Geekscape Games Reviews: ‘Daylight’
Cause in the daylight we’ll be on our own, but tonight I need to hold you so close. Oh Adam Levine, you have no idea how true your lyrics are. In Zombie Studios’ survival horror Daylight, you’ll want to hold someone so close not because of love but because you can hide behind them when the horror show starts.
Daylight gets right to the point with its survival horror story. You are Sarah and with no idea of anything else, you’re left with trying to navigate the ominous hallways of the derelict hospital with just your cellphone to guide your way. Most of the story is told through various letters or notes spread throughout the multiple areas for the player to find. What little of the story is left, the mysterious man communicating with Sarah over her cellphone fills in. It’s not like you will pay too much attention to the story the first time through. I mean, you do have deadly apparitions chasing after you. Still, having more of a story conveyed outside reading a lot of text would benefit immersing players into the world to maximize the scare factor.
Though combat is non-existent in Daylight, it doesn’t mean you still don’t acquire tools to protect yourself. Glow sticks can be used to light up your surroundings better than that dinky cellphone light, but is mainly used to find items of interest. When a glow stick is lit, certain objects will highlight with maze-like patterns indicating that something important may lie inside. Sometimes, these things will yield nothing but dust. Other times, if you’re lucky, you end up with replenishing your glow sticks or the only true weapon you have against the ghosts, flares. It’s been a long time since I have used flares but I would have thought they projected more light than a glow stick. As long as it keeps away the terrors of the darkness away from me, I can’t complain.
The most important thing you will find other than supplies are remnants. Remnants are nothing more than specific notes about the area you’re in currently. These remnants are the only way to escape whatever hell unceremoniously placed upon you. When all the remnants are discovered, a sigil appears and is needed to unlock the spiritually sealed door to the next area. This is also when you are most vulnerable to the ghastly beings. When holding a sigil, none of your sticks of light can be used. Since the more remnants you collect will attract the unwanted, this is where the run button comes in handy. It may be hard at first to decipher the small map displayed on the cellphone, especially while running. I ended up getting just good enough to know what symbol on the map was me in order to make my way to the exit without my legs ever stopping.
Zombie Studios does a great job with the ambiance of Daylight. I feel in any good horror experience, game or otherwise, the audio is what makes the scares even better. Echos of footsteps, creaky or slamming doors, whispers coming from behind you and even complete silence sends chills up your spine the entire game. The ghost that’s chasing you down the whole game has an audio warning that builds tension the first couple of times. Once you get used to the distinct noise, it is a little easy to cheese the mechanics in order to not look at the ghost. Since that is technically the only way you can die in Daylight, I was disappointed it was too easy to bypass. Anytime I heard the noise of the imminent appearance of the ghost, I just turned my back towards the direction I needed to go and walked.
Not to say you can beat the scare factory meticulously designed by Zombie Studios. There were times where I used my back walk technique and the game seemed to adapt by reappearing in my face, negating my well laid plans. It also seemed that if I was progressing too fast through an area, more obstacles would be placed to slow me down. I really wanted more of these instances to happen. To have the game adapt to your style, keeping you on your toes would maximize the horror. One of the main components of horror is, after all, surprise.
What is also a surprise is how I didn’t notice the art design in Daylight. Being the first game using the Unreal 4 engine, you would think I would take note of how amazing things looked all around me. This could be a testament on how well Zombie Studios designed the gameplay. I was too worried about getting the hell out of each area that I never took the time to look around and examine the details. The fact that lighting was in limited supply also made wandering around a bit of a pain to do just to get a closer look. I did notice that there was a slight haze or blur while playing. I thought it was the depth of field option in the PC settings, yet turning it off didn’t seem to change anything.
After reaching the climax of the story, Daylight may seem short. Two or three hours is a brief period in time but in order to get the entire story, you will need to make multiple journeys through the game. In one playthrough, I managed to collect 27 remnants, out of 104. So as you see, there are plenty of notes to fill in all of the backstory. All this attention to the backstory, it makes me wish the actual current story had more setup going for it. There is also the fact that every new story has new layouts to navigate. Having procedurally generated areas helps in that regard. At first, things may look and feel the same as the last time. It only takes a couple of minutes to realize that everything is, in fact, changed. Rooms being laid out differently to scare cues happening in areas not in the previous session will become apparent real quick. The disappointing aspect of this randomization to keep things fresh is the scares are still the same. Oh, they will still get you to shriek back in horror being as though they happen in different locations. For each time you venture through the story though, the impact of these scares will become watered down even if they happen in random locations. For a game designed to be played multiple of times, having a more varied bag of scares would’ve been welcomed.
Then there’s the Twitch streaming functionality built into Daylight. Similar to how Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition implements Twitch, Daylight lets viewers type in commands to the chat and causing certain things to happen to the person streaming in-game. Since Zombie Studios wants people to figure out these magical keywords to activate actions in Daylight, be prepared for dictionary dump of words scrolling at insane speeds. That is, if you have a lot of viewers. For those of us not a known entity in the Twitch community, this feature is pretty much a waste of time to set up. Besides, most people want to see webcams with faces ready to contort to a misshapen form of horror when encountering the terror that could be around the next corner.
Although a short-lived experience, Daylight manages to pack just enough scary into making those couple of hours seem like an eternity. The frights, jump scares, skin crawling sounds from the dark will test anyone’s ability to keep calm and composed. More attention to filling out the main story would have helped wash that demo feeling I got at times. Even more variety in the ways the game scares you would have worked. Still, that first experience through Daylight will be an enjoyable one if you like jump scares.
