The problem with a horror game that is executed well is that the very nature of the genre is designed to make you not want to continue playing it. This leads to this weird cycle where the player can know that a game is designed well and is rather engrossing, but can continue to find reasons to not go back and play it—because there is always something else to do that isn’t hiding urine soaked pants from loved ones. Daylight takes the ease to be gained from repeated playthroughs, knowing where everything is, as the game itself is procedurally generated and manages to steal even that from us.

Your phone is a multi purpose tool

Daylight is good, in all of the ways that it sets out to be and possibly some of the ways that it didn’t even intend due to the randomness. From the moment that the character awakens there is a sense of being utterly and completely helpless in the environment that they have been dumped in, something that is only driven home the farther that they go into the complex and the sparser supplies become. Worse is that there isn’t really any way to defeat the ghosts, instead only to temporarily drive them away makes matters more nerve racking when you eventually get lost in the sprawling building.

Watch our live stream of this game here:

The only major drawback is that it does, at times, feel machine generated instead of handcrafted like most of these games. This goes far to break the tension and completely pull one out of the emersion and break whatever atmosphere the game had been creating at that point. During streaming the game I became lost in a warehouse of shorts for some time directly after some rather creepy supernatural thingies happened and required sometime to figure out what to do next before I could progress. It just seems disappointing that at moments such an amazing game should fall to such random and odd happenings.

Plenty of scares

If you have ever enjoyed a horror movie or game in the past you owe it to yourself to buy Daylight. The game is entirely worth the price of admission and more. Do yourself a favor and turn off your phone, lock the door and turn off all the lights and play the game by yourself—it is short enough that you should be able to finish it the first time in one sitting, but designed to play again. It is rare that you can tell that the people who made a game are all fans of the work that they are doing and not just contract workers that are looking for a paycheck, but with Daylight it really comes through that from start to finish this was a labor of love for every person involved. The least that you can do to repay that is buy the game and become scared senseless.