Daylight seemed like a very controversial adventure from the very beginning. Ambitious plans to create a horror game in a randomly generated world were expressed out loud – but in advertising videos only identical corridors were visible. The developer had carte blanche in the form of cutting-edge Unreal Engine 4 technology and the ability to create for the new PlayStation – but none of the company’s previous games were good enough.

Surely we managed to achieve only one thing: Zombie Studios attracted the attention of almost the entire specialized press. The project was probably talked about even more than it deserved. Still, I wanted to believe that the authors would be able to breathe new life into the boring format of horror films.

And we will cure you

After watching the trailer, I want to write down two hits at once in the “source of inspiration” column: Slender And Outlast. It turned out that there is practically nothing here from the latter, with its complex direction and twisted plot. But from a series of stories about a skinny man, perhaps too much was borrowed.

A girl named Sarah wakes up in some abandoned hospital. She is greeted by an unfamiliar male voice who says all sorts of scary things: about ghosts, about the need to be saved and that “the memory of this place stores terrible things.”. The same man also explains the rules by which the game will be played in the near future.

The only property that the main character has is a mobile phone, which replaces her flashlight and navigation system. If it gets too dark, you can use glow sticks, scattered in limited quantities throughout the levels. Finally, if any paranormal gets very close, a signal fire can scare it away. By and large – everything.

Despite the presence of some cliches, the game gets off to a good start: mysterious tattoos appear on the girl’s arms, an eerie ghost appears at the end of long corridors, and heart-rending screams are heard from the neighboring rooms.

Actually, the gameplay is https://boomerangcasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ that you need to explore a closed location in search of newspaper clippings and personal files of patients. Once a certain number of sheets have been collected, a magic item will become available in one of the rooms. It must be brought to the closed doors to the next zone, where everything will happen again.

What should be interesting is that the locations Daylight are generated randomly on each playthrough. However, there is nothing good about this: the hospital turns into an incoherent jumble of corridors and identical rooms, and it is not immediately possible to distinguish one forest from another. There are so few environmental elements that they are repeated even within a single run (the maternity ward, for example, can be encountered three times). And it doesn’t even help that the rooms themselves are made more or less atmospheric.

The “search-puzzle” cycle will be repeated several times, periodically diluted with scripted puzzles or cut scenes. And after an hour of running around, the player is faced with a finale that is completely absurd in its “surprise”. In theory, it is he who should tease and encourage a replay, which will clarify new details of what happened. After all, the only thing that will change when you restart is the structure of the level and the text of the collected pieces of paper. But Daylight there is simply no need to go through it twice, so generating content is useless.

Nothing, you’re just tired, it happens to everyone

It’s probably worth changing your anger to mercy: after all, a million games blatantly copy other people’s ideas, diluting them with unnecessary innovations. The authors, it seems, do not aspire to more, knowing full well that they will not have a masterpiece. They are just honestly reproducing other people’s work.

First of all, the player is given the role of not just a faceless dummy, but a character with a certain character: Sarah constantly comments on what is happening, screams and complains that she doesn’t like the situation too much. It’s a pity that the girl often talks out of place. "I don’t see anything!" she says as she holds a lantern in each hand. "What was that?"- when there was absolutely nothing. And only the phrase “I can’t do this anymore” is almost always appropriate, because you begin to experience similar feelings within twenty minutes.

IN Daylight you can probably find all the cliches that the industry is sick of. Falling shelves, flickering lights and paintings tilting to one side are fine, but the “old Indian cemetery” is a complete circus. In addition, the only and main enemy does not evoke any emotions: this is a faceless half-dead woman. Her presence in the abandoned hospital is so logical and appropriate that, compared to the aforementioned Slenderman, it is not at all scary.

However, horror has two things in store that deserve attention. First of all, of course, technology: Daylight – this is the first game on Unreal Engine 4. We can celebrate the beginning of a new era!

But it’s better to celebrate without cake, and drink without clinking glasses. Everything that depended on the developer was done in the worst possible way. The textures are very low resolution, the animation of the main character’s hands does not reveal new technologies in any way, and if the art and design are surprising, it is by the degree of inexpressiveness.

However, even through the thick walls of poor implementation you can see echoes of the engine’s capabilities. When you open the doors, realistic dust scatters across the floor, the sheets on the beds sway in many planes, and the light from the lanterns falls on the surfaces in such a way that it’s simply a sight to behold. This is not a reason to buy the game, but graphics fans will certainly appreciate it.

Another interesting point is that the horror film is specifically designed for live broadcasts using Twitch and assumes the ability of the audience to influence the gameplay. This element was clearly tailored to the needs of PS4, but is also available on PC.

It works like this: if you start the broadcast using a special item in the menu, the game will be able to monitor comments in the viewer chat. And as soon as anyone present mentions a certain keyword, the virtual director will throw up an event corresponding to the key. “Hello” will make the heroine say hello, “scream” will cause a heart-rending scream. The authors do not provide a complete list of commands in the expectation that viewers will look for options on their own.

Based on trailers and screenshots Daylight leaves the impression of a passable horror film, the kind the market is filled with. And she actually holds some sort of standard: she’s decently voiced, doesn’t look too bad, and sometimes manages to please with a spectacular scene. In the end, it just works – there are a very moderate number of bugs in the game.

But in fact, the value of such a craft is no more than ten thousand clones Flappy Bird. It lacks integrity, there is no style and taste, but there is only an endless stream of borrowings, which, if it frightens the player, is only an inexperienced or sensitive one.

Pros: small number of bugs; funny story.
Cons: boring, secondary, inexpressive, meaningless.