I can’t think of a worse environment for Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle to exist in than firmly in the long shadow cast by its inspiration, the Resident Evil series. Everything about the demo I played, from its bland corridor crawling exploration to its trivial run and gun action, feels like a cheap imitation of some of the greatest survival horror games of all time, maybe even more so these days in a post-Resident Evil 4 Remake world. What's worse, there's almost nothing differentiating it from Capcom’s zombie-horror masterpieces save for the setting, which is understandably undercooked as my 20-minute demo was not nearly enough time to build a world or establish likable characters. Nothing about my time with this slice left me with much motivation to see more.
Which is wild because when IGN had a first-look preview of this game a year ago, it still seemed like a Resident Evil clone in a F.E.A.R. costume, doing all of the item inspection, puzzle solving and creep shooting you’d expect. Except it was dressed up with more sci-fi inspired government paramilitary fare, complete with unique secret tech like a freeze gauntlet. In this build, I got none of that. Instead, I solved rudimentary door puzzles, rooted around for a forgettable lore item, and used bog-standard third-person shooter weapons to take down foes. The demo does not put Daymare’s best foot forward.
Stepping into the shoes of Reyes, a member of a Homeland Security strike team called H.A.D.E.S., you're tasked with slinking through the dark halls of a compromised government facility in search for lost members of Section 8. The building itself is very generic, sterile, and science-y, with only one standout piece of personality in a very easy door puzzle styled like a ‘90s computer program. Towards the end of the demo, things start to show promise, with a giant tanker mysteriously dry-docked in a massive basement, or a shining conduit to God-knows-where gaping out of the wall. But there’s no satisfying interaction with any of it.When IGN had a first-look preview of this game a year ago, it still seemed like a Resident Evil clone in a F.E.A.R. costume.
In fact, there’s not a lot of interaction with anything at all besides scattered ammo and the occasional button that unlocks the next section of the map. Early on you pickup an item that you have to examine in your inventory to reveal a key, but there’s nothing else you encounter that requires such inspection. Reyes’ glove comes with a scanner that can pull data out of computers without having to physically interact with them, but there’s only one occasion where you can use it and it’s a tutorial. If Daymare: 1994 wants to compete with the titans of the genre in terms of dense environments and lots of reasons to explore them, it’s not off to a great start.
As things start to heat up, monsters appear, with the twist being that the menace isn’t the reanimated corpses of slain soldiers and scientists, but the sentient balls of energy that electrify them back to life. Putting one of the slobbering ghouls down releases the ball lighting from its body, freeing it to find another corpse to possess. This was admittedly very cool in theory, but in practice it was only ever a factor the first time I encountered bad guys. The only other sections, where a handful ran down a hallway to get easily dispatched and at the end where I was encouraged not to fight a group that chased me to the a door, showed little potential for the dynamic race against the light that the first encounter suggests. It also doesn’t help that these were the only enemy type.
If this was my first impression of Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle, I don’t think I’d be very interested in another one. Knowing that this game has more to offer outside of the boundaries of this sneak peek has me willing to keep my optimism somewhat alive, despite how underwhelming almost all of what I played was. Even with the conspicuous absence of some interesting looking abilities shown elsewhere, there was very little opportunity to play with the tools you do have in this 20-minute slice. Here’s hoping that the just-released Resident Evil 4 Remake can inspire Daymare to dig a bit deeper before it’s finally released.
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