Days Gone director blows a gasket as its protagonist is ‘reduced to a cartoon shill’ to promote ‘small game’ Astro Bot—Sony’s all-star romp featuring Kratos, Aloy, and Nathan Drake
Astro Bot appears to be doing rather well—we’re not nattering about it, obviously, because it’s a PS5 game, but the scant few of us who have betrayed our rigs, and have access to the forbidden console, have only had glowing words for it.
Someone who is not doing well, conversely, is Days Gone’s former director John Garvin. His former studio posted a cute cartoon featuring the game’s protagonist, Deacon Lee St John (or Deek) to celebrate the launch of Astro Bot, since both developers are part of Sony’s PlayStation Studios division. What should have been a bit of fun, with colleagues supporting each other, seems to have incensed Garvin who has been posting through it on Twitter (via Eurogamer), claiming that Deek has been “reduced to promoting other games”.
When one commenter gently recommended he “calm down, my brotha”, Garvin gave, well, a very impassioned response: “Haha, I see my character reduced to a cartoon shill promoting some small game and I’m being harsh? Sit down, my brotha, adults are talking.”
Days Gone, which was ported to PC in 2021 and received a 63 from us in our Days Gone review, is a open world zombie game about a biker who faces the grim, harsh reality of the apocalypse with a stern expression and who (as reviewer Andy Kelly put it) is “mostly angry and monosyllabic.”
“I don’t know Astro Bot and wish them well, but not at the expense of #Daysgone,” he writes, before entering a Twitter beef with someone called Lil Rizky, asking some variant of ‘what have you made?’ three separate times.
It’s a bizarre reaction for sure. While I wouldn’t treat Metacritic scores as gospel, both user and critic reviews for Astro Bot are higher than Days Gone. Although, Days Gone has been looked upon more favourably by fans as the time’s gone on—an 8.5 user review is more than respectable. Astro Bot is also a game that includes characters from games like God of War, Horizon, and Uncharted—which is hardly bad company. Downright complimentary, even.
But this isn’t the first time Gravin has blown his lid on Twitter—like that time when in a (since-deleted, to be fair) tweet from 2022, the former director blamed Days Gone’s reception on “woke reviewers who couldn’t handle a gruff white biker looking at his date’s ass”.
Look—I’m sure it doesn’t feel great to have to cede creative control over something you made just because you left a company. However, Sony’s not done anything wrong by using characters and properties it owns, and it’s not as if he’s the sole creative force behind a game built by an entire studio of developers.
You can make the argument that Astro Bot’s entire gimmick—making a platformer out of Sony properties, turning them into cute li’l funko pop style robots—is a little corporate, but it’s not an insult to be included among heavy-hitters like Uncharted, God of War and Horizon. I certainly wouldn’t get into public fights over it.
