My question isn't "is days gone fun?" it's "is Days Gone fun for 30+ hours?"
Days Gone makes some interesting choices that kept my play session engaging, and the sections of its story that I experienced piqued my interest enough that I was legitimately frustrated that I couldn’t continue playing at the end of the demo. While I’ll admit that I initially rolled my eyes at yet another Gruff White Male Protagonist™ in a grim world - especially one with such a Gruff White Male Protagonist™-ey name as Deacon St. John - I ended up getting far more invested than I’d initially expected. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose - this is a first-party Sony title, and Bend is no stranger to writing around well-developed characters and games with a strong narrative focus, either.Yes, “Deek” may seem at face value to be yet another gravelly-voiced antihero, but I found myself genuinely empathizing with him (largely due to some really good performance work by Star Wars’ Sam Witwer) as I learned more about his obligatorily tragic backstory and while interacting with other survivors. Though an early-on reference to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had me prepared for a lot of cliches written by big hammy fists, I found myself enjoying their rapport with Deacon and the several threads of storylines I got to pull at - predictable plot twists included.“
The devs weren't kidding with their "This world comes for you" tagline."
The only goal you have at the onset is to survive long enough to ride north, away from the Farewell Wilderness (the region where Days Gone is set). This is smoothly MacGuffined into a quest loop when Deacon’s bike is stolen and chopped for parts, resulting in him needing to spend the rest of the game building a new one. This eventually leads to what seems to be a main story that chases leads from Deacon’s past, but it also uses the idea of “storylines” to smartly track all of your ancillary progress throughout the world. Clearing out freaker infestations or clearing cultist camps all further their own storylines, and improve your relationships with the various survivor camps you’ve managed to ally yourself with.From these camps, you’re able to start new quests, like hunting down troublesome bandits or locating lost survivors, or purchase weapons or upgrade your bike using credit you’ve earned. It’s a clever bit of world-building, this particular currency system - you don’t trade in bottle caps or bullets, rather you simply build credit with a camp when you do them favors. The more favors you do for a given camp, the more they’ll trust you, allowing you to take their more valuable items, like assault rifles or silenced pistols (though you can always make a silencer yourself with an oil filter from one of the many derelict cars scattered around the world).You’ll need the best equipment possible, too, since it seems that the developers weren’t kidding with their “the world comes for you” tagline. I explored two of Days Gone’s biomes - the heavily forested Cascade Wilderness, which has been shown off in most of the press material so far, and the newly-debuted Belknap Hotsprings, a stretch of high desert pocked with small pools and rivulets - and while I never saw any of the massive hundreds-strong “