Daymare: 1998

Let’s cut right to the chase: Daymare: 1998 is a terrible title. It’s the sort of mishmash, low-budget title that all but ensures most self-respecting Steamers won’t give it the time of day(mare), let alone drop some cash on it while browsing a Steam sale.

But passing over Daymare: 1998 because of its silly title would be doing yourself (and the game) a disservice. While yes, the name of the game feels like it was designed to induce an eye-rolling fit, the game itself is actually a surprisingly solid (albeit lower-budget) entry in the Resident Evil-style survival horror genre. And we’re talking about a genre that is criminally underrepresented outside of the actual Resident Evil series (with precious few exceptions).

If you give Daymare: 1998 a shot, you’ll find a competent horror shooter with a few quirks, sure, but it also brings a decent amount of original ideas that add to the genre in ways that even mainline Resident Evil games haven’t been able to lately.

Do you remember Dark Sector? No? Well, Dark Sector is an all-too-often-forgotten third-person, over-the-shoulder action title that released in 2008. It is actually a solid — if not also flawed — mid-tier entry in the sort-of-like-Gears of War, sort-of-like-Resident Evil 4 category of games.

Daymare: 1998

The reason I bring up Dark Sector is because Daymare: 1998‘s visual aesthetic and general mood make it feel almost like a lost sequel to Dark Sector. Everything feels wet (but in a good way). Tactical uniforms more closely resemble scuba suits (from the standpoint of wetness). It lends a disgusting, moist feeling that makes Daymare: 1998 feel slimy. And it really is the atmosphere that makes Daymare: 1998 stand out as more than just a derivative Resident Evil clone.

That being said, Daymare: 1998 plays exactly like a Resident EvilRevelations-era survival-horror title. The third-person camera is tightly affixed to the player character’s right shoulder, zooming in even tighter when aiming down the sights. The general character controls and movements are tank-like, but for the most part, both the character and the camera control admirably well (though finding that headshot sweet spot will admittedly take time to get used to).

Daymare: 1998 also comes replete with asinine, completely ridiculous environmental puzzles that need to be solved before you can do something as simple as, say, resetting a user password. And this, of course, involves using a keyboard with Greek letters and a series of paintings of Greek mythology to crack the password in the first place (instead of — oh, I don’t know — just going into the computer’s settings). But these ludicrous puzzles, now a staple of the genre, serve as a nice brain activity between bouts of mindless action (what little action there is in the game’s early hours).

Daymare: 1998

Also in the vein of classic survival-horror games, Daymare: 1998 tasks you with managing your ammo supplies and knowing when it’s better to cut and run instead of cutting some fool. More often than not, you’re in tight quarters, which can make dodging these mutated monstrosities all the more challenging.

In fact, there’s an extra layer of difficulty to mundane tasks like reloading. There are several ways to reload in Daymare, and each has its own scenario where the payoff will outweigh the penalty. If you quick-reload, you will expel the current magazine and any bullets still in it, requiring you to manually pick it back up to add it to your inventory. If you use the slower reload, you will hold on to your expended clip but take longer to load a fresh one.

It’s a nice touch that adds to the tension of an already-chaotic firefight — knowing or not knowing these mechanics can quickly turn the tides or bite you in the behind.

Daymare: 1998

Daymare’s inventory is handled by a small PDA strapped to your character’s wrist. He will raise his arm towards the screen to allow you to interact with the traditional grid-based inventory storage menu. But while his arm is raised, you are still in control of his movement and the camera, using the D-pad to navigate the menus. And since you need to manually load bullets into each clip, this allows you to keep walking down a corridor while, say, reloading your clips instead of just standing in place. This admittedly doesn’t make a huge difference, but it’s a nice little touch that doesn’t go unnoticed.

Daymare really wears its Resident Evil inspirations on it sleeve when it comes to the game’s voice acting. There are moments when a character is speaking and will interject a weighty pause in the least sensible place in a sentence. Plus, you will notice frequent discrepancies between the spoken conversations and the subtitles. And these are really odd changes — a character will say “cherry,” for example, while the subtitles say “apple.” All of this is hilarious.

At the end of the day, Daymare: 1998 is a pretty solid albeit flawed mid-tier game. If you are a fan of the classic-style Resident Evil games and happen to find Daymare for under $20, I think you might have a really cool time with it. There are multiple playable characters, and every single character is a friggin’ laugh riot. the gameplay is pretty competent, and this game does some fresh things for this specific brand of survival-horror. I got my copy on sale on PSN for about $17, and it was money well spent.

Oh, and for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet, Daymare: 1998 is actually set in 1998. So if 1998 is your year, look no further. Daymare: 1998 has your JNCO-wearing butt covered.

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