After some strange twists and turns, a full-fledged gameplay trailer for "The Day Before" (opens in new tab) was finally released last week. In fact, it seemed more familiar than generic. Twitter sleuths seem to have figured out why: they accuse the game's trailer shots and much of its other marketing materials of being copied from an entirely different game.

In a post to Twitter late last week, YouTube channel Force Gaming compared The Day Before's public trailer to Call of Duty: Black Ops-Cold War's original zombie mode showcase in a series of clips and screenshots (opens in new tab). If the imitation is flattering, Treyarch must be blushing pretty hard, because it's nearly impossible to deny that the shots in Force Gaming's comparison bear a striking resemblance to those in the 2020 CoD trailer.

Force Gaming notes that "not only is the framing, composition, and coloring similar" between The Day Before trailer and the CoD clips, but "the order is exactly the same, one after the other."

CoD is not alone: YouTubers are also, The Day Before's marketing (opens in new tab) and highlighted the similarities between The Last of Us, The Division, and SnowRunner's material.

The response from the community was as scathing as the tweets themselves: while The Day Before was once highly touted as the second most wishlisted game on Steam (opens in new tab), now the associated subreddits, forum threads, and Discord channels have taken on the atmosphere of a crowd gathered to watch a house burn.

In a comment on Reddit thatguyned (open in new tab) joked that "The Day Before" would eventually be revealed to be "after someone sent 'The Last of Us' into some sort of game writing AI", Another post on turbolasertron (opens in new tab) rages that developers are "blatantly copying from other games and using them for marketing to get people excited." Meanwhile, the game's subreddit (opens in new tab) is mostly split between confusion and derision.

Most of that confusion stems from people's inability to understand who the hell is getting what out of this increasingly farcical spectacle. It's not hard to find people trying to call "The Day Before" a scam (opens in new tab), but the game is not available for pre-order and has not been funded through Kickstarter or anything like it. Much speculation has been rife, but it is still difficult to conclude what exactly The Day Before's deal is.