Daylight Reviews
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.
Daylight tries hard to scare you with its soundscape and atmosphere, but unfortunately it treads an all too familiar haunting ground that leaves you sitting impassively in your seat rather than at the edge of it.
Daylight is capable of doling out some shocks, but it's far too reliant on a single trick and the writing covers too much well-trodden ground for players to be truly unnerved.
Daylight incompetently piles on the clichés and delivers an experience that is far more likely to induce boredom than anything resembling fear.
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 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's inherent creepiness is undone by randomly generated elements that dispel the all-important illusion of survival horror.
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
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.
There's not a shred of innovation or much of a concerted effort to evoke terror in players throughout the entirety of Daylight.
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 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'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.
Daylight's shortcomings will scare away genre detractors. The gameplay is repetitive, the level design annoying and backtracking quickly becomes a chore.
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.
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.
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.