Daylight Review

Daylight: probably one of the strangest names that Zombie Studios could have given it, as there is an immediate scarcity of the stuff. ‘Nighttime’ probably would have been a more fitting title for the game, as it’s cliché, much like the rest of the game itself.

Daylight is a survival horror game in which each area is randomly generated upon entering it, thus allowing a different game each time you play through it. Being the first game ever to use the Unreal Engine 4, it has a lot to live up to in order to make it a game to remember.

As you start, you wake on the floor with no memory of who you are or how you got there. All you have is a phone, which acts as a flashlight, a map and a means of communications for a mysterious voice that guides (or attempts to) you through the game, but rarely actually helps. Instead, the voice either confuses you with riddles or mocks you in some way. After investigating the room, you open a door and discover you’re in an asylum. You progress past each level by collecting remnants (pieces of paper that contain information of the asylum’s past.) Once you’ve collected enough remnants, a key appears, which is an object that one of the former inmates were very fond of, like a doll or The Bible. This is used to unlock the doorway and progress to the next level. Not all remnants appear during one playthrough, meaning people who like to 100% games will find joy in playing through it multiple times.

Through the areas you can find glow sticks and flares. Glow sticks cause objects of interest to glow, whether it is because they can be searched or moved, making them an invaluable tool which you will find yourself using a lot throughout Daylight.

As you collect more remnants, your threat level gets higher, causing the Witch to appear. There is little to no explanation about why the Witch is there or how she got there. The higher the threat level is, the more persistent she is at attacking and following you. Unfortunately, she is too easy to evade. Lighting flares keeps her away for the duration of the flare’s light, but merely running in the opposite direction or even running straight past her also suffices, as once you have seen her, she seems to forget the aspect of using her legs, meaning she just stands there gormless until you look away.

I’m not going to lie though, the moments when she does appear are terrifying, especially when she is dangerously close to you when you see her. The moments when she does appear are pulled off just right, the obvious things such as how the camera pans round to her automatically when she’s a set distance to you, the sudden music, the scream she lets out to the way she immediately lurches forward slightly once you see her, as if she’s going to jump through your screen and slap you across the face as you scream like a little bitch.

If this is sounding scarily (no pun intended) similar to Slender, that’s because it is. Running around in circles, hearing loud noises until you find all the pages gives a strange sense of déjà vu. Like Slender, the most annoying part of the game is when you have all but one remnant (or page, in Slender’s case) and you’re running in circles trying to find the damn thing whilst desperately avoiding whatever it is that is practically hanging off your buttcheeks.

Each level is a different part of the asylum, starting with the hospital, then the prison, then the sewers and finally ending with the forest. These (theoretically) should get harder as they go on, but it goes the opposite way. For me, the hospital was the largest area and was made a lot more like a maze, even to the point of having multiple floors. The game actually gets easier after that. The prison is a rather small area, as are the sewers. The forest is literally that; a big open forest area, meaning getting away is easy, especially as there isn’t any stamina to limit your running, allowing you to just sprint around until you find an area of interest. I understand that they are randomly generated, but so are the levels in The Binding of Isaac, and they get larger and more difficult the deeper you get, so why can't it be the same here?

The game itself took me two and a half hours to complete, and about half of that was spent looking for the last remnant in each area whilst avoiding Witch attacks every ten seconds. Point is, if you’re looking for a long game, Daylight is the wrong place to be looking.

As I mentioned before, Daylight is the first game to use the Unreal Engine 4, and it has put it to very good use. The environments and game itself is beautiful to look at (except the screaming ladies) and very clearly boasts the power of UE4. Even to things such as how dynamic the lighting is. For instance, at one point I was standing behind a table, trying to regain my composure not long after a Witch attack. As I was standing still, my character started waving the glow stick in her hand around, and as she did, the shadow of the table I was behind moved accordingly to how she moved the glow stick. Just small things like that show the potential of what Unreal Engine 4 can do and really add to the experience.

Overall, Daylight is a game that had the potential to overthrow games like Outlast and Amnesia. Armed with randomly-generated areas and Unreal Engine 4, it should have, but boring and repetitive gameplay, cliché design, small length and general unoriginality unfortunately let it down massively.