The kid was a zombie, I guess—in Days Gone, they’re “freaks”—but this is, or was, unmistakably a kid. Five, maybe six years old? I don’t know their name, I don’t know how they got this way. All I know is the game said to clear the roof, and provided no options for me to deal with the situation other than coldly bashing in their skull. And so I swung away.

One of the first things I did in Days Gone was climb on a roof, and bash a child to death with a stray slab of wood. The meter charting my progress to the next level went up a tiny bit.

It appears I’d just slaughtered a bunch of people trying to get by, for no reason. Well, not for no reason: again, the meter charting my progress to the next level went up a tiny bit. Cha-ching. This is Days Gone in microcosm: feeding the game’s relentless assault of upgrades, collectibles, and other disconnected pieces of video game-isms that rub against the game’s alleged core, a man with a “code.”

Another time, a question mark appeared on my map, the game’s way of saying “Hey, check this out.” (If you don’t, the event disappears.) When I got there, I found some people defending an outpost. Not “freakers,” not zombies, just regular ass humans. But still: enemies, I’m told. Like clockwork, I pulled out my gun, and watched the corpses stack up. I was rewarded for my efforts with... absolutely nothing. There was nothing special about this outpost, no special upgrade to find.

These moments, among others, gave me pause during my earliest hours with Days Gone, the first original franchise from developer Sony Bend since 1999’s Syphon Filter for the original PlayStation. But after more than 20 hours roaming Sony’s unnecessarily sprawling and achingly misguided open world zombie game, I’m numb. I don’t know why this game exists. It’s a hodgepodge bucket list of Stuff You Expect in Open World Games, half-baked ideas executed better elsewhere—several in another game published by Sony, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us—and a failed morality tale whose emotional stakes are constantly undermined.

Days Gone refuses to settle on what it wants to be or what it wants to say. Rather than settling on a direction, it proceeds in all directions, hoping a more-is-better philosophy will prove blinding. This is true of both the clumsy mechanics, which are ever present and impossible to ignore, and its story, following the boring moral compass of biker Deacon St. John, who roams the world in the years after an event turned the whole world to shit, claiming to operate by a “code” but refusing to allow said code to operationally manifest into action. But that itself is selling the narrative failings of Days Gone—and Deacon himself—way short.

A moral code, applying old norms in a world without “rules,” is a post-apocalyptic trope because it’s classically effective at drawing tension from the base premise: life would be easier if you treated everyone like disposable garbage, but what’s that mean for the soul? But using this trope effectively requires either careful setup or especially sharp execution, and ideally both. Days Gone has neither, despite what its many hours of dour cutscenes with people acting extremely serious tries to suggest.