The reviews have dawned for Daylight – and it looks like critics feel like they’ve been left out in the dark.
The game’s developers promised lots of scares for players, and even delayed its release to ensure a terrifying package was delivered.
But before you rush down to your local video game dealer to secure a copy, have a read through what the experts have to say.
Daylight was sitting on 56% on Metacritic for PC at the time of publication. The PS4 scores had not been aggregated as yet.
Gamespot 3/10 (PC)
Daylight makes for an interesting experiment in audience participation, but no crowd of online viewers can make the poor writing any better or the themes any less hackneyed. In creating a game designed for return visits, Zombie Studios ironically forgot to make a game worth playing in the first place.
Eurogamer 7/10 (PC)
Daylight has neither the creeping sense of psychological dread of Fatal Frame nor the poster man antagonist of Slender, and its reliance on cliché lacks distinction. But if the game’s straightforward purpose was simply to panic and upset its player then it is an indisputable success, no matter how cheap the tricks employed.
IGN 5.8/10 (PC)
Daylight has a good foundation of scary atmosphere and interesting bits of story. All of that is squandered by the first half, where poor level design, unnecessary box-pushing puzzles, and impotent enemies deflate the scares before it even gets going. By the time I reached the more interesting second act, I’d grown immune to its tricks and could only see it as a mediocre series of fetch quests.
Polygon 5/10 (PC)
I would be lying if I said Daylight didn’t scare me, because it did, and often. It’s kind of fascinating to see how much of its mechanical design was crafted in the interest of eliciting an emotional response from the player; all the theory and psychology behind its scares. But those moments of fear and panic were just that, moments, amid a whole campaign of boredom and frustration.
Daylight
GamesRadar 2/5 (PC)
Daylight is a mess. Its procedurally generated design doesn’t succeed in creating unpredictable scares, and the enemies that populate the spooky locales prove to be more annoying than frightening. The randomised levels offer a slightly different experience if you take a second trip through, but you’ll have seen just about everything Daylight has to offer after only a couple hours of play – which, regrettably, isn’t much.
GameFront 7.5/10 (PC)
Though Daylight isn’t necessarily anything most players and genre fans haven’t seen before, it still is another in a widening field of horror games steeped in ever-present creepiness and expertly delivered scares. Daylight won’t serve to illuminate new corners of the horror genre, but it’s a worthy addition to the current crop of games that will make players freak out in the dark.
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