Twitch Plays With Your Head: Daylight's Streaming Screams

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 where all the boogiemen live. But that, apparently, is only the beginning. Developer Zombie Studios has introduced a new wrinkle: the ability for Twitch users to enter commands into chat ala Twitch Plays Pokemon and produce spine-chilling, flesh-rattling effects. Like kitties meowing! Seriously. Details and release info below.

Daylight is now set to launch on April 8th for $14.99/£11.99, and it'll take place in and around an asylum, which is something no horror anything has ever done before. You've got your spooky rooms, spooky forests, spooky prisons, and spooky things of which we can't even conceive (largely because Zombie hasn't told us about them yet).

Snark aside, I'm absolutely willing to overlook a trite setting if Daylight delivers on randomization and stream-powered scares. There are some (much-needed) limits, though. As publisher Atlus told Eurogamer, "[The Twitch keywords] are all on timers, so you can't spam them. That would be ridiculous." This part sounds rather promising too: "We're not going to tell you the list of words. You're going to have to find them through experimentation."

Given that horror has gained an especially big following on places like YouTube and Twitch, all of this makes a lot of sense. Oh, and Daylight was built with Oculus Rift support in mind on top of all that, so it's certainly one of the more forward-thinking horror games to spring out of gaming's conspicuously oozing closet in quite some time.

I hope it comes together in a suitably scary fashion. All these untested moving parts could easily collapse into abject purposelessness, but we'll just have to wait and see. Me, though, I'm prepared for anything. I've got a warm bowl of milk and enough catnip to fell a pack of enraged lionesses. Let's do this.