Daylight (2014)

From top to bottom, Daylight falls short of being a good horror game. The gameplay is bare bones, and the attempts at scaring you fall into so many clichés that they're boring. It also becomes downright laughable once you discover how you can safely avoid combat with the main villain in a ridiculous manner. The story makes no sense, and it doesn't get any better after multiple playthroughs. Only the presentation can be called decent, and even that is questionable at times. Even if one were to consider this just for the sake of bechmarking their system against Unreal Engine 4, this is a very difficult title to recommend to anyone, horror fan or otherwise.

There's not a shred of innovation or much of a concerted effort to evoke terror in players throughout the entirety of Daylight.

Daylight deserves credit for trying to spice up the first person horror genre, but its problems keep it from becoming anything more than an interesting experiment.

Daylight is clearly more of a tech demonstration than a game, but it forgot to include any interesting uses of technology that couldn't - and haven't - already been done better on older software. As a one trick pony, if Daylight fails to scare players, then the monotonous and repeated palette of the game world itself will provide no joy to explorers, and the story will fail to grip those that like to engage with the narrative. If there is still any desire to experience the game, it would be recommended to simply watch a Twitch stream rather than paying for it!

The procedurally generated stages and piped horror-movie tropes just don't work for Daylight even for one playthrough, never mind multiple visits. The frame-rate is choppy and the environments are dull rehashes of every haunted house gaming has dragged us through over the years. As a download, I can only delete it -I'd rather burn it.