This was one of my most anticipated games before E3 this year. I've been craving a good turn-based RPG, and I've been craving a solid survival horror game that doesn't require me to be a superhuman with a pistol. Square Enix gave me a near-perfect remaster of Final Fantasy X, so I turned to the Zombie Studios game Daylight for this other experience that I was craving. Did it deliver?
Plot / Gameplay
In Daylight you play as Sarah, a young lady who wakes up in a seemingly abandoned hospital with some creepy man at the other end of a cell phone taunting her and giving her instructions. Once he finishes his initial breakdown of scaring the be-jeezus out of you, you start walking around and being scared. Oh, and the cell phone is your faint source of light and map of where you've been already.
Once you walk into another room away from your starting point, you find a bag of glowsticks and a conveniently placed emergency kit on the wall, which will only let you pull flares out of it. [Sorry Resident Evil fans, but you can't take the spray out of there!] At this point, you might be thinking that Sarah is going to a rave in a creepy zombie place.
If you were disappointed to find that this wasn't the case, there is a movie about that already.
The glowsticks, however, are used for showing you how everything you need to pick up and every drawer / locker / cabinet / chest that you can open has some scary looking runic writing all over it. When your glowsticks run out, you have to use some good old fashioned police work to search for stuff. Oh, and the flares? They make all of your nightmares disappear.
Once you start using them to find stuff, you'll find out that whoever drew all over the collectibles is your tattoo artist as well, because you've been blessed with blacklight tattoos.
As you make your way through this hospital, you occasionally start hallucinating as you pick up several documents and pictures for some unknown reason. Then you walk into a strange looking room that looks like it has occult graffiti art written in chalk by a bunch of teenaged Marilyn Manson fans who conveniently hung up a blacklight to make it look creepy. If you picked up the right amount of items while walking around before entering this place, you'll grab some floating objects in this room, and you'll have another bad trip until you start seeing some kind of zombie witches everywhere at random.
"Welcome to Hell, little girl."
So throughout the rest of the game, you dodge the zombie witches (because staring at them for too long kills you), and you pick up items that help you get through these Stargates for Spooky Kids. It's a really basic concept. It's so basic, that the length of the game suffers quite a bit because of this. Is there a catch? You betcha.
If you happen to die throughout all of this fun, you'll awaken from your journey even more confused than you were before you died. Why is that? The game's map is procedurally generated, which means that the map is randomized everytime you start / restart a level. It isn't laid out the same way twice, so there's some serious motivation to not screw up and stare at the witches for too long. That is - if you're out of flares. The flares, which are your only source of defense, instantly kill the zombie witches. Does this sound too frustrating for you?
It shouldn't. After you accomplish just a few missions in the hospital, you'll find yourself in a prison to rinse and repeat. Once you leave the prison, you'll go to a creepy forest with a graveyard and some abandoned buildings in it. After the menacing forest, you'll basically be finished with the game. I would equate the game clear time to Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.
"C'mon, dolly! We'll be done with this game soon!"
Graphics / Visuals
As far as graphics go, I don't know the benchmarks. My PS4 is a gaming device, not a pixel-counting framerate guesser. This is an atmospheric survival horror game, and the visuals are well done. Actually, I would say that the visuals are the best part in this game. The bad thing? Framerate.
Again, I don't know what the framerates are in this game. I'm not a machine, and my PS4 isn't a dev kit. However, there were numerous times, typically during autosaves and bad trips, where the game would be unplayable for a few seconds at a time. Maybe this is because the game couldn't generate new content and save at the same time, or maybe this game was just due for a patch. However, as one of the first games to feature the Unreal 4 engine on PS4, that was a huge letdown! I had much higher hopes for this kind of thing, but alas - the PS4 is still new, and people are still going to have to learn how to make their games run on it.
"There are all these boxes everywhere, and not one of them has shit for me to use. Oh, bother."
Sound
Want to know what really cements this game as a fun experience? The sound. Sometimes at random, you'll hear a nearby scream that sound like your only enemy in the game is about to maul you. You can also hear footsteps pitter-pattering toward you from time to time. When a zombie witch is near you, your cell starts getting all distorted with the runic symbols from The Blair Witch Project showing up on it, while this nasty distorted noise happens, which kind of sounds like the noise you hear you have bad cell phone service somewhere. It isn't the radio static from Silent Hill 3, but it's certainly a trigger just like all of the other creepy sounds.
On the negative side of things, Sarah isn't the brightest b-movie scream queen, so she tries to be like Luigi in the GameCube classic Luigi's Mansion. She keeps calling out to people, hoping someone can hear her. When she runs into one of the witch zombies who float around or run in her direction, she follows up the encounter with, "I know you're there!" Then again, it helps that her voice is done by one of the game's creators, Jessica Chobot of IGN fame.
Trophies / Replay Value
For those who don't care about the replay value in this game, you can skip this part and go straight to the score. For the rest of you, here's the verdict: the trophies are easy. Finish the game on easy, and most of the trophies will have popped. I got a trophy for finishing the game without dying, and I probably died 4 times. Oh, and the one for finishing the game on hard? I finished the game on medium, went to the title screen, switched the difficulty to hard, loaded my save data, toggled on/off the DS4 vibration in my options menu, and ran through the last 30 seconds of the game for that trophy. There are 13 bronze trophies in the game and 3 silver trophies. Nothing too exciting here, but some of them are kind of fun to get if you're a horror fan and like to look at creepy pictures.
Easy bronze trophy. Boo.
Summary
Daylight is good for some quick knee-jerk jumpiness for the first 10 minutes or so, and the graphics and sound are great. However, I have the feeling that this game is directly inspired from Slender or some other similar game. Some things are a little bit too similar to other games, and I'm not 100% sure if this game brings anything new to the table at all, except maybe the interactions you have with people while streaming this on Twitch. Despite these shortcomings, however, I really liked this game. I just feel like something was missing.
Super scary at first!
Beautifully creepy art done in Unreal Engine 4
Great sound, especially with Pulse Elite headset
Procedural generation is well done.
Easy trophies!
Debilitating framerate drops
Incredibly repetitive
2-4 hours of gameplay at the most
Feels like a Slender ripoff / isn't terribly original
Easy trophies.
5.5/10
In Daylight you play as Sarah, a young lady who wakes up in a seemingly abandoned hospital with some creepy man at the other end of a cell phone taunting her and giving her instructions. Once he finishes his initial breakdown of scaring the be-jeezus out of you, you start walking around and being scared. Oh, and the cell phone is your faint source of light and map of where you've been already.
Once you walk into another room away from your starting point, you find a bag of glowsticks and a conveniently placed emergency kit on the wall, which will only let you pull flares out of it. [Sorry Resident Evil fans, but you can't take the spray out of there!] At this point, you might be thinking that Sarah is going to a rave in a creepy zombie place.
If you were disappointed to find that this wasn't the case, there is a movie about that already.
The glowsticks, however, are used for showing you how everything you need to pick up and every drawer / locker / cabinet / chest that you can open has some scary looking runic writing all over it. When your glowsticks run out, you have to use some good old fashioned police work to search for stuff. Oh, and the flares? They make all of your nightmares disappear.
Once you start using them to find stuff, you'll find out that whoever drew all over the collectibles is your tattoo artist as well, because you've been blessed with blacklight tattoos.
As you make your way through this hospital, you occasionally start hallucinating as you pick up several documents and pictures for some unknown reason. Then you walk into a strange looking room that looks like it has occult graffiti art written in chalk by a bunch of teenaged Marilyn Manson fans who conveniently hung up a blacklight to make it look creepy. If you picked up the right amount of items while walking around before entering this place, you'll grab some floating objects in this room, and you'll have another bad trip until you start seeing some kind of zombie witches everywhere at random.
"Welcome to Hell, little girl."
So throughout the rest of the game, you dodge the zombie witches (because staring at them for too long kills you), and you pick up items that help you get through these Stargates for Spooky Kids. It's a really basic concept. It's so basic, that the length of the game suffers quite a bit because of this. Is there a catch? You betcha.
If you happen to die throughout all of this fun, you'll awaken from your journey even more confused than you were before you died. Why is that? The game's map is procedurally generated, which means that the map is randomized everytime you start / restart a level. It isn't laid out the same way twice, so there's some serious motivation to not screw up and stare at the witches for too long. That is - if you're out of flares. The flares, which are your only source of defense, instantly kill the zombie witches. Does this sound too frustrating for you?
It shouldn't. After you accomplish just a few missions in the hospital, you'll find yourself in a prison to rinse and repeat. Once you leave the prison, you'll go to a creepy forest with a graveyard and some abandoned buildings in it. After the menacing forest, you'll basically be finished with the game. I would equate the game clear time to Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.
"C'mon, dolly! We'll be done with this game soon!"
Graphics / Visuals
As far as graphics go, I don't know the benchmarks. My PS4 is a gaming device, not a pixel-counting framerate guesser. This is an atmospheric survival horror game, and the visuals are well done. Actually, I would say that the visuals are the best part in this game. The bad thing? Framerate.
Again, I don't know what the framerates are in this game. I'm not a machine, and my PS4 isn't a dev kit. However, there were numerous times, typically during autosaves and bad trips, where the game would be unplayable for a few seconds at a time. Maybe this is because the game couldn't generate new content and save at the same time, or maybe this game was just due for a patch. However, as one of the first games to feature the Unreal 4 engine on PS4, that was a huge letdown! I had much higher hopes for this kind of thing, but alas - the PS4 is still new, and people are still going to have to learn how to make their games run on it.
"There are all these boxes everywhere, and not one of them has shit for me to use. Oh, bother."
Sound
Want to know what really cements this game as a fun experience? The sound. Sometimes at random, you'll hear a nearby scream that sound like your only enemy in the game is about to maul you. You can also hear footsteps pitter-pattering toward you from time to time. When a zombie witch is near you, your cell starts getting all distorted with the runic symbols from The Blair Witch Project showing up on it, while this nasty distorted noise happens, which kind of sounds like the noise you hear you have bad cell phone service somewhere. It isn't the radio static from Silent Hill 3, but it's certainly a trigger just like all of the other creepy sounds.
On the negative side of things, Sarah isn't the brightest b-movie scream queen, so she tries to be like Luigi in the GameCube classic Luigi's Mansion. She keeps calling out to people, hoping someone can hear her. When she runs into one of the witch zombies who float around or run in her direction, she follows up the encounter with, "I know you're there!" Then again, it helps that her voice is done by one of the game's creators, Jessica Chobot of IGN fame.
Trophies / Replay Value
For those who don't care about the replay value in this game, you can skip this part and go straight to the score. For the rest of you, here's the verdict: the trophies are easy. Finish the game on easy, and most of the trophies will have popped. I got a trophy for finishing the game without dying, and I probably died 4 times. Oh, and the one for finishing the game on hard? I finished the game on medium, went to the title screen, switched the difficulty to hard, loaded my save data, toggled on/off the DS4 vibration in my options menu, and ran through the last 30 seconds of the game for that trophy. There are 13 bronze trophies in the game and 3 silver trophies. Nothing too exciting here, but some of them are kind of fun to get if you're a horror fan and like to look at creepy pictures.
Easy bronze trophy. Boo.
Summary
Daylight is good for some quick knee-jerk jumpiness for the first 10 minutes or so, and the graphics and sound are great. However, I have the feeling that this game is directly inspired from Slender or some other similar game. Some things are a little bit too similar to other games, and I'm not 100% sure if this game brings anything new to the table at all, except maybe the interactions you have with people while streaming this on Twitch. Despite these shortcomings, however, I really liked this game. I just feel like something was missing.
Super scary at first!
Beautifully creepy art done in Unreal Engine 4
Great sound, especially with Pulse Elite headset
Procedural generation is well done.
Easy trophies!
Debilitating framerate drops
Incredibly repetitive
2-4 hours of gameplay at the most
Feels like a Slender ripoff / isn't terribly original
Easy trophies.
5.5/10
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