Days Gone is a weird one! I think my overwhelmingly positive option is largely based in expecting it to be bad and then having it be good for exactly the reasons it could have been bad, because it intentionally engages things that made me go :/ (toxic masculinity, women in refrigerators, and the particular mix of "liberal" and conservative inherit to its setting which interacts in complex/icky ways with a narrative about social destruction and rebuilding). That gives it a kind of slow start, toxic vibes in a crapsack world until, finally, things start to change.
But that's not a disrecommendation! I loved it. I think it's fascinating set against other zombie stories interested in social rebuilding and in the question of how an inherently violent setting sculpts the work of rebuilding within it; it doesn't try to have the gravitas of The Last of Us but it's still in conversation with The Last of Us, among other titles (I thought a lot about Day of the Triffids). And, fannishly, the line delivery & mocap has a sort of naturalistic, memetic rhythm that makes the character interactions ridiculously charming.
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Days Gone is a weird one! I think my overwhelmingly positive option is largely based in expecting it to be bad and then having it be good for exactly the reasons it could have been bad, because it intentionally engages things that made me go :/ (toxic masculinity, women in refrigerators, and the particular mix of "liberal" and conservative inherit to its setting which interacts in complex/icky ways with a narrative about social destruction and rebuilding). That gives it a kind of slow start, toxic vibes in a crapsack world until, finally, things start to change.
But that's not a disrecommendation! I loved it. I think it's fascinating set against other zombie stories interested in social rebuilding and in the question of how an inherently violent setting sculpts the work of rebuilding within it; it doesn't try to have the gravitas of The Last of Us but it's still in conversation with The Last of Us, among other titles (I thought a lot about Day of the Triffids). And, fannishly, the line delivery & mocap has a sort of naturalistic, memetic rhythm that makes the character interactions ridiculously charming.