Procedural spooks! Daylight is the horror game that randomises the ghost train every time you play. Your first playthrough might involve trundling past a dangling skellywobbler at the first turn, while repeated visits might see a couple of tatty plastic bats in place of dem bones. Maybe a Freddy Krueger knock-off with spatulas strapped to his fingers will pop out one time, or a banshee…
Daylight
6 years ago
Daylight, despite its balmy, flower-scented hug of a name, is meant to be scary. Wicked scary. If you have pants, they will be scared off your person. Your pants will leave you to die. It's a fascinating experiment, too, because many of the game's levels and scares are procedurally generated, hopefully leading to high replayability in a genre that typically goes cold after you've figured out…
Scary hospitals filled with things that bump unkind in the night? We've all been there. Daylight looks like a sequel to Outlast, a game which initially scared the socks off me and then became so cosily familiar and repetitive that it fit me like a pair of slippers. Daylight mixes up the institutional walkthrough horror by introducing randomisation - the corridors and creeps are different…
When Billy Shakespeare and Alanis Morissette put their heads together at a student poetry workshop and invited irony, I think they had higher purposes in mind than horror game titles that are almost certainly entirely misleading. Daylight will be a very dark game and most of the interiors will be illuminated by little more than the flickering screen of a cleverphone. Perhaps levitating spectral dolls…
7 years ago
I think it's fair to say that horror games are in a slump, although that suggests the existence of a golden age of trouser-troubling titles at some point in the past. I'm not sure that's the case, but when 99% of the entire genre involves walking through forests or factories, waiting for slenderman to appear and then shrugging, the frighteners have certainly become frightfully dull.…