Daylight

Daylight is far from perfect, but despite having a dull gameplay mechanic and few scares it's a great game for inexperienced players who want to start their adventure with horror games. But still - it's not as scary as its competitors, unless you count system requirements. They're scary, and the graphics do not justify them. All in all this first game to utilize Unreal Engine 4 is mediocre at best, and scary game veterans can skip this one.

Despite its budget release price, Daylight is an underwhelming survival horror full of monotony.

There are some half-decent ideas here - particularly the evolution of the hospital - and some fairly decent jump scares, however Daylight is too often too keen to rely on tropes that have been far better served elsewhere.

You can’t just chuck players in a maze with a ghost and tell them to be scared. Unfortunately this is exactly what Daylight does.

The idea of randomly generated levels and scares is sound, it's just that the pieces used are so limited that it becomes horrifyingly boring. [July 2014, p.58]

Didn’t fulfill our expectations at all. You might be better off downloading some freeware horror games. [Issue#242]

A horror game hiding a fact behind great promises, that its developers did not even try to try. Its gameplay is dumb at the best. Its story will scare you only if you fear trivial kitsch, and there is no next-gen not even when looking from afar. At least the game won't take you long...

It’s so sad that Daylight became the first commercial product based on Unreal Engine 4. You can’t find worse publicity for Epic’s new tech than this.

Daylight gives the minimum for an horror/adventure game: it offers a fearful atmosphere and manages to scare us. But besides that, the procedural levels create nothing but poor level design and the gameplay is too repetitive.

Overall I felt as if Daylight was made as a jump-scare machine with a loosely tacked-on plot.

Throw in some truly dreadful writing (the newspaper clippings that tell the story are so nakedly expositional and poorly delivered as to be laughable) and an enemy that actually runs away from you at times and you've got a stinker.

Daylight is capable of doling out some shocks, but it’s far too reliant on a single trick and the writing covers too much well-trodden ground for players to be truly unnerved.

Daylight is a mess. Its procedurally generated design doesn’t succeed in creating unpredictable scares, and the enemies that populate the spooky locales prove to be more annoying than frightening. The randomized levels offer a slightly different experience if you take a second trip through, but you’ll have seen just about everything Daylight has to offer after only a couple hours of play--which, regrettably, isn't much.

So unoriginal, it'll be tough to restrain yourself from rolling your eyes. [Issue#148, p.108]

Some cheap "boo scares" and a few dark corridors do not make a decent horror game. If you wish to be frightened look elsewhere.

Daylight’s claim to fame is its reported replay value; that no scare will ever be the same twice. While it is technically true that the level geometry does change from playthrough-to-playthrough, the scares certainly see some overlap, and the writing isn’t worth a return visit. There are no nascent ideas in Daylight – just the desperate, flailing attempts to throw every horror cliché at the wall.

You're way better off playing Penumbra, Amnesia or Outlast. And when you're through with those, I still could name a slew of other horror games way better than this dull hunt for objects in confusing corridors.

Baffling design decisions and over-reliance on the same tricks further mar this already unpleasant journey.

Daylight incompetently piles on the clichés and delivers an experience that is far more likely to induce boredom than anything resembling fear.

Daylight makes for an interesting experiment in audience participation, but no crowd of online viewers can make the poor writing any better or the themes any less hackneyed. In creating a game designed for return visits, Zombie Studios ironically forgot to make a game worth playing in the first place.