, Rick acts as a surrogate for the audience, as they learn about the current apocalypse at the same rate he does.
Not much has been shown about how the player character enters the game world, but the site for the game currently states that player will "wake up alone" in a world they don't recognize. Players will have to journey forth collecting resources and looking for clues to see what led to the zombie plague and the downfall of society. This is the same principle as what The Walking Dead did with Rick, and will likely be used to explore exposition in The Day Before. However, unlike Rick, the players don't have any family members waiting for them once they wake up.
Starting a story with a character who is entering into a crisis without any information can be an extremely useful storytelling tool. However, the exploration and in-game lore discovery shouldn't all be dumped on the player at once, instead being spaced out and maybe leaving it up to the players as a whole to put the story together. New players to The Day Before could hang around the survivor civilizations after selling their loot, and pass rumors about the notes and newspapers they found around the world.
While what has been shown of The Day Before has looked promising, there has been no beta and no release date so far. There is also no telling how much the story will take from zombie franchises' past like The Walking Dead. However, if Fntastic can manage a similar pacing in allowing the player to find out about the zombie apocalypse in their own time, it could heavily improve the level of immersion in the world. With such a detailed world, any boost to the immersion is bound to push the game's popularity that much further.
The Day Before is currently in development for PC.