Days Gone By

I'll be straight with you: Days Gone By is a micro-budget indie 2D platformer built in Godot by a solo-or-near-solo outfit called Fineam Neo Studio, and it wears that origin completely openly. The tile-to-tile design philosophy is visible in every screen you traverse - rooms connect in clean, deliberate grids, and the level geometry has that handcrafted, slightly rigid quality you get when one person is building every platform by hand. That is not an insult. It is a style, and if you grew up on early scrolling platformers, you will recognize the DNA immediately. The game's central hook is its no-mercy ruleset. There are no respawns, no power-ups, no in-level maps, and no second chances. You get one life to push through a set of levels that mix timing challenges with light hack-and-slash combat against fantasy enemies, eventually working toward a magic king boss at the end. The sword - reportedly oversized and deliberately so - is your primary tool, and swinging it through groups of enemies has a low-fi, satisfying crunch to it that punches above the budget. The fantasy and magic tags on the Steam page are accurate: this is not a grounded world, and the enemy designs lean into weird creature variety rather than pixel-realism. Who is this actually for? Players who miss the hostile simplicity of arcade-era platformers and do not need hand-holding to find that fun. If you bounce off games the moment a checkpoint system disappears, Days Gone By will frustrate you inside the first ten minutes. But if a clean one-life run through a dozen levels sounds like a satisfying afternoon rather than a chore, the game delivers exactly what it promises. The minigame elements add occasional variety, and partial controller support means you are not stuck on keyboard if you prefer a pad. The weak spots are real. The presentation is bare-bones - do not come expecting polished animation or a memorable soundtrack. The macOS situation is a practical concern: the game is listed as incompatible with macOS Catalina (10.15) and above, which rules out most modern Mac users despite the Mac listing in the store. Windows and Linux players are fine. The community around the game is essentially nonexistent, so if you hit a wall, you are solving it yourself. With only two recorded Steam reviews and no critical coverage, there is no wisdom-of-the-crowd to lean on. Take it for what it is: a tight, punishing little platformer that respects the constraints of the genre it is paying tribute to. It does the one-life challenge structure well enough that genre fans will get a clean hit of that particular satisfaction. Everything else is rough around the edges, and that is fine.

Alex · Scout Team

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