Daymare: 1998

On the night of August 19th, 1998, as families gathered around the television to watch Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, a shadowy military operation is going down off the coast of Washington State. Little information is given, but there are reports of infected soldiers dying and then coming back to life. This horrifying scenario is the setup to Daymare: 1998, a flawed yet effective survival horror game that brings zombie action to the Pacific Northwest. It's a familiar premise loaded with performance problems, but I'm here to make the argument that this debut release from Invader Studios will do more than scratch that classic Resident Evil itch.

This is the all too familiar story of what happens when a small, rural town is infected and turned into flesh-eating zombies. We see the horrific events play out through the eyes of three different people, including two H.A.D.E.S. operatives -- Raven and Liev -- and a local man named Samuel who works as a park ranger. They don't know it yet, but they are about to be pawns in a grand conspiracy that rivals anything the Umbrella Corporation was working on.

The comparison is apt, because Daymare: 1998 is doing its best to evoke the spirit of the survival horror games of the past. It's a third-person shooter that traps you in a number of dangerous locations and has you picking up keys and solving puzzles. We go from slowly investigating the military base to trying to survive a zombie-filled hospital to uncovering the terrible secrets hidden in the town of Keen Sight. And just like the games that inspired it, you won't find a lot of ammo or health items laying around, creating a tense situation where you're constantly forced to conserve bullets while avoiding the walking dead.

A lot of your enjoyment of this game is going to come down to how much you like the genre's clichés. From picking up documents to combining items to hanging out in a save room, this checks all of the boxes. Unfortunately, it also resurrects some of the bad aspects of survival horror, such as dealing with a limited inventory and sluggish controls that make the combat tougher than it should be. And we can't forget about the horrendous voice acting, especially when it comes to the guy who plays Samuel.

But let's not gloss over the bad gameplay too quickly, because there are times when the developer is just being mean. A perfect example of this is the way you reload the handgun. It's not enough to make you sit through a lengthy animation, but you have the extra step of pulling up a menu in the middle of combat in order to manually reload the clip. This is made even worse when you realize that a lot of zombies will require a half dozen or more bullets to take down, so you're constantly having to manually reload. It's really frustrating.

Even more annoying is the frame rate, which will often slow to a crawl. Perhaps I have my computer settings haywire or it performs better on console, but Daymare: 1998 is a mess. When I wasn't chugging through the environments, I was getting stuck in their geometry. That's a shame, because I like the attention to detail we see in most of the locations. I appreciate that this game takes us away from the typical haunted mansion setting and uses the Pacific Northwest to great effect. I would have had a lot more fun exploring every inch of Keen Sight if the frame rate was more stable.

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Probably the best thing I can say about this game is that the story is surprisingly good. In fact, it's one of the main reasons why I'm going to recommend Daymare: 1998. Sure, the writing is clunky and Samuel gets stuck in that damn hospital for too long, but it tells a full story and has a fantastic ending. This game does a good job of recontextualizing a lot of what you see early on, especially when it comes to the H.A.D.E.S. operatives. I have a hunch that I would look at the events early in the game in a completely different light after completing the story, and that's not something I say about a lot of survival horror games.

The problem is that you can occasionally tell that Daymare: 1998 was made on a limited budget. I suspect a lot of the pacing issues come from wanting to use (and then reuse) the same locations until you're sick of them. You also run into the same zombies about a thousand times and none of the human animation looks very good. It's clear that a lot of focus went into bringing Keen Sight to life, and it's easily the best part of the game, but there are long stretches where we're in a sewer, tunnel or some other bland location. Thankfully, there are a lot of great and tense moments that make the drabber settings more exciting.

As a survival horror game, Daymare: 1998 does what it needs to do and nothing more. It hits all the notes you expect without adding much to the formula. Your enjoyment is going to come down to how much you like older survival horror games and their clichés. If you're ready to accept a derivative story, a few performance issues and a lot of inventory management, then you're going to have a good time playing through this throwback. This gets enough right for me to recommend it, but you might want to wait for a patch before visiting Keen Sight.