Two minutes past midnight

Discussing the post-apocalyptic setting for his new game Rad (p38), Lee Petty refers to calls in the US press for there to be more media about the fall of humankind. What was once about escapist entertainment, the thinking goes, is now a matter of preparedness. The Doomsday clock is at two minutes to midnight: we are the closest we’ve been to the apocalypse since the height of the Cold War, so it’s time to rewatch The Walking Dead with notebook in hand. Well, whoever had that bright idea clearly hasn’t played many games. The last thing we need is more of the blessed things.

Yet here we are, staring down the barrel of another round of games that seek to ask how we might survive when society finally goes up in smoke. Leading the charge is Days Gone (p34). Bend Studio’s tale of one man and his motorbike has been long in the making, and while our time with it suggests the delay has been a question of technology – those eye-catching swarms of mutated Freakers from the game’s announcement are nowhere to be seen – it may also be one of setting. Difficult as it must be to get hundreds of enemies moving at speed on a base-model PS4, it’s even harder to make yet another game about how actually the humans are the real bad guys in this scenario and have it meaningfully stand out.

Rad’s answer to that problem is to fashion a mechanic from the apocalypse, with the irradiated wasteland causing mutations that can be experimented with in a variety of useful, and frequently disgusting, ways. As a Double Fine game, it at least has the one thing Days Gone conspicuously lacks: charm by the bucketful. The post-apocalypse is so effective in videogames because it immediately casts the odds against you, and positions violent ingenuity as the logical way out. If nothing else, when the bombs drop, at least we’ll all be better prepared than most when we find ourselves in an axe fight over the last tin of beans in town.