Daylight Reviews
Daylight is a victim of its most-touted feature. When the random generated items and enemies work, every step carries a palpable sense of dread and unease. But the immersion's lost when the player gets caught in an enemy spawning loop with too few flares is hard to get back. The story's climax works better on paper, and bland visuals just make maze navigation aggravating. The $15 price is also a bit much to ask for what will last most players up to 3 hours without much of a reason to replay it. For the few moments when it all clicks, Daylight is the best we could have hoped for out of the Slender craze. The rest of time will have you remembering why it was a craze to begin with.
Daylight has neither the creeping sense of psychological dread of Fatal Frame nor the poster man antagonist of Slender, and its reliance on cliche lacks distinction. But if the game's straightforward purpose was simply to panic and upset its player then it is an indisputable success, no matter how cheap the tricks employed.
Daylight has moments of fear but too much boredom
An elaborate version of Pac-Man that isn't anywhere near as scary as it thinks it is.
Don't be afraid of the dark in the shallow and cliched horror adventure 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.
Predictable, trite, and convoluted, Daylight is more likely to make you yawn than scream. It's every single horror game ever made, and it's less than the sum of its parts.
Overall I felt as if Daylight was made as a jump-scare machine with a loosely tacked-on plot. I never felt invested in Sarah or cared much for the mysterious man rambling through her phone. In fact, I was more concerned with getting Miss Ghost off my back so she'd stop screaming, more so out of annoyance than fear. Daylight would have benefited from a fresh set of spooks rather than intermittent scares and muddy plot lines, but at the end of the day if you're looking for a cheap thrill you've found 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.
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.
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.
Daylight alleges to alleviate the replay problem for games of this type. It certainly does that with its procedurally generated world. The problem is, I don't think they make a compelling enough argument to play again in either the story or gameplay department.
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.
Some of the scares in Daylight are genuinely chilling, but their shock value fades quickly. And after the opening hour or so, the hospital itself seems to become a character, which adds a needed layer of interactivity and suspense to the mix. But between dull writing, last-gen graphics, and limited game mechanics, Daylight devolves into nothing more than a glorified maze simulator with mood lighting.
Everything about Daylight converges to create a shining beacon in the survival horror genre and shows a glimmer of hope for its future. If nothing else, one thing is for sure: it reassures you that your heart is working.
Daylight's shortcomings will scare away genre detractors. The gameplay is repetitive, the level design annoying and backtracking quickly becomes a chore.
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.
Daylight hits the right mood at first, but the creepy atmosphere is pushed aside for lame jump scares and hollow gameplay.
You can't just chuck players in a maze with a ghost and tell them to be scared. Unfortunately this is exactly what Daylight does.
All in all, Daylight is a respectable addition to the modern horror lineup that packs enough scare into its roughly three hour playtime to justify its modest $15 price tag. The story and scares don't quite stack up to the best of its contemporaries, but the title brings enough of its own charm to the table to make it worth a procedurally generated spin or two.