Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist ’80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

I honestly can’t remember exactly when I first decided to give this colourful slice of simian silliness a go, but since then playing it has become a winter ritual. I always come back to it at this time of year, when in my part of the world the short days are cold and dark, and the long nights are colder and darker. It’s a perfect game for the holiday season, a time when there always seems to be a million things to do and my brain’s left a polite message thanking me for my interest in coherent thinking, but it won’t be back until March.

The Day Before was one of the most-wishlisted games on Steam before it came out in early access last week. Players flooded into the servers—over 38,000 were playing concurrently at its peak—but very quickly began flowing out, either because they were unable to connect to the servers, which featured no login queues, struggled with crashes and bugs, or just weren’t having fun in the open-world survival game. Just four days and many refunds later, developer Fntastic announced that it was closing, and The Day Before joined the ranks of legendary videogame flops.

But is The Day Before really that bad? We’ve played it and, yeah, it’s pretty bad—not shockingly so, but certainly not a game to stake a company on.

Trainwrecks aren’t exactly rare in the gaming industry, but it’s rare that they’re this spectacular. After a suspiciously-polished trailer, The Day Before quickly became one of Steam’s most wishlisted games. 

Then delays, more delays, major red flags featuring “volunteer” workers, a much shoddier 10-minute gameplay video (which you can’t watch anymore) and finally a debut on December 7. One preempted by the studio Fntastic begging players to not accuse them of “scamming” people. One pile-up of car-crash Steam reviews and studio closure later, and The Day Before was pulled from Steam, December 11. In response to a baffled fan, Fntastic replied:

I’ll just let that sit there without comment. I’ve given a very abridged history, but in case you want the full run-down my fellow Staff Writer Morgan Park has put together an explainer post. While following this unfolding story yesterday, my US colleagues also watched the game’s Discord server collapse into ashes. 

“I’ve never seen a Discord server disintegrate in real time,” Morgan notes before sharing a vaguely apocalyptic screenshot of a voice chat with over 311 people in it on the left, a bot getting bullied with slash commands in the centre, and a vanished member list to the right.

The studio’s YouTube channel also has no videos on it. I’m not even confident it’ll still exist in the coming days. The cherry on the top of this nightmare sundae? Fntastic’s CEO is MIA. As spotted by Second Wind’s Nick Calandra, Fntastic CEO Eduard Gotovtsev has deleted his Twitter account and muted his LinkedIn profile.

The Day Before’s early access period lasted four days. Now, it’s being scrubbed clean from the internet in the world’s clumsiest vanishing act. Nobody sets out to make a bad game—but the speed at which this particular one took a nosedive is stunning in the literal sense of the word. From a top-wishlisted game to ‘errr, nevermind’, I’ll be fascinated by what details emerge from game’s post-mortem.