Daylight Reviews
Although notable as the first game to use Unreal Engine 4, the graphics are perfunctory and drab. If only more effort had gone into crafting an interesting environment rather than relying on the game to conjure its own random shocks.
So while I do appreciate Daylight as an effective scare generator, its shelf life feels much shorter than Zombie Studios intended it to be.
Daylight tries to offer horror fanatics a unique, dynamic experience by giving them a procedurally generated environment and an intriguing system of "social" integration. However, just about all of it falls well short of the intended goal. The gameplay is uninspired and repetitive, the story is a mess, nobody will care about the protagonist, and the challenge is minimal.
Daylight does offer an experience and just about doesn't outstay its welcome, it offers a ton of atmosphere and a feeling of helplessness that other games in the genre have been unable to do. A far from essential purchase, but one that will keep you entertained for an evening alone.
The procedurally generated stages and piped horror-movie tropes just don't work for Daylight even for one playthrough, never mind multiple visits. The frame-rate is choppy and the environments are dull rehashes of every haunted house gaming has dragged us through over the years. As a download, I can only delete it -I'd rather burn it.
nd then again to find the "gate." All of this while fending off a Shadow army straight out of your nightmares. You run out of flares, and you die. And you wake up to a map you have never seen before. This is where Daylight excels. Your surroundings are permanently unknown to you; you have no idea if that desk ahead is empty or contains supplies. You don't know if you're going to have to run back across the map two or three more times before you can exit to the next section. It's tempting to call out proceduralism as lazy level design, particularly after seeing several similar hallway blocks crammed together into one level, but its implementation in Daylight is kind of genius.
While Daylight is a bit on the stereotypical side, with you running circles inside an asylum where the good doctor wasn't actually that good, and the dementia that the patients were experiencing was more than just a figment of their imagination, it does a good job in the presentation department.
The overall experience is one that is enjoyable, but multiple playthoughs without the Twitch experience leaves a flat undertone. Finding the same pages over and over again gets annoying to a point and the ghosts that are supposed to be haunting come across as an agitation. It's no doubt that horror is a hard genre to develop for and there are a lot of really good ideas in Daylight, but in the end the game just feels lacking which is a darn shame.
Daylight is clearly more of a tech demonstration than a game, but it forgot to include any interesting uses of technology that couldn't - and haven't - already been done better on older software. As a one trick pony, if Daylight fails to scare players, then the monotonous and repeated palette of the game world itself will provide no joy to explorers, and the story will fail to grip those that like to engage with the narrative. If there is still any desire to experience the game, it would be recommended to simply watch a Twitch stream rather than paying for it!
All in all, Daylight was a bit of a disappointment. Let it be said that it's utterly terrifying and will likely scare even the hardiest of players, but ultimately the experience feels a little shallow. The overall game is let down by a lack of variation and a thin narrative, feeling like one missed opportunity after another. Daylight isn't the definitive horror experience we've been waiting for. It's more like a spooky campfire story: it'll make you jump on the first time, but it doesn't have much lasting appeal.
From top to bottom, Daylight falls short of being a good horror game. The gameplay is bare bones, and the attempts at scaring you fall into so many clichés that they're boring. It also becomes downright laughable once you discover how you can safely avoid combat with the main villain in a ridiculous manner. The story makes no sense, and it doesn't get any better after multiple playthroughs. Only the presentation can be called decent, and even that is questionable at times. Even if one were to consider this just for the sake of bechmarking their system against Unreal Engine 4, this is a very difficult title to recommend to anyone, horror fan or otherwise.
If you like Slender, play that instead and pretend you are navigating a maze of corridors. If you hate Slender, run far away from Daylight as though evil witches are chasing you.
Armed with randomly generated levels and the Unreal Engine 4, Daylight is a title that had the potential to even beat horror games like Outlast and Amnesia, but boring and repetitive gameplay, cliché design, miniscule length and general unoriginality let it down massively.
For full Daylight performance benchmarks on the GD Machine 2014, be sure to check out our official frames per second Daylight test results.
Anyway, if you are a horror junkie you will probably find something to enjoy here and I would recommend it for the thrill of the initial level alone if you are a fan of the genre. Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing yourself a disservice by skipping this one. I'm not going to outright not recommend it, by all means, try it out yourself if you want.
Daylight's claim to fame is its reported replay value; that no scare will ever be the same twice. While it is technically true that the level geometry does change from playthrough-to-playthrough, the scares certainly see some overlap, and the writing isn't worth a return visit. There are no nascent ideas in Daylight – just the desperate, flailing attempts to throw every horror cliché at the wall.
If you scare easily, the low asking price may entice you into a purchase but, for everyone else, Daylight represents a dull and missed opportunity for effective horror.
The promise of Daylight—never feeling safe because random scares defy predictability—ends up seeming like the main cause of its problems instead of a genre-changing bit of design.
Atmospheric but all too familiar in far too many places, Daylight is a middling time-killer with few frights.