Daylight Reviews

“Daylight’s inherent creepiness is undone by randomly generated elements that dispel the all-important illusion of survival horror.”

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.

(I say silent fear, but this is a game knowingly made to cater to the Twitch and Let's Play crowd, with all their blue-faced clown wailing. Part of me wonders if that's the reason the writing and acting is so woeful - was this a case of seeing all the Slender vids and thinking $$$ hurryhurryhurry?)

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Atmospheric but all too familiar in far too many places, Daylight is a middling time-killer with few frights.

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.

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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.

Daylight has a good foundation of scary atmosphere and interesting bits of story. All of that is squandered by the first half, where poor level design, unnecessary box-pushing puzzles, and impotent enemies deflate the scares before it even gets going. By the time I reached the more interesting second act, I’d grown immune to its tricks and could only see it as a mediocre series of fetch quests. Editor’s Note: Two former IGN employees worked on Daylight’s development. To ensure an impartial review, we selected a reviewer who joined IGN after both had departed.

This survival horror flop sacrifices basic scares and intriguing gameplay for dull item collection and repetitive level design.

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.

In the absence of more traditional action, first-person exploration games depend on their atmosphere and characters. Success stories like Dear Esther and Gone Home demonstrate how a compelling narrative can pull players in, even when the gameplay consists mainly of looking at stuff and reading. Zombie Studios makes a similar attempt using a horror setting with Daylight, but fails to create a world where you care about anything or anyone. Without a captivating hook or any real scares, Daylight leaves players lost in the dark.

And then there's the copious technical issues I ran into during the game's relatively brief campaign. In an hour and a half, the game crashed on me twice and hard-locked my PC once. In one level, I fell through the floor whenever I tried to run, forcing me to walk at a snail's pace the whole time. In one section, a shadow appeared seconds into the level and stayed inches behind me to the exit, threat meter be damned. I also encountered countless clipping issues, which severely detracted from whatever visual feats the game's Unreal Engine 4 backbone may have been able to conjure up.

The Bogeyman has been banished.