The Day Before was a game that, amazingly, was able to gain an audience and community of players who thought it might’ve been the next thing in post-apocalyptic zombie survival games.
It had a hype train that was sort of baffling, because it survived multiple accusations of ripping off other games in its marketing, and still up to its launch there were still hopefuls that it was everything developer Fntastic promised and maybe more.
The studio and game were seemingly no more within a week of The Day Before launching in early access, but just yesterday the studio returned, presenting a new game and asking that it be given a “second chance” to make up for the debacle that was The Day Before.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” the studio begins in a statement posted to Twitter. “We deeply apologize to everyone for The Day Before and take full responsibility for what happened.”
Fntastic launched a Kickstarter for its new game also published a document titled Fntastic 2.0 where it promised to, “from now on,” conduct itself based on three principles: Honesty, Transparency, and Professionalism.
It lists objectives such as “raise development standards,” “expand professionalism” and “enhance brand identity.” The document closes with mission and vision statements, where Fntastic says its mission is to “create games that will be loved for decades.”
The vision is “to become one of the most loved game companies by creating fantastic, innovative, and emotionally engaging experiences.”
That was yesterday. Today, a new report claims that dataminers might’ve already found out Fntastic’s new game, Escape Factory, to be nothing more than a bunch of mechanics used in Unity’s demo mode and a bunch of free assets off the Unity store.
If you check the Community Notes on Escape Factory’s Steam Page, you’ll see plenty of comments and threads of people calling the developers scammers, warning those not to back the Kickstarter. The Kickstarter also has comments like that, and if you join the Discord you’ll see a lot of deleted messages and developer responses in defense of themselves saying that they refunded everyone, so The Day Before wasn’t a scam.
And for whatever reason, there are (potentially sarcastic) comments in support of Fntastic and this new game. The Kickstarter has also, at time of writing somehow raised $12,647 USD towards it’s $20,000 goal.
Will it get to the end in the next month? And if they reach their goal and have another release like The Day Before again, are we going to be back here nine months after Escape Factory’s failed release with the studio asking for a third chance?
Source – [Insider-Gaming]