Daylight

   Horror is a genre that is very near and dear to my heart, as will probably become abundantly clear in upcoming reviews. I've always been particularly fond of the supernatural variety of horror, dealing with ghosts and various other things lurking in the dark hallways of various haunted places. In terms of games, for me, this goes as far back as the first time I played Fatal Frame and stepped into the halls of the Himuro Mansion and years later into All God's Village. Up to that point, my exposure to the survival horror genre was that of Resident Evil.
   Those games are a fine introduction, but games along the lines of Fatal Frame showed me something new; something different. I was powerless in the horror setting that the game had put me into. I wasn't some well-trained soldier or part of a special task force, with enough allies and firepower to get me through whatever horrors awaited me. No, I was simply one person, alone, with a camera and nothing more. Resident Evil is still very special to me as a game, but Fatal Frame gave my the taste of what I really want out of a survival horror game.
   Sadly, this is a taste that has rarely been satisfied in recent years of survival horror games. There definitely have been some quality ones, Dead Space being among one of my favorites in recent years. It did fall into the usual fare of them recently of giving me enough firepower to dissolve any fear I might have. Though, to the game's credit, the atmosphere of loneliness and isolation was excellently conveyed. But it left me still wanting that old sensation I craved. The feeling like I truly had to survive against supernatural and impossible odds.
   Then I discovered Daylight. Daylight is a game developed by Zombie Studios. The moment I started up the game, I had the feeling it was what I was after. It started in the usual way, waking up in an empty asylum and realized I need to find my way out. I found myself armed only with a cell phone, providing me light and a map, and my main tools being glow sticks and flares.
   The game itself exists in sections, usually placing you in various parts of the asylum and the island it rests on. There is a very simple goal for each of the sections. You have to collect what are referred to as remnants, pieces of evidence that fill you in on the past of the asylum and the spirits that haunt it now. You have to obtain six in each section, but there are always more than six and you can still pick up all of them.

 

A good first note to find. Good for morale.

   That being said, there are two types of notes that you can pick up. The remnants, which tend to glow red, are the ones you need to get to advance. They get you closer to the next part of the goal in each area, but also increase the presence of enemies within the area. There are other notes that have more of a blue aura around them. They also shed light on the past of the asylum, but have no affect on enemy presence and they don't count as remnants.
   Once you find them all, the mysterious and disembodied voice guiding you through this whole adventure lets you know that the sigil has appeared in the area and you must retrieve it. Now, this is where the game gets interesting. The game itself is entirely procedural game play. Everything is randomly generated. This was actually both what I liked about it and also what caused my biggest grievance with the game. It definitely added a good element of panic to the game, especially when you are trying to run and find the end goal of the area while evading enemies, sometimes getting constantly turned around and getting lost repeatedly got increasingly annoying and less enjoyable as it went on.

One of the sigil rooms...

...and the sigil door you need to bring it to.

   Many things about this game are simplistic, and intentionally so. Part of me welcomes the change, as it feels like an interesting direction for gaming to go. While it's never given me trouble, some games now can be fairly convoluted with the tools and skills that makes available to you. With Daylight, you really only need to make use of two. The one you will likely use the most are the glow sticks, which give a little more light to the surrounding area than the light from your phone will. As an added bonus, having a glow stick out makes it easier to find remnants, notes and important objects, like lockers and desks and so on. It gives them a more noticeable look that you can see from a good distance, and lets you find some item stashes that you may have missed otherwise.

Using a glow stick will give objects you can search a distinct outline.

   Flares, however, are strictly reserved for enemies. Various ghosts and shadowy figures wander the halls of this asylum and much like the areas in the game, the enemies are randomly generated. They rarely spawn in the same place and can appear any time. As I played, the glow sticks seemed to keep them away from me and give me enough time to run from, but only the flares will actually kill them, or at least cause them to vanish for a while so you can continue on. Most of the time, these flares seemed to be in short supply and in later areas in the game I found myself running more than anything.
   Interestingly enough, you don't encounter these aggressive spirits until after you go through the first few areas of the game. As you begin, the first few scares come in small doses. Mysterious figures darting quickly down a hallway in the distance, drawers suddenly opening, tipped over chairs righting themselves out of nowhere (even ghosts want their haunting grounds to be tidy, I guess), and so on. None of those really impressed me aside from making me startled for a few seconds. It's a cheap horror trick, but it did get me a little on edge, so maybe it's not as bad of a horror tactic as I think.
   However, for me, the atmosphere really began to settle in when I started hearing the sounds. Most of the time it was strange, vaguely human howls echoing down the halls of the asylum, coupled with the map on my phone getting filled with an increasing amount of static and glitches. This is where I thought the game did a really excellent job of creating that tension. The periodic howls, with locations that were hard to discern, were extremely grating and unnerving. Sometimes they'd be far away, then sometimes they'd be closer and then far away again. I never really could tell if it was getting closer, searching for me, or just idling around making these tortured, animal-like wailing sounds.
   A more common scare I found, a tactic more lifted from the F.E.A.R. games, were the sudden changes in scenery. There would be a crackling snap after picking up the remnants, and I find myself in a different room only to encounter a ghost. It doesn't attack me or harm me, but it will do something or say something unnerving or fairly creepy. A distinct one I remember was in a storage warehouse, a ghost approaching me from amongst the rows of shelves with an increasing amount of fire surrounding it. While an effective scene, it's one I've seen before, and is just about directly lifted from F.E.A.R. as I said before.

Alma would be proud, I'm sure.

   I'm not covering much of the story, for the sake of spoilers, but naturally as you play you learn more of the history of this asylum and what exactly happened. So, in the end, the major question is this: does Daylight satisfy the craving I've been wanting from survival horror games? Well, the answer is more of a yes and no.
   Personally, Daylight doesn't reinvent in the wheel, nor does it really do very many interesting things with the wheel we already have. It's not a perfect game, and for the most part, seems to be making use of tactics that other games have previously used, only not as well. In that regard, I would say that it doesn't. Not as well as it could have.
   But I do have respect for the game and for Zombie Studios as well. Because this, to me, shows that there is that realization of what a survival horror game should be like creeping back into the minds of developers. The way I see it, even if you create a great, creepy atmosphere for your game and give it some wonderful, memorable and terrifying enemies, the moment you give me a really powerful weapon and a suit of armor and even some allies, the feeling of terror gets lessened. Games like Dead Space can still be excellently creepy in their own right, but for me, this philosophy that Daylight is attempting to adhere to is what makes for a truly great survival horror game.
   So, the game is not perfect or terribly original, but it gives me a good sense of hope that survival horror developers are thinking along the right lines again. There are a few more horror games in my lineup to play, and with hope, they'll succeed in giving me that flavor I'm so eagerly looking for.