Daylight Review: Scare Generator 3000

As much an experiment as it is a game, Zombie Studios’ Daylight is a peculiar horror beast. It commits some of the same sins that so many other indie horror titles have-- ­­ abrupt, context­-free cold opens driven by note-based storytelling framed by a barebones structure-- ­­ but it made me scream so much that I almost forgave its many problems.

Almost. As time went on, the more I played, the more glaring those problems became.

Daylight is procedurally generated dungeon horror. You play as a woman named Sarah, wandering around an abandoned hospital collecting notes as a disembodied voice says cryptic things to you ­­ (stop me if you’ve heard this before). It mostly feels aimless but amid the mediocrity is an actual objective: collect the notes that glow red (as opposed to the notes that glow blue) and find a sigil object and take it to the room with the stuff. Rinse and repeat for new areas. If you think about it too long, the structure's lack of novelty shines through, but the game won't be giving you much of a chance to think about it. The more of the red notes you collect, the more likely that a ghost is going to come after you (you have a means of fending it off, but I won't spoil that bit for you).

The procedural nature of Daylight has two major results: the dungeons are unique to each playthrough, and the appearances and actions of the enemies that hunt you are unpredictable. Most of the time this is a good thing. The completely nonsensical layout of the hospital, and the repetition of the rooms and hallways themselves, are disorienting and unsettling because it makes it hard to backtrack through them (you’ll do a lot of that), even as the phone you’re using for light keeps track of the layout of areas you’ve explored. You'll need to move around very quickly, as when you find a sigil item and need to return to a previous room, you are unable to to defend yourself. The unpredictability of the ghost adds to the stress. You never know which direction she’ll come at you from (­­ though your phone will glitch out when she’s near), which produces intense panic. When you first enter an area she may not even attack you at all.  Since her appearances are somewhat random, you may go long stretches of time without an encounter at all. I like that.

My main complaint about Daylight is that because the world is randomly generated, the setting becomes anonymous. For instance, in the second area on my first time I found a nursery room with cribs scattered around. It’s a cool room, though again because it’s procedural there’s no specific meaning assigned to that nursery. It wasn’t haunting in the same way nurseries in Dead Space 2 are. It is just another random room among many random rooms, and thus the layout of the world becomes more important than the world itself.

That the nursery was actually right next to another nursery that was completely identical, down to the layout of the cribs, really drove that point home for me. Curating an experience about feeling crazy in an old dirty hospital robs the situation of meaning.

Further weakening my emotional attachment to the game is the opening, which drops you into the setting with no explanation. Now, I understand that I’m supposed to read the notes and figure out what’s going on and why I’m there, but let's be real, that’s not how this situation would actually work in any logical context. Were I, Phil Owen, put in this situation without any idea what was going on or why I was there, I would not spend much time pondering the words on scraps of paper stuck to the walls. But not only that, there are memory issues at play. It’s very difficult to remember and internalize information out of its original context, and that difficulty ramps up when you’re nervous or stressed. The story seems to somewhat gel into semi­coherency, but it is hard to judge its content given that I don’t remember most of the notes I read.

As I said, I forgive a lot of these flaws because the core gameplay experience was scary and usually moved at such a crisp pace that an hour­long session would go by very quick. I screamed a lot, and anything that can do that will generally get the benefit of the doubt for me.

But with a gameplay experience I found generally unpleasant (that is a compliment) combined with a context I have trouble grasping, the replay value that procedural generation is supposed to provide has gone out the window. I’m not really down to continue subjecting myself to this kind of stress since for me it’s been an on-­the­-surface experience.  So while I do appreciate Daylight as an effective scare generator, its shelf life feels much shorter than Zombie Studios intended it to be.

Final Verdict

7.5/10

Daylight is developed and published by Zombie Studios. It is available at an MSRP of $14.99 on PC and PS4. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.