Daylight

In closure, Daylight as a whole does not reach the pinnacle of fear factors it strives for.

Although repetitive after a while, Daylight manages to fulfill the promise of shaking our breath while we cautiously walk in its procedurally-generated corridors. We fear those shadows, we know they’re there, even if we don’t see them.

Daylight has neither the creeping sense of psychological dread of Fatal Frame nor the poster man antagonist of Slender, and its reliance on cliché lacks distinction. But if the game's straightforward purpose was simply to panic and upset its player then it is an indisputable success, no matter how cheap the tricks employed.

It holds some scary moments and manages to entertain, but it fails to deliver something now. If you haven't played any horror game from the Amnesia/Slender wave, it might be surprising. If you have, it feels like yet another survival horror relying on the very same gameplay.

When I finished, I didn’t expect Daylight to stick with me as much as it did. The story did very little new; the levels weren’t novel; the ghosts were ones I’d seen before. But when I closed my eyes that night, all I could see was that Shadow at the end of the hallway, watching me.

Daylight is a common horror game, following the lead of Slenderman. It is, from time to time, scary enough to thrill the player, but it's also too short and poorly presented.

The procedural concept behind Daylight is quite charming and the game is full of potential, but it fails to deliver.

Daylight is an horror game that despite its many limitations in gameplay and longevity, manages to keep its scary promises mainly thanks to a dark setting of great effect. The fear, though, is not enough to make a good horror game.

Overall, I enjoyed getting scared by horrible, scary-looking spirits.

Daylight starts off scary and ominous, but repeating gameplay and enemies makes the game tedious and mediocre by the end.

It's just let down by the repetitiveness and enemies that soon reveal themselves to be nothing more than a nuisance. Ultimately, the biggest shock Daylight gave me was the realisation that I was out to collect stuff instead of surviving the horrors around me. Don't say you weren't warned.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a rather creepy game and it can still frighten even the boldest of players, but in the end, it is a single play through game that lasts four hours at the most.

I also ran into a series of technical problems, including crashes, falling through the ground, and audio glitches. These technical missteps are distracting, but they aren’t the most serious problem. Daylight’s inability to terrify you and present a world you want to explore is its ultimate undoing.

Daylight is a good survival horror game for PC and PS4. In this game, Zombie Studios give to the players a huge amount of frights that will make them scream for a while. In addition, Daylight incorporates procedurally generated environments that invite the players to complete the game all over again.

Daylight is the first ever game using unreal engine 4 – but with its cheap, boring gameplay and muddy textures it’s not a good advertorial for epic’s tech.

It’s a fun experience overall, but certainly not the best in its genre.

Daylight has a good foundation of scary atmosphere and interesting bits of story. All of that is squandered by the first half, where poor level design, unnecessary box-pushing puzzles, and impotent enemies deflate the scares before it even gets going. By the time I reached the more interesting second act, I’d grown immune to its tricks and could only see it as a mediocre series of fetch quests.

Predictable scary moments and a missing constant tension is what awaits you in this game. Finding pieces of paper on an abandoned island might be a fun thing to do, but Daylight barely fits in the genre that is horror.

Procedurally generated design makes Daylight a complete mess. With its cheap scares, poor writings and predictable events, Zombie Studios remains confined in his own labyrinth.

Specially made for YouTube and Twitch, Daylight carries the legacy of Slenderman and Amnesia. Dark visuals, first person view without any form of self-defense, gloomy and nerve-racking atmosphere: everything's in it. Among all those banalities, Daylight has something very uncommon: the random generated levels, which is the strength and the weakness of this game, as it can't be fully mastered from a rhythm point of view.

Should have stayed in the dark. Only the scary moments, which are often achieved by cheap tricks, save this game from getting a slating review.

After 15 minutes Daylight is no longer scary and makes you explore boring, very similar environments that in addition are procedurally generated in a mindless manner (e.g. a whole floor of bathrooms). [08/2014, p.64]

Daylight is what happens when you mix standard cheap scare videos with Slenderman games and standard horror tropes. The game will scare you time after time, thanks to its randomness. Besides those moments, Daylight has nothing else to offer.

The story never gets interesting; it’s too disconnected for that. Besides this, is too short, it takes about 3 or 4 hours to reach the end and halfway you’ll already feel that you have been doing the same things over and over and the fear transforms into boredom.

A mediocre start for Unreal Engine 4, on a game with surprise, horror and agony lasting no more than 30 minutes. Apart from that, it is a constant repetition with very few jump scares.

It’s a shame that Daylight has turned out to be fairly average, because the title has the atmosphere, the creepily produced audio, some promising ideas, and initial jump scares, but the overall package is brought down by issues with gameplay, its focus on random design, clichéd story and unoptimised performance.

Even though the beginning is filled with cliches, Daylight still manages to scare. At least for the first hour. After that the terror turns to indifference, the main character yells nonsense and the game mechanics become awful. Luckily you can connect the game to Twitch, which will allow other players to form your experience. Only then can Daylight become something more than a nonstop yawning.

It's a shame, because there are moments when Daylight's ominous ambience is pitch perfect, but ultimately it's undone by ho-hum gameplay and a dull story. The witches are truly unnerving, but they're never a real threat, and the reward for your survival is disappointing.

All in all, Daylight was a bit of a disappointment. Let it be said that it's utterly terrifying and will likely scare even the hardiest of players, but ultimately the experience feels a little shallow.

Predictable, trite, and convoluted, Daylight is more likely to make you yawn than scream. It's every single horror game ever made, and it's less than the sum of its parts.