Rating
Daylight
You awake, trapped in an abandoned hospital. Your only source of light is your phone. You hit a dead-end and must turn around, but behind you lurks an eerie presence and strange noises…
Similar Games
Daylight Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
Atmospheric but all too familiar in far too many places, Daylight is a middling time-killer with few frights.
Daylight deserves credit for trying to spice up the first person horror genre, but its problems keep it from becoming anything more than an interesting experiment.
Daylight is a procedurally generated psychological horror game where each time you start the game, the entire world will be different; from the layout of the level, the location of items you find, and, most importantly, the encounters you stumble into.
You wake in an empty hospital. This is never good. You press forward, squinting into the unknown. Suddenly you hear voices, a giggle from the corner of the room. It’s close - a little too close for someone with only a smartphone, glow stick and flare to defend themselves. A stack of boxes tumbles to your left and you book it, sprinting in whatever direction you can because anywhere is better than
“Daylight’s inherent creepiness is undone by randomly generated elements that dispel the all-important illusion of survival horror.”
Daylight is a nice idea. But it misses the point of what separates a truly great horror work from a generic mess of jump scares. Once again I argue that the less random the design of a horror work, the more potential it has.
Graphics: 4.5 Gameplay: 2.7 Sound: 3.4 Control: 4.0 Replay Value: 1.0 Overall Rating: 3.5 Online Gameplay: Not Rated Publisher: Atlus Developer: Zombie Stud ...
(I say silent fear, but this is a game knowingly made to cater to the Twitch and Let's Play crowd, with all their blue-faced clown wailing. Part of me wonders if that's the reason the writing and acting is so woeful - was this a case of seeing all the Slender vids and thinking $$$ hurryhurryhurry?)
And then there's the copious technical issues I ran into during the game's relatively brief campaign. In an hour and a half, the game crashed on me twice and hard-locked my PC once. In one level, I fell through the floor whenever I tried to run, forcing me to walk at a snail's pace the whole time. In one section, a shadow appeared seconds into the level and stayed inches behind me to the exit, threat meter be damned. I also encountered countless clipping issues, which severely detracted from whatever visual feats the game's Unreal Engine 4 backbone may have been able to conjure up.