If you prefer to watch reviews rather than read them, here is our video review of Daylight.
Lets set the scene. You wake up; confused, disoriented with no idea where you are or why you’re here, and all you have is a phone with no signal and some creepy guy communicating with you like he’s a voice in your head (can’t be coming from the phone, that has no signal). If his voice was coming from a television you might think this is a Saw movie, but you should be so lucky. You’re not in for a gore-fest, this is a give-you-chills-and-creep-you-the-fuck-out-fest… Welcome to Daylight.
Developed by Zombie Studios and published by Atlus, Daylight is a game that puts the player in an abandoned mental hospital where you must unearth the terrible secrets held within and escape. To help with this you have a phone which doubles as a torch and a mini map, as well as glow-sticks and flares which are conveniently placed around the hospital. These tools provide the means necessary to traverse the dark hallways of the hospital and to defend yourself from the evil spirits seemingly hell bent on you demise.
The reason I started this review with a description of the opening scene is because the atmosphere and aesthetics are two of the things that are truly great about Daylight. The hallways and rooms within the hospital are derelict and decaying. They have old medical equipment and furniture strewn about the place. The building is old and makes sounds that don’t sound natural. The empty rooms and hallways echo, occasionally with footsteps, too often with screams. Items move when there’s nothing there. Sarah, the character that you play, sometimes speaks which only increases your awareness of how empty the hospital actually is… or should I say the lack of humanity within its walls. It’s dark and the limited field of vision provided by the light cast from the torch on your phone or from a glow-stick only help to emphasize the feeling of dread the game tries to instill in the player, as well as casting shadows that make you think you’ve seen something out of the corner of your eye. I completed Daylight in about 4 hours, but I probably could have completed it sooner if not for the feeling that I needed to be cautious with every step I took.
The game is broken up into several sections. To move from one section to another you must first find all the relics in the current area, grab the key that appears once all relics are found, and use the key to remove the supernatural inscription that is locking the door to the next area. This format of gameplay has its positives and negatives. At first it’s fun and reading the relics is genuinely interesting as they give snippets of the history of the hospital and allow the player to piece together the plot of the game. The downside to this is that it becomes very rinse and repeat gameplay. The objective is the same in each section of the hospital and nothing really new is added. Also, while a lot of the relics are well written and very creepy, some seem like filler content and others are generic horror writings.
The monotony of the gameplay is broken up by two things: what I call flashes of insanity and the spirits haunting the hospital. The flashes of insanity happen at random moments through the game. This is where the player has a vision of a body burning in flames, something running across your path the hallway ahead, a body hanging from a ceiling, amongst other frightening things. They’re flashes because they exists for mere moments in the game. Just long enough to creep you out and keep the fear alive. The spirits on the other hand appear much more frequently and try to pull you into complete darkness. They look like the girl from the Ring but have the face of Van Gogh’s the Scream with light streaming from their eyes and mouth. Most of the time you can tell when they’re coming as your phone will begin to display static interference, at which point you pull out a flare a burn them away with the light. Something however there is no warning and you’ll turn around to their screaming faces, panic, misclick and pull out a glow-stick instead of a flare ensuring your quick demise. Several times when there was no static interference warning I heard what sounded like footsteps and turned around just in time to see the spirit sprinting towards me, hunched back, ready to ruin my day. Thinking back on those moments the movements and look of the spirit still gives me chills and I tip my hat to the guys a Zombie Studios for that one. Eventually though the appearances of the spirits become a little stale and you become immune to that initial panic that you feel when they first appear.
The big thing about Daylight that intrigued me was the procedural level generation. As a software developer by trade I was interested in how they achieved it, as a gamer I was intrigued by how well they achieved it. While I can’t answer question one I can give my opinion about question two. To test out the procedural level generation I completed one section of the game but instead of unlocking the door at the end and allowing autosave to kick in I restarted the game and replayed that section. What was cool was that the layout of the section had indeed changed, the only thing that let it down is that the rooms all pull from the same templates so that while the left and right turns change it’s hard to notice since the look of the rooms is the same. It’s a cool concept and I hope it’s utilised more in the future, but I think it would work better in a game that has more open levels.
Just like this review Daylight climaxes with an ending that is slightly predictable and not hugely original. Overall though the game did an excellent job of scaring me, thinking back on certain parts still give me chills, and if it had added new elements of gameplay as the game progressed it would of scored much higher.
