Zombie Studios, the creators of Blacklight: Retribution, announces their Unreal Engine 4 first person horror game, Daylight.
First teased at in December of last year we finally got more details on this unique first person horror game Daylight. The announcement came from the DICE summit in Vegas.
Daylight features a procedural-generated environment. Using only the dim light emitting from your cell phone to guide you, players will navigate the halls of an asylum as a woman who’s just woken up. Every experience will be different because every playthrough has rooms that are randomly generated and keeps this experience fresh. Players will only learn about the game’s story via clues they discover as they explore the environment.
Zombie creative director and studio head, Jared Gerritzen and Jessica Chobot, spoke with IGN at the DICE Summit to talk about Daylight. The pair explained what players can expect, plus the motivations behind the project.
“The player doesn’t have a name. We don’t give any backstory on the player. She literally just wakes up and you need to find your way through, but there’s a lot of story elements. The way the story unfolds is we have all these elements where you can pick up documents and case files, but also your phone gets possessed and it plays recordings from the past. So there’s so many different elements we’re able to use that allow players to get all this information, but the way that we’re going to do it it’s programmatically, procedurally given to the player. So I’ll play it and I’ll get the first bits to understand what’s going on, but from that point on everything will be in different successions.”
Jared Gerritzen’s statement explains how the story is told in the game. A playthrough of Daylight is only meant to take around 25 or 30 minutes, but the idea is for players to replay it multiple times. With every experience being different with randomly generated rooms you learn more of the story through notes and case files that you didn’t get in the first playthrough. Jessica Chobot elaborated more,
“We have so much content story-wise that it hopefully, whether the person manages to succeed to the end or not, will be an experience that they want to capture more of the story so they have to go back and replay, because each time you might be getting different story elements and over the course of that time, depending on how long you decide to play and what you find, it opens up the concept of the world a little more, the backstory, what your involvement is in it, how you find yourself here and whatnot. So instead of finding the same item over and over again and saying ‘I’m not going to bother reading this piece of paper because I’ve seen it a thousand times,’ it’s different every time.”
Players will be armed with a cell phone that offers a compass and various tools they can use to navigate the asylum. No other weapons or objects have been disclosed. There is no combat, there is no gun. You don’t have anything. You just have to run away when being attacked by a phantom.
“The phone itself has multiple features. It’s kind of like a character. It’ll get possessed occasionally and play recordings and stuff like that. And when a Phantom’s around it’ll start to glitch out because it’s just like a psychic ability. And hopefully you won’t get lost, but if you do, you can flip [the phone] to a different mode that doesn’t put out as much light. It puts out a UV light that lets you actually see your footprints, so if I get lost I’ve got essentially bread crumbs that I can follow back.”
Daylight will be released via Steam, as Valve has allowed Zombie Studios to circumvent the Steam Greenlight process. The game will cost $20 or less and will be released some time in 2013. The PS4 will likely receive their version sometime in early 2014. But this is just the beginning, it seems as though Jared Gerritzen sees Daylight as just the first part in an episodic series.
“After we release Daylight, it’s going to be considered Chapter 1, And Chapter 2 and more chapters will come out, and each chapter will not be a reboot or anything. It’ll just be more systems that get added to the bucket and more story elements and all that.”
