Daylight Reviews
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.
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 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's shortcomings will scare away genre detractors. The gameplay is repetitive, the level design annoying and backtracking quickly becomes a chore.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
A few jump scares left my heart racing, but the overall adventure isn't exciting
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.
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 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.
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.
Daylight's horror atmosphere starts strong, but repetitive corridors and nonthreatening enemies squander it quickly.
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
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.