So there we were, moving through a hallway, minding our own business. Suddenly, the door that we just came through closed by itself, but that wasn’t anything compared to what was to come. As we stood in a small connecting room, looking at a few closed doors trying to decide where we wanted to go, our phone’s display becomes fuzzy.
Then, we heard the whispers. A quick look around us proved that nothing was there, and our phone had already quietened down. So, a lump in our throat, we move on. We open a door and just as it rather loudly creaks wide, the lights go out. At the other end of the newly-revealed hall, something is walking towards us. We turn and start to run, only to be suddenly greeted by the screaming face of some horrid apparition which looks as though it’s just stepped out of The Ring.
If you want to scare the living daylights out of your friends - and yourself - play Daylight.
The first-person horror title from Zombie Studios and Atlus follows the current trend in the survival-horror genre by trapping you in some terrible, haunted place, with no way to defend yourself, and expects you to get out – one way or another. Armed with nothing but glowsticks, flares and a phone with a seemingly endless power supply - Apple, take note - complete with GPS, Daylight submerges you in to the world of yet another haunted asylum.
However, Zombie Studios brings you anything but a clichéd world. Every time you start a new game, the world is procedurally generated. Guides won’t help you in Daylight. Very little will. Of course, this also carries the benefit of ensuring that you’ll never become immune to the game’s tension through over-familiarity with scripted scares: Zombie Studios forces players to brave the unknown, creating environments which change with every playthrough. There is no real warning when enemies – those white dress wearing, blood stained ninja women of horror – are about to pop out at you, and there on more then one occasion you may - or may not - see a ghastly woman standing up above, watching from a safe distance.
Daylight was made solely to scare you, and though it has its faults, Zombie Studios has made a terrifying game.
When you think of Daylight, imagine a cross between Slender and Outlast. Like Slender, Daylight forces you to trek through the haunted halls and forests of its world - looking for a way out in every area without getting too close to, or even looking at, the ghosts that haunt the environment. Of course this wouldn’t be complete without the mangled asylum that you must find your way through. Taking its cue from Outlast, the majority of the game is focused on trying to escape the asylum and sewers beneath. But Daylight is much more than that.
Armed with your tablet phone, equipped with a map that fills out as you search through the areas, you are given control of Sarah: a woman who can’t remember anything and is following the mysterious voice coming through the tablet, belonging to someone who spends the majority of the game playing on your emotions and tormenting you with cryptic words.
From the moment the game starts – waking up with no memory of anything in the abandoned asylum – you find yourself running through the halls, trying to avoid ghosts that seem to want to eat your face off. While you’re running in terror, you’re tasked with finding a number of remnants, leftover artifacts which populate each level. Find all of them, and you’ll unlock a trigger object somewhere in the level, which allows you to progress. The more remnants you gather, the more angry the spirits become - and the harder they’ll chase you, making it increasingly more difficult to reach your destination. These objects range from the dingy teddy bear to the broken, dirty baby-doll. But when you pick up these items, you’re prevented from using either your flares or your glowsticks - leaving you with only one option against the witches that will come after you: Run. The Fuck. Away.
Your tablet phone also provides you with a light source. Zombie Studios has performed an admirable job with the ambiance of Daylight: the creepy, hard-to-see environments are adept at crafting an ever-present sense of isolation and apprehension. You’re also given glowsticks and flares - two items that provide light and defense throughout the game, though you can only carry a total of four of each at a time.
Glowsticks illuminate pieces of furniture that you can interact with, guiding you to help find the remnants you need to unlock the trigger objects for the sigils. The flares, however, are your only defense against the omnipresent witches. The flares, when lit, will kill these shadowy ninja women of doom - banishing them back to whatever creepy hell-hole they came from; but that doesn’t stop more from popping up out of nowhere, scaring you all over again.
There’s no real way to tell when or where these witches are going to come from, save for the fact that your tablet becomes overcome with static the closer they get to you. This essentially warns you that you’re about to die, giving you just enough time to either attempt to run away screaming, stand there and hope it goes away, or rip out a flare – if you have one – and stand and fight. The AI of the witches varies greatly: some will chase you down, whereas others will simply stand still.
Daylight throws these ghastly apparitions of women at you left and right in a tasteful and frightening manner. You’ll look behind you and see something just on the other side of the door - then she’ll be gone as you get closer. Boxes topple over as you enter a room, doors open and close in front of you, and chairs will move on their own, getting in your way as you walk. While these elements are all effective, over time the procedural engine throws them at you with such frequency that it begins to make the game a little less frightening.
There are flaws in the mechanics of Daylight then, but they aren’t highly noticeable while you’re running through its corridors. The way that the game generates its maps can cause rooms to be doubled in the same area - which causes issues with navigation - making you travel through more than one information desk or a couple of extra canteens in one level. With a few more building blocks to choose from, it’s something that could have been avoided, similar to how much of your time in Eldritch is spent encountering the same few rooms again and again.
Don’t get us wrong, it’s nice to be able to have a game that we can jump in to at any time and not know when to expect the scares. It provides plenty of replay value in a genre that’s so often scripted to hell and back. It also means that while you know that there is something in this area that is going to scare the daylights out of you, you’ll never know when or where; it’s just that the certain repeated environments can harm the feeling that the Asylum is a cohesive, believable space.
That said, the scares in Daylight can be incredibly effective. There are times where you just know there’s a scare lying in wait through the door that’s opened in front of you, and there are times where you’ll look to the left or right and see someone standing just in the shadows, watching you.
While the game saves at the beginning of each level, the checkpoint system is a little questionable. Having to start from the beginning after every death can be frustrating, resulting in a large amount of lost progress. It’s annoying, but it’s also a small price to pay when playing a game that focuses strongly on the replay value.
Daylight isn’t a game that would be enjoyable for someone who wants more then to just be scared senseless, however. The story is relayed almost exclusively via text notes throughout its environments, and the amount of backtracking required in every level can sometimes frustrate. But the environments are genuinely frightening and unsettling, making Daylight worth at least a single playthrough.
But the most fun we had with Daylight wasn’t in the game itself. Zombie Studios has worked in a fantastic feature, teaming up with Twitch.tv to incorporate even more possibilities for fear and screams. Players have the option of linking their game with their Twitch accounts and stream their playthroughs to other viewers. But Zombie Studios takes this feature and goes a step further, allowing a way for viewers the chance to really mess with the head of the streamer. Certain words, when typed in the chat log, trigger events in Daylight. Though Atlus and Zombie Studios is keeping the entire list of words a secret, a little trial and error revealed a few of these triggers, but we’re sure there’s plenty more - and that more will be added over time.
As a spectator, we had the delightful pleasure of being able to test this feature - and we found ourselves rolling in laughter. We immediately tried the word “scream” and we were quite happy with the results. A blood curdling scream was immediately heard, far different than the sounds the witches in the game usually make. We even typed it in to the chat box when the streaming player was in the pause menu, only to be delightfully surprised that the scream was still heard, resulting in a pair of headphones being thrown off the player’s head and plenty of profanities being uttered.
Other words are also trigger events; static results in causing the tablet to freak out – and witch… well, we’ll let you guess what that does. But the best trigger word that we found was feet. This resulted in the player hearing footsteps coming up directly behind them - though when they turn around, there’s nothing there. This makes Daylight an amazingly enjoyable game to play with friends, and a game that is just as fun as a spectator as it is actually playing - something which is unique to the horror genre.
Though Daylight has its shortcomings and will be quickly overlooked by genre detractors, it remains a fun - and never-jangling - experience. Horror fans will love Daylight. With atmospheric and terrifying locations, and the frightening sounds of screams and footsteps around you, it’s easy to overlook the lack of story and recycled assets. Even though Daylight doesn’t really introduce anything too new in terms of its gameplay, it assists in widening the field of the genre, and its inspired use of spectator interaction is surely deserving of further exploitation.
Daylight may not raise the bar for the horror genre, but it’s certainly a game worthy of being added to your library.
Heather Williams
@Olaris_Rhea
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