Daylight is one of those games that is brilliant on paper. Here’s the pitch:
Players take on the role of Sarah, a reporter who awakes to find herself alone in a derelict hospital with no knowledge of how she got there and no way to escape. Her only light source and means of navigating the long, seemingly deserted corridors is her mobile phone. As she explores the dark corridors she discovers ‘remnants’ pinned to walls and hidden in cupboards and desks –Written clues that slowly help her to unravel the truth of whatever calamity befell the dilapidated husk she now finds herself trapped in.
However, it soon becomes clear that her presence there has angered some otherworldly force, dark and ancient. The ghosts of the hospital’s previous occupants linger in the halls, doors sealed with arcane magic bar your progress. Only once Sarah has uncovered the truth and retrieved the sigil that breaks the spell can she leave this place. That’s if the angry spirits lurking in the darkness don’t get her first!
Players never know what’s around the next corner thanks to procedurally generated maps and randomized events that are different every time you play
Sounds like a great game, right?
Well it can be, it can also be a tedious pain in the arse. Like the game’s levels and scares, how much enjoyment you can derive from a single playthrough of the game, which takes about four hours, is as random as the procedurally generated surroundings.
The first time I tried to play Daylight I didn’t have a very good time at all.
Make no mistake, the building blocks were all there for a decent horror game: a creepy as fuck setting (I hate going to hospitals when they’re fully staffed and open, let alone when they’re abandoned and full of ghosts), a dazed, confused and almost constantly panicked protagonist that desperately clings to her only limited source of light; a mobile phone that maps your surroundings and screws up when something otherworldly draws near. The usual diegetic screams, thumps, and sobs that come from nowhere. Dark shapes that appear in your periphery with glowing eyes and inanimate objects that spring to life and off key string music that instantly puts you on edge.
When all of this comes together properly, Daylight is genuinely tense, creepy and a great haunted house to traipse through for a couple of hours.
However, this depends entirely on where the game decides to dump the six documents you need to collect in order to reveal the sigil needed to break the seal on the locked door that lets you move onto the next area. The first time I played the game I missed one, and for the life me I just couldn’t find the damned thing.
Phone in one hand, magical glow stick that apparently reveals secrets in the other, I spent the better part of an hour stumbling around the map like someone who’d lost their car keys at a rave, wandering around in circles watching the same things happening over and over again as I hunted for that one last sodding document.
During this time the cracks in the game’s design became painfully clear. Daylight only has a limited number of tricks up its sleeve, and like every other haunted house ever made it needs to keep pushing you forward and not look back in order to maintain the oppressive atmosphere and keep you scared.
Eventually I got so bored I decided to give up and play something a bit more cheerful for a bit.
When I returned to Daylight several hours later, I discovered another shocking revelation. The game has incredibly sparse checkpoints. Despite spending what felt like an eternity playing the damn game it had decided that my meagre progress was not worth recording and the best thing to do was to make me start the whole damn thing again.
Needless to say, I wasn’t at all impressed until I realised that not only was this not the same map that I first got lost in, but that I was actually making progress. I found the remnants I needed, learned a little about the facilities time as an asylum, broke through the barrier and moved onto the next area, a prison facility complete with much angrier spirits, some great jump scares and a couple of nice little set pieces, once again I breezed through the prison, jumping and nervously chuckling as I went.
Although, at one point, a spectre did manage to get the jump on me and, in my panic, I didn’t manage to light my ghost be gone flare in time and died. To my surprise the layout of the map did change. Although, there are certain set areas, such as a three story prison block and an archive room which remained the same. Also, some of the set pieces I experience before changed. In my first attempt one of the cells suddenly burst into flames as I scanned them for clues, the next time I was prepared for the fright but nothing happened. Instead, some scary fucker got the jump on me as I left the area, resulting in a thrilling chase to the exit.
Bolstered by this positive experience, I felt compelled to push on to the next save point, then one after that and the one after that as the game began to find its stride with each new subsequent area better suited to the randomness of the game’s design, from sprawling sewers to a dense forest full of angry spirits.
However, just as Daylight got up to speed and I’d finally warmed to it, it ended. Abruptly, with an ending that may as well have been “and they all had lemonade, The End”. It could have gone in several weird and wonderful directions. Hell, it could have been randomly generated. Instead, the game’s writers decided to go with the most obvious. You could probably figure it out from just reading this review, no, scratch that, if you’ve ever seen a horror film about an asylum you could probably figure it out. That’s how obvious it is.
After I had finished the game I decided to see how well the proposed twitch integration worked. Once again, it’s a rather spiffy idea as viewers can type in words that result in random events happening in the game. Mostly sounds, but then again also highly open to repetition and abuse, especially if you take into consideration that Zombie Studios have not released a list of what these magical phrases are, so once you find out one of them chances are you’re going to keep typing that same thing in because you know it works.
Seen as an experiment in game design, Daylight is pretty interesting proposition, but the fact of the matter is that it misses the mark more than it hits it.
Theoretically at least, a procedurally generated horror game is a pretty cool idea, and in practice it works quite well. The problem is that it’s shackled to an obnoxious supernatural paper chase that kills any sense of progression or tension. By missing a single document you invariably end up more preoccupied with finding the final piece of the puzzle than the horrors that surround you, as the game’s box of tricks is slowly emptied and then repeated ad nauseam until you find it. Pulling down the metaphorical curtain and revealing the ride operator to be a carny with a beer gut in a wife beater and trucker hat.
The game’s main concept of procedurally generated horror is both its best feature and its Achilles’ heel. Despite being an interesting experiment and a very different approach to its heavily scripted contemporaries, it’s hard to recommend and, to a certain extent, review Daylight because not only will my experience invariably be somewhat different to yours, but I can’t guarantee its quality at all.
