Daylight Reviews

Daylight is ranked in the 5th percentile of games scored on OpenCritic.
4.5 / 10.0
Jul 10, 2014

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.

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Jun 1, 2014

There's not a shred of innovation or much of a concerted effort to evoke terror in players throughout the entirety of Daylight.

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4.9 / 10.0
May 30, 2014

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.

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Cubed3
Top Critic
2 / 10
May 29, 2014

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!

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May 24, 2014

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.

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5 / 10.0
May 19, 2014

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.

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4.5 / 10.0
May 18, 2014

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.

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3 / 10.0
May 17, 2014

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.

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5.5 / 10.0
May 14, 2014

The best thing to be said about Daylight, the new procedurally generated horror game from Zombie Studios in Seattle, is that while it's a failure, at least it's an interesting failure

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39 / 100
May 10, 2014

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.

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5 / 10
May 10, 2014

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.

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Game Debate
Joffy S
Top Critic
5.5 / 10.0
May 10, 2014

For full Daylight performance benchmarks on the GD Machine 2014, be sure to check out our official frames per second Daylight test results.

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Unscored
May 9, 2014

On the first playthrough, it's distracting that Daylight is one-note tonally, unconvincingly written and acted, and unwisely tethers progress to increasingly drearily combing environments for every last scrap of 'oh no something terrible happened here once and everyone's dangerously mental' paperwork. On the second playthrough, it's oppressive. At a guess, self-awareness of this is why the game's so short, but by God another pass on the writing and more care about voice-acting would have made the world of difference.

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3 / 10.0
May 9, 2014

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.

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7 / 10
May 8, 2014

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.

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3.5 / 10.0
May 7, 2014

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.

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6 / 10.0
May 6, 2014

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

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AusGamers
RyanC
Top Critic
4 / 10.0
May 6, 2014

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.

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Unscored
May 6, 2014

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.

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3 / 10.0
May 5, 2014

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.

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