Daylight Reviews
For full Daylight performance benchmarks on the GD Machine 2014, be sure to check out our official frames per second Daylight test results.
Daylight has moments of fear but too much boredom
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 works great if you're just looking for a few cheap scares, but if you're itching for something more, you should look elsewhere.
Atmospheric but all too familiar in far too many places, Daylight is a middling time-killer with few frights.
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.
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.
All in all, Daylight was a bit of a disappointment. Let it be said that it's utterly terrifying and will likely scare even the hardiest of players, but ultimately the experience feels a little shallow. The overall game is let down by a lack of variation and a thin narrative, feeling like one missed opportunity after another. Daylight isn't the definitive horror experience we've been waiting for. It's more like a spooky campfire story: it'll make you jump on the first time, but it doesn't have much lasting appeal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Daylight hits the right mood at first, but the creepy atmosphere is pushed aside for lame jump scares and hollow gameplay.
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.
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.
An elaborate version of Pac-Man that isn't anywhere near as scary as it thinks it is.
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's inherent creepiness is undone by randomly generated elements that dispel the all-important illusion of survival horror.
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.