Zombie Studios has announced Daylight, a new horror game built on Unreal Engine 4. The announcement came from the DICE summit in Vegas tonight, as Zombie finally provided details on the project it first teased in December.
Daylight is a horror game featuring a procedurally-generated environment. With only the light of a cell phone to guide them, players will navigate the halls of a dark building as a woman who’s just woken up. Every experience will be different as rooms are randomly generated, and players will only learn about the game’s story via clues they discover as they explore.
At DICE, IGN had a chance to speak with Zombie creative director and studio head Jared Gerritzen as well as Jessica Chobot, who wrote the game. The pair explained what players can expect, plus the motivations behind the project.
“The player doesn’t have a name,” Gerritzen told IGN. “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.”
“There’s a lot of different types of horror. There’s hack-and-slash. It’s not like that,” Chobot said. “It’s all very subtle. It’s all very implied and it kind of leaves the player to their own devices.”
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 in order to find all of the story elements.
“Different players will have a totally different experience,” Gerritzen said. “You’re essentially a rat in a cage, but the cage is an asylum and it’s scary as hell. You need to find your way out, and each time you do it it’s completely different.”
“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,” Chobot elaborated. “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. “You don’t have combat. You don’t have a gun. You don’t have anything. You literally have to run away when a Phantom is attacking you, and those things are really interesting,” Gerritzen explained. “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.”
“And then you’re able to find emergency kits that have flares or glowsticks,” he continued. “The flares will scare off all Phantoms, but it’s also very violent and it’s very bright and it drags shadows around. Because everything’s fully dynamic lighting, and so it’s very scary just to use. And then the other emergency kit thing is a glowstick, and that’ll have a much bigger light. It’s also kind of like the phone where you can see your footprints, but also you’ll see messages written on the walls and you’ll see other story elements. And then the phone itself will also go to a video mode that will show me elements like clues or story bits that I can pick up and interact with.”
Daylight will be released via Steam, as Valve has allowed Zombie to circumvent the Steam Greenlight process. The game will cost $20 or less and will be released some time in 2013.
Gerritzen explained that Zombie will be taking an episodic approach to future Daylight content. “After we release Daylight, it’s going to be considered Chapter 1,” he said. “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.”
We’ll have much more from our interview with Gerritzen and Chobot over the course of the next week, so check back to find out more about Daylight’s brand of horror, plans for the future, the inspirations that led to it and much more.
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