Daylight Reviews
Daylight is somewhat of a strange title. It has the makings of a great horror game with its art design and world, but the game play revolves around too many of the same mechanics while the procedurally generated levels offer up more missteps than different experiences. Don't get me wrong, it is a rather creepy game and it can still frighten even the boldest of players, but in the end, it is a single play through game that lasts four hours at the most.
Daylight deserves credit for trying to spice up the first person horror genre, but its problems keep it from becoming anything more than an interesting experiment.
Horror games can be tricky to get right, but Daylight fails on virtually every front. It's a shame to see such a promising product slump so spectacularly, but despite being a rather short affair, this is still a pain to play through. As a result, there are far better experiences that deserve your attention ahead of this – especially with Outlast recently being offered for free on the PlayStation 4. Don't shine your torch in the direction of this one, as you'll only find bitter disappointment in its beam.
There's not a shred of innovation or much of a concerted effort to evoke terror in players throughout the entirety of Daylight.
At full price Daylight is only $15, so some of its shortcomings can be forgiven. Unfortunately, it can't be denied that after the first short playthrough the game can quickly devolve into tense tedium. There isn't enough in the game to encourage the repeated visits that would allow the procedural generation to shine.
It's just let down by the repetitiveness and enemies that soon reveal themselves to be nothing more than a nuisance. Ultimately, the biggest shock Daylight gave me was the realisation that I was out to collect stuff instead of surviving the horrors around me. Don't say you weren't warned
Daylight's inherent creepiness is undone by randomly generated elements that dispel the all-important illusion of survival horror.
Daylight works great if you're just looking for a few cheap scares, but if you're itching for something more, you should look elsewhere.
Daylight is a very short game, but, thanks to its randomly generated levels, you'll get more than a few plays out of it. The overall presentation of it is pretty solid, and if it doesn't get you jumping out of your seat on a regular basis, well, you're a braver person than I am.
Daylight incompetently piles on the clichés and delivers an experience that is far more likely to induce boredom than anything resembling fear.
Daylight is gold when it comes to scares, but is merely sterling silver in the gameplay substance department. The price might be worth the risk, though.
I found Daylight a better survival horror experience than any of the other titles that fall into the same subcategory. The game may only last a couple of hours, but the randomness of each playthrough and modest price point make Daylight an enjoyable and tense experience.
In the end then, Daylight is neither horrifying in the good way nor in the bad way. Once you've managed to become inured to the cheap shock factor Daylight feels like nothing more than a simple tech demo for the Unreal 4 engine, and it's not even one that manages to present the engine in a good light. Conflicting mechanics, poorly managed procedural generation and the lack of any real hook for replayability mean that this is one that probably needed more time in the oven before seeing the light of day. If you get lucky with the level generation and don't abuse the mechanics then there's enough here for a playthrough with a few shocks that will only take a couple of hours - but the risk of an utterly duff experience is too high to recommend.
It's a shame that Daylight has turned out to be fairly average, because the title has the atmosphere, the creepily produced audio, some promising ideas, and initial jump scares, but the overall package is brought down by issues with gameplay, its focus on random design, clichéd story and unoptimised performance.
Upon death, Sarah regains consciousness before the message "You can't remember, but this seems familiar" lines the foot of the screen. In note-driven Daylight, this is perhaps the most hauntingly accurate passage of the lot.
There's simply nothing about Daylight that hasn't been done better elsewhere, leaving me with no choice but to recommend you avoid it at all costs.
Daylight's shortcomings will scare away genre detractors. The gameplay is repetitive, the level design annoying and backtracking quickly becomes a chore.
Atmospheric but all too familiar in far too many places, Daylight is a middling time-killer with few frights.
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.
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.