Horror is perhaps the most mishandled of all the video game genres. The amount of titles that claim to fall into that niche eclipse the amount that actually do. They all seem to think that by adding a few limbs and drops of blood onto a largely humanoid figure that you blast a few times with a shotgun, that it counts as horror. The trouble is, it’s impossible to be scared when your main character is packing more weapons than a small country. So recently, there’s been a trend in horror games where your character is equipped with a mobile phone or a camera and very little else. Daylight is the latest game to jump on this particular bandwagon, following popular titles such as Amnesia and Outlast. The question I found myself pondering as I loaded up Daylight and discovered that all my character had was a mobile phone, a glow stick and a few flares, was which of these trends was the most entertaining. From a purely horror stand point the latter can be the only winner, but at least the gun toting approach tends to include actual game play.
Speaking of, my scepticism was raised even further when I realised that all the game play in Daylight added up to walking along corridors and shining the glow sticks around looking for ‘clues’. ‘Clues’ appeared in the form of freaky patterns etched over various pieces of furniture which, when used, would contain a piece of paper with some hastily written down back story plastered over it. Using the glow sticks I was to piece together the past of the strange abandoned hospital I was stuck in and, hopefully, make my escape. I understand that these games appeal to people because they’re supposed to simulate an ordinary person being trapped, alone, with something that hunts them and equipped with nothing to fend off the horrors that appear. I will concede that not being able to fight back makes a game scarier, but that can’t be all you base your game on, otherwise it just becomes a walking simulator where things jump out at you every now and then. There’s got to be some form of puzzle solving, but all Daylight seemed to possess was a map, which was pretty difficult to read.
All I can tell you for certain is that your character’s name is Sarah. She has somehow managed to wake up, alone, in an abandoned hospital with a strange voice, presumably in her head, telling her she needs to discover the history of the hospital before finding an escape route. That’s pretty much your plot. As mentioned there are loads of notes scattered throughout the game and it’s your main job to find them, but they’re just so dull to read. This kind of story telling simply doesn’t appeal to me. I would much rather have seen the events rather than just read about them. It made the story feel fractured and stop-start, so much so that the notes eventually just blended together. It becomes clear that, yes indeed, Sarah has some tenuous link back to the hospital and there are vengeful spirits determined to kill her because they were bored or something.
As I said, I really stopped taking the story in after a while and instead, just explored the hospital trying to find scary stuff. After all, you could forgive a bad story in a horror game if it’s scary and I would say Daylight is, at least a little bit. The hospital is nicely put together with dimly lit corridors, random noises and brief glimpses of things that don’t appear to be friendly, but don’t get close enough for you to tell. That’s the good kind of horror rather than having monsters putting on a song and dance before you scatter their brains across a wall. However, I found it impossible to get immersed, mainly because of the volatile nature of the game. I was plagued by constant frame rate drops and crashes, and believe me, I wasn’t playing it on a low end machine. Occasionally I would also notice a bit of texture that looked completely out of place. It wasn’t always noticeable, but every now and then I would glance over a bit of wall or floor that just looked like it had been put in there in a rush.
The games real big boast, that could of saved it but didn’t, was its procedurally generated maps and enemies. Supposedly the hospital would have a different layout every time you played the game. I was quite excited by this but, as with a lot of features in this game, was left disappointed. While the layout of the hospital is generated randomly, very little of what is contained in it seems to be. It’s all the same badly lit corridors, beds pushed up against walls and destroyed wardrobes just in slightly different places. As for the different enemies, maybe I was just unlucky, but all I really saw were shadow creatures. So in the end, the only outcome of the procedural generation was that you got lost every single time you played the game. I can’t help but feel this is a feature that wasn’t taken advantage of.
The biggest criticism of Daylight has to be how insubstantial it is, even with the procedurally generated content. There isn’t enough in the game to keep me interested, but maybe that’s more the genres fault that the games. I’ve had a bit of fun with Amnesia and Outlast, but never more than a few hours and Daylight is identical to that. It was a little bit of fun for a while, but mostly forgettable and doesn’t have enough game play or content to give it any re-playability at all. Maybe Daylight will quench your horror thirst for a little while, but don’t expect it to do much more than that. Avid fans of Amnesia will probably have much more fun with this than I did, but if you’re not really into horror, this will not be the game to convert you.