I don't WANT to go out and have fun

Why yes the flu was terrible and the recovery was somehow even worse, thank you for asking.
Stuffed up in bed unable to put one foot in front of the other for a week or two, I did have time to catch up with my much-neglected gaming habit, however, and in the course of playing Days Gone I sometimes felt that explaining to kids nowadays that we used to have black and white tvs that had screens smaller than the one on their laptop and yet weighed a ton and were huge and bulky and on them we played Jet Set Willy makes us sound like one of the Yorkshiremen from the Monty Python sketch, and yet my takeaway from the underwhelming Days Gone is to think of the technology of the 8-bit era and remember that no matter how laughably clunky and low-resolution it was, you could at least read the flipping text onscreen without a magnifying glass.  TVs have never been bigger and yet somehow onscreen text has never been smaller.


The point I rage-quit this turkey came when I encountered my first "destructible barrier" and how to deal with it was not explained with an in-game tutorial but in tiny, tiny text that flashed onscreen for roughly 3 seconds before disappearing forever, so now I don't know how to deal with that in-game problem unless I load an earlier save, navigate back to that spot, then either sit with my head less than a foot away from my 39 inch smart tv (I usually sit five feet away from it) and hope that this time I can read the instructions when they appear, or I can take a screenshot, quit to the console dashboard, open the capture gallery, look at the screenshot and try to read the instructions there - but even that's not a given method of success because of the PS4's terrible multimedia options that Sony designed it to have on purpose so as to make you use (paid-for) streaming services for media on the console instead of just viewing your existing (already paid-for) media stored on the internal HD, so the PS4's native image viewer doesn't have a zoom function.
And then there's the controls: for some reason you have to hold down buttons instead of just tapping them if you want to do something like pick things up or interact with the environment, which combined with the brief animations results in confusion as to whether or not you've actually done what you wanted to do, which was a feature I didn't like in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which changed the way you looted the environment from the previous game - Assassin's Creed: Origins - from simply hitting the triangle button to holding it down for some (but not all) looting interactions.
Buggy, undertested, possessed of story that is so aggressively banal and uninteresting that it may as well be terrible, and undercooked combat mechanics that just draw your attention to the fact that this isn't The Last Of Us, a game that it clearly wants to be yet whose many strengths Days Gone does not seem to be familiar with, primary among them being The Last Of Us' simple and responsive controls transplanted from a combat game to the then-aging survival horror genre still obsessed with the tank control system developed in the 1990s for games with pre-rendered backgrounds and a fixed camera.  But the most disappointing thing the game fails to transplant from The Last Of Us is a laughably overambitious story director who might have made something of the futility at the heart of the main characters of the game, two ex-bikers who cling desperately to outdated notions of masculinity not because it serves them well in a post-apocalyptic world but because the game story just doesn't have any original ideas or interesting ways to execute what it lifts from other sources - it even has your grizzled biker hero rescuing his girl from rapey rednecks in a flashback.  There is plenty of grist for the mill here, but no-one seems interested in exploring it so the cut scenes - which require lengthy loading times, naturally - just drag on forever and never tell you anything important that you can't glean from the slightly messy story/inventory screens.


Aaaaanyway, this rambling review is basically building up to me saying I did not like this game, but on balance, it was mostly more enjoyable then being bed-ridden... up to a point, and then it wasn't.so I watched Robot Jox on Netflix again instead.