The Day Before gets yet another last-second delay

It’s safe to say that few games have caused as much confusion and had such a bizarre story behind it as The Day Before. If developer Fntastic is to be believed, it’s a post-apocalyptic survival MMO that was still delisted on Steam one month from launch, as we reported a few weeks ago. The game was said to be launching next week, but in a shocking (not really) twist of fate, it’s been delayed.

The Day Before’s strange story started back in January 2023, when the game’s Steam page disappeared overnight. Fntastic, at the time, said that the game – which had planned to launch on March 1, 2023 and was at one point the second most wishlisted game on Steam – had been pulled and delayed due to a trademark dispute with a calendar app.

It was at this point that it began to dawn on people that The Day Before may not be real. The lead moderator for the game’s discord said that nobody had seen real gameplay for the game, and claimed that any prior clips of the game were glorified tech demos using prebuilt assets. It was delayed to November 10, which Fntastic said was more than enough time to get the legal trouble sorted.

The Day Before developers later claimed that the delay was planned before the trademark issue, contradicting earlier statements that suggested the trademark dispute was the cause. The sudden change in story did not help Fntastic convince people that the game was real, but at least it had a release date.

A trailer released shortly after the strange episode, but that gameplay trailer actually convinced more people The Day Before wasn’t real. The trailer was filled with empty environments, 90 seconds of fiddling around in menus, and very little of substance. The trailer was subsequently pulled, again due to this mysterious and apparently nefarious calendar app developer, which didn’t help either.

And that brings us to yesterday, when Fntastic revealed the game had “won back” its name at the Intellectual Property Tribunal. It said that the game had been delayed by a month, and was now set to be released in early access on Steam on December 7, 2023. The full release – along with a promised port for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S – will come at some undefined point in the future.

Honestly, this new information raises almost as many questions as it answers. If the game was supposed to launch in full in March, why is it releasing in early access next month? What actually is this game, that we’ve seen so little of and know next to nothing about? And who in their right mind is going to spend $39 on an unfinished version of the game next month?

We may never get answers to these questions, but we are eagerly awaiting early December to see if this game actually comes out, or if the can is kicked down the road once more.