"9/4/2026, 2:59:18 PM" version for "The Day Before" article
"This was our first big experience. Shit happens." - FNTASTIC
About The Day Before
The Day Before was an Unreal slop post-apocalyptic open-world "MMO" zombie survival game developed by FNTASTIC and published by Mytona. It was priced at $40. It was one of the lowest-rated games on Steam in history, a title usually reserved for the likes of War of the Three Kingdoms or the review bombed Overwatch 2 after it was added to the platform.
It was also given the honor of being rated at an unfathomably rare score of 1.0/10 by IGN given to only a scant few games, mostly shovelware. "How did it go so wrong that even those dog shit game journalists gave it a 1?" you may ask.
On January 29, 2021, the first trailer for the game released on IGN's YouTube channel. It showcased stunning graphics, driving a car, voice chat, abandoned city with a fitting atmosphere, looting, PvP and PvE combat, dynamic weather, crafting. Pretty much the whole nine yards and anything you could want out of an online zombie survival game, only missing base building.
Now, even a monkey after a lobotomy understood that this was a cherry picked, pre-rendered, scripted trailer, but it has done one very important thing: set insanely high expectations. The trailer itself has spread like a wildfire to the joy of Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev, the two co-founders of FNTASTIC.
A month later, another video appeared on IGN's YouTube channel. It consisted of the brothers themselves sharing a few words about the game and thanking for the interest and cutting into a 2 minute clip of some more PvP combat footage on streets.
It's worth pointing out the subtle foreshadowing from one of the brothers:
"[...] a real breakthrough for the MMO survival genre!" - Eduard Gotovtsev
After that, there were a few more trailers and an extended gameplay video until April seen by millions of people. And then nothing until October, when they released another trailer via IGN on YouTube alongside the release date. It was set for June 2022. It even became the most wishlisted game on Steam at the time, blitzing through Stalker 2 and Starfield.
Then they used all that attention to shill a game they were making on the side, Prop Night, basically prop hunt but with a single hunter and a couple of mechanics stolen from Dead by Daylight. It was received rather well, forsen played it a couple of times too.
After that, we only got a video on NVIDIA's YouTube channel in January showcasing the game's graphics in 4K and with RTX. Wow, this game must be real if even NVIDIA is releasing a video like this, just look at the graphics and the gameplay!
What followed is another few months of radio silence until May 2022. It's 1 month until the release of the game and we basically have no info from the developers. We finally got any kind of communication from FNTASTIC and it was bad news: they were delaying the game by a year and switching from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Slop 5. Upgrading the game engine by a major version this far into the development? Only short of forsen's genius.
This whole tomfoolery continued for more then a year, including another delay due to "trademark issues" because they never bothered to even trademark the title or people discovering that the game was made by "volunteers." And then even more trailers, more releases, more controversies, shilling their Russian Microsoft Teams clone, you get the point.
There are multiple great documentaries on YouTube explaining the more detailed story of the game before and after it has been released, I can recommend watching them if you're interested in learning more about this shitshow:
- The Absolute Chaos of The Day Before by big boss
- The Day Before - A Scam to Remember by Skill Up
- The Most Popular Game on Steam Was A Massive Scam? by KiraTV
The Day Of
After all those shenanigans, the game finally released on December 7, 2023, over 1.5 years after the original release date. And of course, as an Early Access title for $40.
Forsen played it on day one, right after it released. The game opened up with a very promising 4 FPS cutscene. The main menu offered no settings and threw the player straight into the character creation.
The randomly generated character he got right away reminded people of Sodapoppin. He settled for the "Ghost" class, though the trait bonuses likely didn't even work either way. Forsen has only played around with the character creator for a few minutes before he settled for a dollar store Keanu Reeves.
The creation system wasn't advanced enough to warrant a long and careful session like with Avowed.
He then proceeded to delete the character because he realized he didn't want to call him "Forsen" and was only baiting for the classic "Don't steal my name" joke. To his surprise, nobody did. He recreated his budget Keanu Reeves and called him "JustGetAHouse" as he does in all online games.
After some trouble with finding a server that wasn't full, he finally manages to enter the game. That's right, the game wasn't actually an MMO, which was one of its main selling points. It was an extraction shooter based on servers which, at most, supported 32 players. A short cutscene, some tutorial, talking to the NPCs, the usual tutorial stuff. You could feel a bit of jank just from watching, but if you ignored the fact graphics were utter dog shit compared to the trailers, you wouldn't think much of it just yet.
He then was allowed to visit his land plot and Just Build A House. Or rather, choose a tent from a list of prefabs. This game had no actual base building, just presets and placing some furniture he wasn't even crafting, just being given freebies from the furniture store.
Having finished his modern art exposition, he headed back to Woodberry, the game's hub, when he noticed something wrong about the first-person camera. It turned out he was a short king, and even more peculiar, the camera was located at his crotch.
Forsen finally understood that he might be in for a good time, but certainly not because the game was polished to perfection.
After receiving his lunch money and browsing the equipment store he headed out to his first adventure in the New Fortune City. It was completely devoid of any zombies unlike what you'd expect from a zombie survival game. At most, you could hear some constant gunshots in the distance which could've very well been fake.
He finally encountered the first zombie.
Three headshots to kill a zombie and a 0.5 second lag between the last shot and it dropping dead? Not looking good.
However, he eventually spotted his next goal: looting the nearby grocery store. That's where he found out about the worst mechanic in the game which he would have to constantly deal with - the sound alarms. 
After more, mostly aimless, wandering around in search of quest items, forsen got himself into a bit of a situation, catching attention of both a player and a zombie, so he retreats to the building to hopefully quickly dispose of the zombie. What he did not expect was being assaulted by a zombified Ryan Gosling who took 6 headshots from a rifle and 2 shotgun shells before finally falling.
Not long after however, he dies to another player, losing everything he had on him and respawning in Woodberry, being forced to listen to air horns until he finished loading in.
The cycle repeats: grab some equipment, go out, listen to endless alarms, wander around aimlessly, die to a player, back to Woodberry. At least this time he killed someone.
This continued for a few runs, until he eventually realized he has spent almost 3 hours and made zero progress, did not find any interesting loot, did not craft anything or didn't even manage to extract with his loot. Everything at constant 500+ms ping judging by delay between a shots and zombies dying.
The final nail in the coffin was this death to a player. Trying to put it into words wouldn't be able to explain the absurdity, so check it for yourself below. Notably, he did something he doesn't do too often afterwards - checked user reviews on Steam only to learn about even more tomfoolery by the devs like deleting all previous footage of the open world showcases.
Conclusion
The game has lasted 4 days, less than Concord and Highguard. Players were able to find heaps of pre-made assets from the asset store that were at best slightly altered and at worse just pasted in, which isn't inherently something wrong, unless your game is a blatant asset flip with almost a hundred assets. You can read more on that in this r/TheDayBefore post.
Despite reportedly selling 200 thousand copies, half of them have been refunded. The founders thus decided to close down FNTASTIC. The Day Beyond has been de-listed on Steam and Valve offered a full refund to anyone who bought the game, effectively resulting in FNTASTIC not receiving a dime as Steam has a 30 day period before you can cash out your money.
The icing on the cake? This now-deleted tweet from FNTASTIC:
"This was our first big experience. Shit happens."
- @FntasticHQ on Twitter, archived post on WaybackMachine
202X gaming I guess.