Quick Look: Solo: Daylight

I honestly didn't want to believe the negative media, but this looks really tedious and a sort of uninteresting. I don't say that lightly either. I'll give it a fair chance though. Maybe if it comes to Ps+ as a free game.

And I wonder if it's just the video quality or maybe Patrick's Pc settings, but the game looks kind of murky.

Game looks kinda ugly...why did they license UE4 for this again?

Why do I hear the engine hum of the Enterprise-D? Does this whole game take place on the holodeck or something?

I can see all of Chufmoney's handy work

"Where am I" a Lost reference? Like no one has ever said that anywhere else.

Boom surprise Quick Look solo!

i have a code for this i havent redeemed yet.

This game looks bland in literally every single way.

Also, can we please stop this dumb note hunt thing that's in every single horror game? I am so tired of reading diaries or listening to audio logs. Just stop.

I agree. I usually don't mind notes/audio logs scattered about for exposition, but throwing them everywhere the way this game does is way to egregious to look past.

But does this game have crates?

I keep dissapointing myself by confusing this game's title with Dying Light.

This looks pretty bad. Which is itself too bad. I was, at the least, interested =/

The game isn't doing much for me. I'm not a fan of the genre, so maybe I'm missing something that horror fans can appreciate. "Dull" is the word that keeps coming to mind.

I like the idea of a procedurally generated horror game, but I see nothing here that would make me want to run through it more than once.

If a game is going to throw a bunch of notes at me, they should be interesting. It always comes across as lazy story-telling when a game just says "find and read the story on your own". Maybe it makes sense if someone is playing through this multiple times for the scares.

It's a major problem when you need to edit a quicklook to skip a boring 5 minutes before anything worth seeing happens.

The sound seems decent. I like the sound a lot.

You're damn right it does. You even push 'n climb 'em!

Braap Braap!!

Blinded by the Daylight.

Are there any exploding doors?

Doesn't look that scary (though i'm sure it has it's moments) and i doubt randomness will help a horror game a lot, though the idea is of course interesting. Maybe even more then most other story driven single player experiences, horror games usually require carefully planned environments, where the devil is in the details. Fending off evil with light was once a novel idea, and i love it when a horror game doesn't give you a full military arsenal, but this just doesn't do a lot for me.

Found it!

@teenagejesussuperstar: Why are you pointing out such an awesome game?

Horror is something you have to painstakingly craft to get the best effect, and even then you succeed roughly half the time. You can't just let a machine soullessly cobble together a bunch of corridors and hope the scares will magically materialize on their own.

I gotta say: these stories about going to abandoned buildings at night don't have much punch when you realize the protagonist could just come by when it's brighter outside. Or had more than one person with them. Like a cop with a gun.

Also, if you're intentionally going into an abandoned building at night, too many horror stories exist for you to not go into a building without your own personal light sources, such as your own personal stash of glowsticks. Or a lantern.

Either way, this game seems kind of dull. Odd how this game is the first UE4 game released to the public, though.

This looks very underwhelming. I have no clue why they would license UE4 for a hallway simulator.

Also the note hunting is so tired. "Gone Home" got away with it cause the notes had a story thread to follow and each note was uniquely designed to look like something from the real world.

Here its just notes nailed to a wall that all look like it was written in crayon on treasure map paper.

Why is the janitorial staff leaving notes on nails in random rooms?! Shit like that breaks immersion and reminds me I'm playing a video game.

Looks like an uninspired cash-in to me. Anything can be scary if you turn off the lights and add some spooky noises.

Seems like a big problem with the procedural generation would be the pacing would be off most playthroughs, something essential for a horror

So, the map stays the same but the events change?

And was that room with all the carriages a room for insane...babies?

@teenagejesussuperstar said:

Found it!

That's a good game.

To make reading the notes more interesting maybe they could have had you reading it in real time instead of pausing the game. That would at least give you a sense of urgency and fear that something might be near you while you read it. Adding some sort of puzzle solving element to the notes might help with that too, but then having to read through every note to solve puzzles would be terrible too like in Bioforge.

textures look a bit generic.....not much personality to those corridors!

Is it just me or does a lot of this game seem really poorly put together? Like the light emanating from the glowstick before it's broken, use prompts showing up when looking at an open doorway and that weird jump cut when Patrick first used the glowstick.

I'm actually regretting my pre-purchase of the game now, I was expecting something much more engaging, too many horror games nowadays are inspired by Slender =_=

This game seems really boring. And this really saddens me, I was looking forward to it.

Hey @patrickklepek have you played many silent hill games? I still think they're the scariest games made to date. I'm playing through the first one because I missed it and went straight to the second game and christ is it scary even though it looks pretty dated they really know how to scare the fuck out of you even with odd looking polygons. I would suggest the 4th one if you haven't played it because it's just plain weird considering you're locked in a room through the game. Also they all look sort of amazing on their respective platforms, Silent Hill 3 probably being the best looking PS2 game I've ever played.

Oh and they all totally hold up and please don't go near the HD collection. Downpour is a pretty good none team silent game.

Rav3R $tVY W1F M3.

Looks kinda garbage. What a poor debut for UE4. Solid concept, boring/uninspired execution.

Aaaand all my hype is gone. :( Damn. I wanted this to be great, even if just for Anthony Gallegos' sake, but this looks really, really bad. Consider the tragedy lever pulled.

Couldn't help but notice that IGN were the only ones to say anything positive about the story. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that review was by a new employee and the story was written by an ex-employee.

I would play a horror game where when you see a monster you just start chasing it and then you become the predator.

What FoV was that played at ? , i couldn't watch more than 5 minutes without getting motion sickness :(

Is it just me or do the monsters look like the enemies from Deadly Premonition?

I hate to be negative all the time, but this game looks atrocious. Just a sub-par Bandwagon 1st person "camera horror" title that has no soul, looks bad, and is poorly written.

Well, generally, you're not supposed to be there. It would be trespassing. So if you're going to infiltrate, you do it at night so you're less likely to be seen. You can't just sign on a cop with a gun to follow you somewhere either just because the people there are weird, or least of all, if there's an empty property where probably nothing is happening.

Anthony Gallegos worked on this game (formerly of 1UP and IGN), I don't know if he had any involvement with the story though.

There are some neat ideas in this game -- I like the way they use flares to chase away the shadow-people. Other that, though, this seems like a horrible genre to use procedurally-generated anything in, as evidenced by the random letters scattered in random locations, and same-y looking halls and rooms everywhere you go, and Sarah-Winchester-esque architectural sense.

EDIT: @eskimosnow; yes, Patrick's very familiar with the Silent Hill series (just search for Silent Hill Quick Looks on this site). He didn't seem to like Downpour, which I think was more based on nostalgia-glasses than solid criticism. Weirdly, the only Silent Hill I really DON'T like is the first, since it seems like a "me-too" clone of Resident Evil. (Parasites/Viruses causing zombies and monsters, etc.)

IIRC there was an interview about this game at some event where the guy straight-up said the character is female to make the player protective of her. I guess that's not the worst thing about it.

This is basically a horror game let's play.... not a fan.

@tikicobra: Yeah, I love Pac Man too.

@chicken008: from what I gather, Gallegos was one of the asset artists [the running joke on the Comedy Button was that he'd design exploding doors and barrels cause lol games], so I don't think he directly impacted the story

Jessica Chobot, another ex-IGN employee, wrote the story.

EDIT: Err, where did IGN write anything positive about the story by the way? There is no review for it published on IGN US so far at least, only community scores, which certainly are higher than anywhere else. If you're referring to preview coverage, pretty much everyone who still does previews kinda have to be overly positive even on something that doesn't seem great.