Day One: Garry's Incident Review

Around this point you've probably already attributed this game the same level of entertainment value as that of a dirty sock, but it does have one redeeming feature: Garry. Take the voice-acting prowess of primary-school nativity play, infuse it with character writing on the level of teenage fan-fiction, sprinkle it all on top of the cookie-cutter back-story and you have a character whose every line is pure, unsullied gold. Garry quickly became the single meaningful reason for me to continue through the game, simply because I earnestly wanted to hear him spout more lines of monologue like a ruptured sewage pipe. Cringeworthy doesn't do justice to it; Garry is nothing short of priceless. What's his motivation? Who cares, I just want to hear him deliver more of what somebody must have once thought were witty one-liners.

All of this could be forgiven. Well no, it couldn't, but it would only add up to a game that is merely edging on bad rather than downright abortive. What pushes Day One over the edge into the chasm of misery is – all together now, make sure you're in key – the astounding quantity of bugs. Takedown: Red Sabre was a good start, but Day One shows the true level of brokenness that a game can plummet to and still get a Steam release. Even with near-daily patches for a week after release, the game is a veritable vivarium for the aspiring bug enthusiast. Harmless ones, like being able to phase through solid objects and pick up items from inside them, or the mediocre visuals being sullied by bizarre kaleiodoscope-like vegetation behaviour, or context-sensitive cues vanishing into the ether, are the sort to just elicit an irritated sigh.

But in the big scheme of things they are mere beetles that scuttle around the ankles of bigger, more menacing issues. Don't, whatever you do, try to switch windows while playing this game, because when you come back the graphics will have bugged out harder than the eyes of that bloke from Total Recall. Once or twice I witnessed a cutscene that had clearly been intended to play in an entirely different section of the game, which was confusing but quite incomparable to the time I tried to bandage myself with a possessed man running towards me. In some bizarre display of passive-aggressiveness he stopped about an inch away and stared at me while I tended to my wounds, his glowing eyes boring deep into my psyche. Then, the moment the achingly-slow quick-time event had finished, I was whisked back to one of the earliest autosaves in the game without any warning, dialogue or explanation. That's right! Such was the intensity of his stare that I was blasted back in time. What a novel feature.

Day One is a game that begs many questions. Some of them pertain to suspension of disbelief, like 'why is there a fully-functional flintlock pistol lying discarded on the ground of this remote native community?' or 'who bothered to scratch all these crafting recipes into the solid rock?' Some are more concerned with game design, like 'what's the point of having me complete this unchanging easy quick-time event in lieu of an actual combat sequence?' or 'why would you space out checkpoints so stingily and then fail to implement a quicksave button?' or even the ever-present 'why is everything taller than ankle-height accompanied by an infuriating invisible wall?' Some, mostly those related to the game's exciting plethora of bugs, are too lengthy and expletive-laced to list here. Any one of these would be enough to earn a bout of vitriol in any other game, but here they are mere droplets in a storm, lost in the noise.

Day One is crude from every angle, stuffed with bad design and has zero direction or pacing, but all of this just serves to make the game inherently kind of adorable, like a drunk man singing J-pop karaoke. Entertainment in Day One comes not from the game itself, but from witnessing its failings. It's still impossible to recommend it to anybody under the sun, but maybe that's not such a problem anymore.