Video Game Review: Daymare: 1998

Daymare: 1998

Invader Studios

Third Person Survival Horror

Playstation 4

In my review of Cardpocalypse last December, I discussed how invoking nostalgia is tricky, and the way that many pieces of media try to use name-dropping and references in place of actual jokes or humor, a phenomenon I often refer to as “Big Bang Theory Syndrome”. While references meant to create nostalgia aren’t a bad thing, a work needs to do more than just that to be good. Cardpocalypse did have more to offer, but Daymare: 1998 does not.

Daymare is a third-person survival horror game in the vein of recent Resident Evil titles that bills itself as “[recreating] the mood of iconic titles from the 90s…” In practice, this mostly seemed to mean having easter eggs referencing movies or games from the 80s and 90s, and having the current player character give the player a not-so-subtle nudge-wink about it. This sort of thing is fine in very small doses, but when repeated it can become grating and is an especially jarring creative decision in a horror game.

Beyond these attempts at personality, the game’s writing overall is borderline nonsensical both on the level of the wider plot and moment-to-moment dialogue. From the opening cutscene, the game has a huge problem with dumping exposition (which the characters discussing it would presumably already know) out rather than allowing information to come to light naturally, and even outside of this none of the dialogue feels like something a real person would actually say. Plot threads were frequently introduced and dropped seemingly at random and none of the questions that had been introduced over the course of the game were answered until a post-credits scene. On top of that, many of the plot elements that were included were highly unoriginal or played out, from the premise of “biogenetics company releases a virus on city turning everyone into zombies” to having one of the main characters’ wife exist solely to get killed off and fuel his manpain/revenge quest.

Many of the technical aspects of the cutscenes are sub-par as well. The character animations are stiff and overexaggerated and the mouth movements frequently don’t sync well to the words being spoken. Subtitles don’t sync well either, as there were many points in the game where dialogue would differ wildly from the text being displayed. Spelling errors abound in both subtitles and text logs, and text logs have the additional issue of many of them not actually being available in-game; you have to go to a special site for the game that then requires you to enter a password you find in the game to be able to read it. While cool in theory, it was obnoxious in practice. After a while I stopped caring enough to check these files, especially since one of them (non-web-hosted documents) included information on a certain type of enemy quickly dissolving when exposed to water. This document made me think the information would be useful or important at some point but not only did that never prove to be the case it was actively contradicted by the level where it was raining and those enemies still showed up completely unaffected.

Other mechanical aspects of the game are equally flawed. The basic gunplay and exploration are serviceable, but nothing special and far inferior to other games in the genre. Neither firing shots at enemies or being hit by them have any strong sense of impact and hit detection on player melee is incredibly inconsistent. Getting headshots that get rid of the enemies’ heads makes the head simply disappear in a way that does not feel natural or look good and in general the enemy models feel lifeless in a way that they should not even as zombies.

The controls and movement were floaty, models would often look as if they were not totally connected to the floor, and I encountered far too many glitches. Glitches I encountered ranged from things as inconsequential as the in-game counter for collectibles in a level showing that there were none despite that I had found one immediately before looking at the counter to the UI not giving me proper counts on how much ammo was currently in my gun and once even ceasing to recognize any inputs I tried to give the game, requiring a restart of the software to be able to keep playing.

Finally, the puzzles are either far too easy or so obtuse as to be actively misleading in how to solve them, and they are very few and far between. The level design is generally no more complex than a linear path occasionally branching in two, with one being the way forward and the other being a small diversion that very quickly forces the player to turn around and continue on their way.

It almost feels wrong to be so harsh on Daymare, because a lot of the gameplay issues seem to be things that could be fixed if it had come from a larger studio with more time, money, or hands to put into the project. It does seem that the developers were very earnest and passionate about making their game and if it were more fun or interesting to play I could look past the poor writing, but unfortunately, there are just too many flaws for me to recommend it in good conscience.