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A survival guide to the Freaker apocalypse in Days Gone
A beginner’s guide to scorching nests, bending time and staying alive in Sony’s other zombie apocalypse game, Days Gone.
My God. You’re alive.
OK: focus up, because a zombie apocalypse is happening and we’re about to throw quite a lot of information at you. Good news first: you’re married to a beautiful woman, so well done you if that lines up with your romantic aspirations. If it doesn’t, more good news: you haven’t seen her in two years and there’s that zombie apocalypse going on. No-one would blame you for moving on at this point.
You’re also in a biker gang – or rather you were, but now there’s just two of you. A biker two-some. A biker duet. Anyway: you (Deacon St. John – a man whose name even sounds like a type of leather) know how to handle yourself. That being said, nearly everyone who isn’t dead is a zombie (though we call them ‘Freakers’) or a bandit or in a cult that sets people on fire. Your odds are more or less fifty-fifty at this point.
Or they would have been, if you weren’t about to read this guide to surviving a Days Gone Freaker apocalypse. Because brother, we’ve been around these parts conducting all sorts of crazy and frankly hazardous experiments that we (almost) guarantee will keep your leathers fresh and your body unburned/shot/zombified during your opening few hours in our beautiful/horrible Pacific Northwest playground. Drive safe and read on, though remember that there will be patches, so if some of this doesn’t ring true, well, it’s an apocalypse. Who else can you trust?
1. Stay cool to outwit Freakers
Here’s another piece of good news: Days Gone has a lot of moving parts, but lots of them have been scavenged from games you’ve probably played before. Your third-person sneaking and stealth killing are solid, in a very Metal Gear-y sort of way; you’ve got your standard issue binoculars from Far Cry/The Future that can tag enemies as they move around; there’s even a teensy bit of Dark Souls in the melee combat. Really teensy. We’ll get to it. But most of all, Days Gone plays like The Last of Us: limited ammo and crafting resources, distracting and avoiding enemies, bludgeoning zombies with miscellaneous debris.
And if you haven’t played any of those games, don’t worry. You may not have the experience, but you’ve got smarts. The Freakers – and even the human enemies, to a lesser a degree – are quite comfortingly dull-witted. If you get swarmed or you’re losing a fight mano-a-rotting-mano (which you won’t – we’ll teach you) then running and hiding are excellent strategies. Freakers will forget about you almost immediately. They also have poor peripheral vision and hearing – so a crouching instakill with a knife will rarely go awry. They have one tactic: run at you, screaming. If you can outwit your neighbour’s toddler, Freakers should be a cinch.
It was the wrong night for a bonfire
© SIE Bend Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment
2. The knife is your best friend
Back to that insta-killing knife we mentioned. That’s your default melee weapon in Days Gone. You can pick up more (baseball bats, planks of wood etc.) but they will all degrade and eventually break over time. Your knife does not break. Your knife does not fail.
What it will do is offer up an instakill option for any enemy you sneak up on from behind or the side. These are pretty grisly, but despite all the howling and crunching, they weirdly don’t alert nearby enemies (though Freakers do usually – and exploitably – react to sound). If you’ve got four Freakers lined up like they’re queueing for the ATM, whittle them down one-by-one as extravagantly as you like.
Another nice use of the knife is to effectively stun-lock enemies one-on-one. Deacon attacks so quickly that the knife seems to interrupt enemy swipes, and then keep that enemy in place as you sashimi them up properly. Freakers will – on occasion – step back to avoid a slash and make a lunge for you, but it’s such an obvious telegraph for an attack you can so easily dodge roll that you’ll almost never take a hit. You’re not in a gunfight with the Freakers – so bring a knife.
3. Guns aren’t always the answer
You will, occasionally, end up having to reach for greater firepower when encountering a distant Freaker or a bandit who’s spotted you and is about to launch into his ‘I found an intruder’ song and dance routine. Guns are tricky early in Days Gone: there’s not a lot of ammo lying around and they make a lot of noise (until you find or can craft suppressors later on). You’ll have intermittent access to a shotgun, a rifle and a crossbow (like a gun, only more historical) early on – but you’ll always have your trusty 9mm sidearm handy. So let’s start there.
From intensive experimentation, we’ve deduced that your handgun has both ranged damage drop-off and headshot multiplier. Shots to the head are a one-hit-kill. Shots to the body of a Freaker seems to take three-to-four. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stagger enemies (by shooting out their legs, for example) so as a rule: if you’ve been spotted, aim centre-mass.
Shotguns and rifles are more powerful, as you’d expect, but the last thing to say on guns in Days Gone concerns stealth. A suppressed pistol sounds like the dream: one-hit-kills with no alarm bell raised, right? Well, no; not from what we could tell. A suppressor seems to remove the multiplier for the pistol headshot. Even more weirdly, when we played, the crossbow wasn’t a one-hit-kill anywhere. Two shots to the head, two shots to the body, same damage. Be wary about stealthing around with guns – it’s no good if your shots are silent but your enemies are howling through the valleys about the arrow they’ve just been stuck with.
4. Shots can be used as lures
Sometimes guns have their place in Days Gone – it’s just usually not for killing things with in the early part of the game. Guns are loud, will alert enemies and bring hordes of Freakers swarming down on you. Which is bad, unless you’re packing explosives and need a convenient way to draw a bunch of enemies together in one place.
The most common explosive throwable you’ll find and craft early on is the Molotov. Once the glass breaks and the flaming rag hits the liquor inside, anything within a radius of a few feet will go up along with it. The supplies are easy to find and it’s semi-effective (only marred by its meagre area of effect), so if you can lure a few Freakers together with a gunshot and you have one spare, light ‘em up.
“You guys hear something?” said absolutely no-one
© SIE Bend Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment
5. Neutralise Newts for loot
Newts are the second zombie-like enemy you encounter in the game. They’re basically Freaker kids – small, scrappy little things that crawl and jump around in packs. Because of their diminutive size, they won’t attack a tough guy opponent like you unless you’re a direct threat. You can play live and let live with them, more or less.
Alternatively: take them on, raid their hideouts for loot and use their ears for currency (yes, Freakers’ ears earn you money – camps will pay a bounty for each dead Freaker, and their ears are like cartilage receipts that prove you’ve done the deed).
Two things to note about Newts from our field research: First, they’ll make for high ground if they detect you and perch there, watching you rummage through bins and so on warily, but not dangerously. Unless your health is below 50 percent. If you’re below half health, they’ll take the chance at an easy lunch and leap on you from above.
Second, though they’ll run for high ground, it doesn’t actually do them many favours. They’ll duck away from a raised gun, but if you can get close to (but not onto) a roof they’re hiding on, you can swipe at them with your knife in safety – they don’t seem to have an attack that works at that sort of angle. You can also dodge roll off a ten-foot-ish rooftop without taking damage, which is handy if you get cornered. Exploit this now, before it gets patched.
6. Mark enemies with your binoculars
Even if you’re just going for a lone enemy, mark them first with the binoculars. The first reason for this is that the red triangle above their heads also serves as a visible health bar – it depletes from top-to-bottom the more damage an enemy takes. The second is that Freakers can wander a really long way. In fact, they can wander out of mission zones. If you try to follow them, you’ll get a warning you’re leaving the prescribed zone of fun and if you don’t turn back the game will unceremoniously boot you back to the last auto-save. Fortunately, shooting at Freakers that stray too far brings them running right back, so you can take their ears and trade them for soup at the next survivors’ camp.
There’s an exploit here, as well, that’ll be familiar to Far Cry players: if you’re in low-visibility conditions, swing your binoculars slowly over your surroundings while machine-gun-tapping R2. Likely as not, you’ll pick out hard-to-see individuals or groups of enemies by chance. Skill. By pure skill.
7. Use the menu to bend time
A quick and grubby-feeling exploit we found while playing: if you’re ever overwhelmed (and you shouldn’t be - see item one) open the radial items menu. It’s transparent, so you can still see what’s currently trying to pull or blast Deacon’s eyes out, but critically it also slows down time. In another game this would be a perk or a skill or a rechargeable ability called ‘Focus’ or something. In Days Gone it’s just called the menu. You shouldn’t need to abuse this too often – but if you’re in a tight spot and need the extra couple of seconds to put a plan together, have a time-bending rummage in your backpack.
Hit the road
© SIE Bend Studio/Sony Interactive Entertainment
8. You can still use stealth with Freaker Nests
Here’s one way Freakers are different from every other fast zombie: they make nests. Like birds! All out of twigs and stuff! And sometimes it’s your job to set those nests on fire while the inhabitants are inside. Unlike birds. We hope.
From a design standpoint, this feels like a way of forcing the player into more head-on, brutal fights – rather than just letting you skulk around the undergrowth. You set the nest on fire, the Freakers inside start screaming, and then out they pour – on fire and suitably aggravated. Zombies out of the nest, stealth out of the window, right?
Wrong. If you’re quick. You light nests on fire with Molotovs (crafting materials will be scattered around nearby). The denizens of each nest take a couple of seconds to fight their way through the flames; so thrown from a long enough distance while standing strategically close to a bush they can’t see through, you’ll have just enough time to duck out of sight before they emerge for blood. Wait for them to calm down/go out, then pick ‘em off as normal.
9. If all else fails, play Dark Souls.
Not literally. Unless you want to. It’s your PlayStation – do what you like. But in the context of Days Gone, pretending you’re actually playing Dark Souls is actually a surprisingly effective approach to dealing with a horde situation gone wrong.
See, despite their swarming behaviour, Freakers aren’t actually all that good at swarming. It’s more like a circle of Arkham villains taking on Batman: one main guy in the group flailing away, others standing in a patient circle occasionally leaping in with the odd jab until it’s their turn to get ka-powed into the dirt.
So if you’re surrounded by a group of Freakers, don’t just hack away madly. Hack away madly for a bit, then dodge roll. Then run away. Dodge rolling and sprinting both use up a Stamina bar – but oddly, that stamina bar recharges at the same rate whether you’re standing still or running. So as long as you’re even vaguely aware of its depletion, you can quite comfortably get in two or three swings with the blade and roll away before the monster behind you builds up the nerve to take a stab. While you’re running, Freakers are slightly faster than you and can catch you with a lunging attack – which again, you can dodge. While sprinting, you’ll outpace them easily. It will take a while due to the knife’s low damage, but it’s perfectly possible to chip away at a dozen Freakers with this cowardly technique, leading them round like a screaming conga line and then diving back in when the mood suits.
