1996: Daylight

I gave the PS4 horror game Daylight a go this evening. It was super-cheap thanks to a hefty discount on PlayStation Plus, and I’d always found the concept to be interesting, so I felt like giving it a shot, even though its reviews hadn’t been all that positive. (But when have I, a proud Hyperdimension Neptunia fan, ever cared what reviews thought of a game?)

Daylight’s unique selling point is that it’s a procedurally generated horror game. What this means in practice is that the various environments you wander through as you piece together the fragmented story are chopped and changed around a bit with each playthrough. I’ve only done a single playthrough so far — it’s pretty short — so I can’t say with confidence quite how much it’s different each time around, but I can see how it would make changes without altering the fundamental structure and “journey” that the protagonist goes through.

Daylight casts you in the first-person role of Sarah. We don’t know much about Sarah upon starting the game, save for the fact that she’s woken up in what appears to be a ruined hospital, and some random dude with a frankly villainous voice is talking to her through her cellphone, which she has the good sense to use as a torch to light the darkness. (It’s also a handy minimap.)

Gameplay is, I am assured, somewhat of the Slenderman mould, in that the vast majority of what you are doing throughout the game is picking up notes with various bits of Plot on them while attempting to fend off the unwanted attentions of various lurking horrors and ultimately unlocking the way to the next area. In Daylight’s, case, you achieve this by collecting a particular number of “remnants” — notes and memos scattered around the area — until a “sigil” unlocks in a creepy room covered in strange symbols, and you must then take the sigil to a locked door to open it and proceed to the next area. The game alternates between these “scavenger hunt” sequences and calmer puzzle areas until you eventually reach the game’s conclusion.

There’s no combat in the game; this is a horror game in the Amnesia mould, in which just being near an enemy is enough to hurt you. However, there are several means of dealing with them rather than just running away screaming: simply making sure you’re not looking at them keeps you safe, for one, but if you do happen to find yourself face to face with one of these bloody horrors, lighting a flare will cause them to combust in a satisfying fwoof of supernatural smoke and fire. These flares are, naturally, in rather limited supply — you can only carry four at once — so on occasion, it’s better to try and avoid trouble rather than defeat your foes. You also can’t use flares while you’re carrying the sigil for an area, so it’s a good idea to find the exit before you pick up the sigil just so you can make a break for it.

Like a lot of horror games, Daylight’s story is piecemeal and leaves a lot up to interpretation — perhaps a little too much. It’s not especially clever like the stories of its genremates in the Silent Hill series, and it’s riddled with cliches, but it was enjoyable enough to pick through and come up with a few theories about, and it had a nicely creepy atmosphere to the whole thing.

Not the best horror game I’ve ever played, then, but an interesting one, nonetheless, and worth giving a shot to while it’s cheap on PSN.