13 Days Of Halloween: Game Review: A Day Without Me (Xbox Series X)

Leaving an overriding feeling of ‘is that it?’, A Day Without Me is a simplistic puzzle/adventure horror game. One with minimalistic visuals and sounds. A game that promises more than it actually manages to deliver.

The player takes on the role of an unknown man who wakes up in his home one day to find his town deathly silent. Everyone has gone, seemingly disappeared in an instant, regardless of what they were doing at the time. The streets are deserted, houses lie empty, cars crashed and blood splashed around. Something bad happened, but what? and why are you still here?

Questions that you would think the game would answer but doesn’t. Instead, A Day Without Me chooses to create massive amounts of ambiguity but lacks the cohesive direction needed to make this work. The initial tension created by the mystery dissolves as you get lost in the similar looking streets, solve simplistic puzzles and deal with a menagerie of confusing threats. Not helped by translation issues and technical bugs.

There’s a sense that developer Gamecom Team (published by ChiliDog Interactive) wanted to create horror that exists in the mind and there are times where you can see that. However, it never feels effective or relevant to whatever the overall plot is.

It’s not a fun game to play and the lack of anything going on makes it a slog to get through. Although it’s not a long game by any stretch; confusion over objectives, where you need to go next and what you need to do to trigger the next part, drags its length out. Knowing exactly what to do and where to go, the game can be finished in under 30 minutes but most first runs are more like double that time.

Although why anyone would play through this twice is perhaps the biggest mystery. There’s no replay value. Even the game’s few collectibles don’t really add much to the game’s confusing narrative. It’s a wholly unsatisfying experience. Where a good idea amounts to nothing and the experience feels like a total waste of time.