132 - Daylight

[matt]

So I decided to buy Daylight in order to give you guys my thoughts on it and how their procedural horror systems work. The short answer is that it is as bad as the reviews make it out to be, and you should skip it. If you are curious as to what they did wrong, here's my take:

[JPrice]

Oh Daylight, what an unfortunate turn of events you turned out to be.
I mean I didn't have that much of a vested interest in the game myself but if it was good then I would have given it a try most definitely. Sadly though it didn't live up to expectations.

Like I said in the other thread, I think the procedural generation really did hurt them in the long run. As you're a lot more constrained with limitations of making a game that can support that random generation. In the end, everything has to be made generally with very little room for unique, well crafted scenarios. I mean don't get me wrong I like the appeal of random generation as it keeps the player on their toes, fearing what's around the next corner each time. Sadly though Daylight didn't make much use of it, maybe if they had more unique elements surrounding the procedural generation then it would be something that added to the game rather than detracted from it.

The whole game just feels very average and uninspired to me. From the gameplay, story and even the visuals (More so the art direction than the actual visuals)
That said I'll give it a try myself when I see it on sale in the coming months, just to give it a try and what not

[matt]

hahaha, I think you are going to be REALLY disappointed if you give it a try. I felt like I was doing a chore playing the game, but I suffered through it to save you guys the trouble of having to play it!

I agree it was quite uninspired and unoriginal. The only cool thing was the twitch integration, which I didn't try, but their "scares" were so bad, I don't think it'd really be that cool.

[gagaplex]

It's interesting that there's just one ghost, when that was basically the premise (or at least what we thought the premise was) of Alien: Isolation; just one stalking xenomorph and you (and now, robots).
"Stop nagging me" really isn't the reaction you want to create in your horror game.
I think I'll pass. Unless it becomes part of a Bundle at some point, I suppose.

[Grabthehoopka]

Yeah, no surprise there. It seems like a lot of indie devs are trying to cash in on the success of Slender, and almost none of them have made anything worthwhile.

Like I talked about in the Fatal Frame thread, there is a way to do random encounters, and Fatal Frame pulled it off. It should be envied and imitated. Slender I think did a decent job of not being frustrating. Everyone else, no.

I don't have a problem with short, cheaply-made horror games, per se, and I think that it's an avenue that is well worth checking out. After all, if the standard horror game can be seen as a piece of horror fiction, than that would make these short, straightforward indie horror titles the gaming equivalent of a campfire ghost story, like The Hook.

Funny thing about The Hook! It's the first thing Stephen King talks about in Danse Macabre (fishing for more imaginary bonus forum points here), and he starts the whole thing off by basically saying that The Hook is the best, most irreducible work of pure horror fiction there is. To quote!:

The story of The Hook is a simple, brutal classic of horror. It offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit [...] No, the story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down. One could jigger the story of The Hook to make him -- it -- a creature from outer space, and you could attribute this creature's ability to travel across the parsecs to a photon drive or a warp drive; you could make it a creature from an alternate earth a la Clifford D. Simak. But none of these sf conventions would turn the story of The Hook into science fiction. It's a flesh-crawler pure and simple, and its direct point-to-point progress, its brevity, and its use of story only as a means to get to the effect in that last sentence, it is remarkably similar to John Carpenter's Halloween [...] or The Fog. Both of these movies are extremely frightening, but the story of The Hook was there first.

I think a lot of the problems with these kind of games is that a lot of developers just aren't interested in approaching the game this way. Rather than using your limitations to make a horror game that cuts out all the fat and basically just skips right to the scary part for a short, ultra-condensed scary experience, they see all the hits that youtubers are getting playing these kinds of games and their eyes do that slot machine thing like in old cartoons. If I recall correctly, I believe Daylight actually has a feature where if you're streaming the game on Twitch, viewers can type commands into the chat window to trigger jump scares in-game. So. Don't get me wrong, that's actually pretty neat, but just to give you an idea of what kind of game they were trying to make, that should tell you everything you need to know.

[matt]

I think the problem with short, cheaply-made horror games is that you have to compete with all the short cheaply-made horror games that are free. There are a lot of those, so I think if you aren't looking for deeper, more interesting things, then you'd be better off playing those.

Personally, I prefer polished experiences. I was playing "One Late Night" today, and I got stuck really easily and kinda bored. I ended up just watching the developer walkthrough video.

I got bored before finding all the pages in one of those free Slender games where you were in the forest.

[JPrice]

I think a lot of the problems with these kind of games is that a lot of developers just aren't interested in approaching the game this way. Rather than using your limitations to make a horror game that cuts out all the fat and basically just skips right to the scary part for a short, ultra-condensed scary experience, they see all the hits that youtubers are getting playing these kinds of games and their eyes do that slot machine thing like in old cartoons.

I can agree with that to some degree yes hahaha
It can be construed as being a positive as all this Youtube exposure is giving the horror genre a lot of rejuvination and new exciting games are being made as a result. However as you said there's a lot of capitalisation as a result which leads to these quick short burst games designed to just shock rather than terrify. Which is a shame as given more time, they could be great you know!

[matt]

All I know is that I hope all the Youtube playthroughs help the sales of Neverending Nightmares.

In general though, I think anything that gets more eyeballs on the horror genre is a good thing even if it produces some bad games. The horror genre was looking pretty bleak until a few years ago...

[Grabthehoopka]

All I know is that I hope all the Youtube playthroughs help the sales of Neverending Nightmares.

In general though, I think anything that gets more eyeballs on the horror genre is a good thing even if it produces some bad games. The horror genre was looking pretty bleak until a few years ago...

I'm not saying let's players and other miscellaneous youtubers aren't a bad thing, quite the opposite! But you didn't come up with the idea for Neverending Nightmares by looking at youtube videos and thinking "there's money to be made here..."

[matt]

I see your point. Designing AROUND what you think might appeal to youtubers is pretty uninspired.