Are you getting Daylight?

[matt]

The reviews have been... not so kind. It has a 57% on metacritic. I don't put a ton of stock on Metacritic, but in broad strokes, I think you can get an idea of the general quality of the game. Perhaps the most damning review was the 3/10 on Gamespot by Kevin VanOrd. He wrote one of the best articles on Neverending Nightmares (in my opinion), so I think he has great taste.

The horror game fanatic in my wants to give it a try, but everything else I've read or heard about the game is kind of a turn off. I was worried about procedural generation before hand, and it looks like they didn't really pull it off in a compelling way.

The twitch integration seems cool though.

What do you guys think? Am I being too judgmental? The polygon review (5 out of 10) said it was pretty buggy, so either way, it might be better to wait. Then again, it's only $10 on Steam right now although I kind of want the PS4 version since I haven't turned on my PS4 in forever...

[RightClickSaveAs]

I'm going to skip this one for now. I was confused by the "procedural content" promises of the game, as that doesn't sound very appealing in a horror game, so hearing about that not being a major aspect of the game actually makes me a little more interested. Still, what I've heard so far hasn't been too promising.

[matt]

Well, it sounds like has a random level layout, random item placement, and random jump scares. That counts as procedural, but basically everything beyond that seems pretty scripted. I think for a horror game with some sort of story, it'd be difficult to make it more procedural. I'm not sure what the best procedural horror game is, but in another thread about Daylight, someone mentioned "SCP containment breach" was quite good.

Harry Sunderland started that other thread. I wonder if he's going to try it. Harry, are you out there?

[JPrice]

Ehhh I haven't been keeping track of Daylight much and judging by the reaction from most gaming outlets, I'm kinda glad that I didn't invest too much interest into the game hahaa

Honestly the idea of having a procedurally generated horror game is interesting at first, however given more thought it's actually kind of a bad idea overall.
The idea of having a constantly new experience with each playthrough sounds great! Also having the scares be completely random all throughout seems like it could be a terrifying experience. But in order to achieve these things, a lot of things need to be removed. In order for the game to accommodate the procedurally generated design, a lot of assets would have to be reused otherwise the cost and time for crafting thousands of unique objects would be astronomical. So as a result you would see a lot of reused objects, creating fatigue for the player which nullifies the effect of the random generation.

This breaks any sort of atmosphere that the game is trying to achieve (At least to some degree in my eyes anyway). Also this simplification has the same effect on the scares, which means that there are probably set types of scares that play at random intervals. As a result they need to be fairly general and work within any context of the game, which loses a lot of potential for unique scenarios and set ups.

Even the Twitch integration, whilst sounding cool, wouldn't really add a whole lot to the experience. That said it still is an interesting idea!

Overall I think it's the mass simplification of the assets and scares, as a result of the procedurally generated design, that makes the game an uninteresting play. It's a shame too because if done right I'm sure a procedural horror game could work well, it's just finding how to accomplish it I suppose!

[matt]

While I think procedural generation of awesome content is the holy grail of game design, I think it's REALLY hard to create awesome content - at least for something that isn't mechanic based.

To me, so much of horror is the environment and the world, and that requires careful design that I don't think I could program a computer to do. Pacing would be challenging. Perhaps something with biometrics like Nevermind could use the player's heart rate to come up with the opportune times to scare, but I don't think random placement is going to work as well. At least when designing Neverending Nightmares, I constantly ask myself, what are players expecting, and then I try to do the opposite. I don't think a computer can do that...

[ranger_lennier]

Daylight is one of those game's I wanted to be good, so too bad it's apparently not. Jim Sterling has a funny poem accusing it of being "Pewdiebait"--that is, designed primarily to appeal to Let's Players. The first part of the video is Yahtzee's poem. It's pretty funny as well, but skip to 2:30 if you just want the relevant part.

[matt]

Curiosity got the better of me, and I had some PSN credit from when I bought my PS4, so I decided to pick up the game. I'll be sure to make a video after I finish playing it, so you guys know what you are missing. (Probably nothing. hahah)

[ranger_lennier]

Well, you need it for research purposes, right?

[matt]

That's how I like to justify it.

Edit: Played it through, and I'd DEFINITELY advise skipping it. It was not even remotely scary and tediously boring. I'll record a dev diary soon talking about everything they did wrong.