A Day Without Me | PS4 Review
Updated: Nov 19, 2021
A Day Without Me is an isometric puzzle adventure game developed by Gamecom Team and published by ChiliDog Interactive. It is currently available on Windows PC, PlayStation, XBox, and Nintendo Switch, and for my review I was playing on the PlayStation 4 version.
A Day Without Me begins with you waking up in your bedroom with a painfully loud and annoying alarm going off. You have to guide your character - who bears an uncanny resemblance to Steve from Minecraft - through your house to discover that some very strange events are happening. Eventually you make it out into the street where you live and as you explore your neighbourhood, you begin to learn that there is certainly something very peculiar going on. You discover that you are basically the only person around and have to try and figure out what is going on in town, solving puzzles along the way to achieve this goal.
Despite the bright graphics and general style of the game, A Day Without Me takes some dark turns and borders on having some horror elements which absolutely took me by surprise. With this said, it was a very interesting and slightly bizarre take on horror which made the game a lot more endearing to me as it added an extra layer of “what the hell is going on here?” to the game. There’s no dialogue within the game nor is there any soundtrack so this feeling of confusion and isolation is only made deeper by the eerie noises scattered around. I really did feel very confused about what was going on throughout A Day Without Me and quite frankly at the best of times I didn’t quite know what the point was.
A Day Without Me is kind of an open world game where you simply have to explore to find your objective but I feel like with all of the random events going on and such that it really could have benefitted from even some written dialogue or some form of direction. I do understand that some developers don’t like too much hand-holding in their games and they like to leave things up to interpretation which is absolutely fine, but even still, I don’t actually know what my interpretation really is and usually by a certain point in a game I start to get an idea of what is going on, however this feeling never arrived throughout my time playing this.
There are a variety of puzzles throughout A Day Without Me, none of them are terribly taxing to figure out, and sometimes you won’t even realise you're doing a puzzle until you are suddenly on fire after stepping on something repeatedly and don’t understand what is going on. Whilst this game is relatively simple to play through, meaning it wouldn’t be overly difficult for your average or less confident gamer, I feel like the lack of direction and narrative would be off-putting. Even for me, I really just felt like I was functioning through a strange world rather than living through a story or solving a problem.
Overall, I would say that while A Day Without Me was an interesting experience, the jury is still out on whether that was a wholly positive or negative experience. I found myself feeling a little bit lost and confused despite the fact I was making progress and I would have liked or hoped for a little bit more exposition story wise. I find it hard to know what the creators actually want the player to take away from this game and it really made it feel like a pointless exercise for me where I was wandering around lost and confused.
Lj’s Rating: 2 days without you out of 5.
For more information on A Day Without Me please use the following links...
Gamecom Team - Developer | Facebook | Twitter | Website
ChiliDog Interactive - Publisher | YouTube | Twitter | Website
Many thanks to ChiliDog Interactive for the Review Key.
A Day Without Me | Steam Store | PlayStation Store | XBox Live | Nintendo eShop
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