The Haunted Hoard: Daymare: 1998 (PS4)

Daymare: 1998’s title not only refers to the year the game’s story takes place in but also to the specific era of video games it is attempting to evoke. 1998 is the year Resident Evil 2 released on the original PlayStation and is also the canonical year given for the events of the first three Resident Evil games. These seminal survival horror experiences managed to draw some horror out of limits placed on certain mechanics like inventory space and an inability to see your health outside of a pause screen, and Daymare: 1998 wants to tap into that type of horror while also including some more modern sensibilities in the places where it wouldn’t hurt to be a bit more accommodating. In fact, Daymare: 1998 began first as a fan-made remake of Resident Evil 2, but the shift to something new provides almost an adjacent way of executing on many concepts familiar to fans of the original Resident Evil games.

 

There are two ways to play Daymare: 1998, a Classic 90s Mode and a Modern-Take Mode. Daymare: 1998 is a third-person shooter where you’ll have an angle from behind your character’s back when trying to line up a shot, and no matter the mode, this does allow for aiming at precise places on targets like their head for high damage or their legs to potentially make them trip up. You’ll be able to move around normally rather than the game trying to imitate Resident Evil’s tank-like turning, but the differences between modes arise in how your ammo is handled. Your small selection of guns all have a dedicated ammo type that takes up space in a small inventory as do magazines you can fill up with ammunition. When you press a button to reload in Classic 90s Mode, your handgun or magnum will need to pop in a new magazine, but if you don’t have any or they’re empty, you can’t reload easily on the fly. Opening the inventory allows you to pop ammo into a weapon, but pulling up that menu is deliberately slow and the action doesn’t stop during it. Ammo management becomes a heavy priority because of this, the player always trying to make sure that they do the inventory reload during a slow moment so that they’re not caught in a pinch later on, but the magazine reload system can also become a tool if you load the stronger ammo into them and then your reload can be a good option to get you out of a bind.

The ammo management ends up a surprisingly compelling and tense aspect of dealing with the zombiefied citizenry and strange genetic experiments that are unleashed upon the town. While the enemy variety isn’t too great, even normal foes can sometimes take quite a few bullets to put down plus there is the concern you might not aim every shot well, so you can start to feel the panic of having your resources drained even if you know after the fight is over you can go in your inventory and pop the bullets in your firearm easily enough. The shotgun is a bit of a pressure valve as well, it having a cleaner reload without any magazine worries but it is slow to fill up so you need to keep moving while you reload it. When a thick group of zombies or the tougher monsters appear the balancing act of trying to avoid injury while managing a deliberately cumbersome reload system can make these encounters far more nerve-wracking in an exciting way, your resources so close yet so far in these pivotal moments. Modern-Take removes some of this by cleaning up the reloading a bit as well as giving the player the option to skip some of the puzzles that break up the zombie shooting action, but this feels like it’s sacrificing some of the most riveting moments of the game in an attempt to achieve a lower difficulty. There is already a few difficulty levels to choose from even in Classic 90s Mode, but many of the most interesting fights are defined by your limits as you try to be careful and efficient even as a horrific creature tries to grab you so it can infect you too.

 

Daymare: 1998’s story certainly does not shy away from its bare-faced Resident Evil inspiration, telling the tale of a biological agent released over a small town that mutates its people into zombie-like creatures looking to vomit their corruptive chemical on anyone who is still conventionally alive. Despite taking the broad strokes from Resident Evil though its notes exploring some of the game’s own twist on the biohazard, the forces behind its creation, and other unusual phenomena adjacent to it do form some interesting context, even if there is a rather odd approach to how you read some of them. You’ll occasionally find notes that don’t have the actual info on them, the information instead instructing you to check out hexacorebiogenetics.com and use the codes on the paper to unlock secret files. The actual pivotal notes in game don’t require hopping on your computer to look these up but the ones you do access this way can flesh out the greater situation and add a more human element to some of the story being told. This means of actually reading them does rip you out of the game for a bit though and is dependent on the site remaining active, but also its choice of files to separate from the experience doesn’t always feel like it matches the idea that these specifically are what Hexacore Biogenetics tried to keep classified after the incident in the town of Keen Sight.

 

The oddity with the website isn’t damaging to the experience much though thank to how well-constructed the lore feels in both what it explores and what it leaves mysterious, but something that does make the story harder to get invested in are the vocal performances. Daymare: 1998 has you playing as three major characters. Liev works for Hexacore and is meant to assist in the cover up of the incident, Samuel is a forest ranger who is just out of reach of the chemicals that transform the town, and Raven is a helicopter pilot who begins working for Hexacore like Liev but has a stronger moral compass and tries to make sense of the disaster that befalls Keen Sight. Unfortunately, the voice actors for key characters often come up rather short, other important players like Sandman who earns Samuel’s ire by killing his wife also facing some issues with wooden line delivery. Sandman’s voice actor seems to not understand where natural breaks in speaking exist and gives the impression that the first take for the script read was used and Samuel’s voice actor seems to only have one level of anger that makes moments like his growing irritation with a doctor giving him the runaround instead of helping him feel like there’s no actual escalation in his temperament. While some poor work in the audio logs like having someone pronounce hubris as “hurbis” and a fair amount of typos in documents that don’t impact readability could be brushed aside, it is a shame the cutscenes have such weak performances on top of subtitles sometimes having different key terms than the spoken dialogue. The broader disaster is still able to be a more intriguing tale by way of written documents, but the attempt to add personal stakes is hampered by the voice work, performances that don’t even seem like the kind of corny deliveries of the 1990s Resident Evil games only harming the experience.

The plot can be compartmentalized though in favor of the far more engaging survival horror gameplay. Your time as the three playable characters will take you to a variety of locations, from the open city streets where you’re ducking in and out of residences to avoid the horde to the dark and dreary interior of a dam that houses hidden Hexacore facilities. Open spaces with many infected citizens will make you realize you can’t always stand and fight as your ammo won’t hold up and you will need it for those tight spaces where you can’t slip through unless you kill your way through. Those dark enclosed areas provide moments where a body on the ground might get up and attack you when you don’t expect it or a crafty creature might be lurking around the corner, each encounter asking you to consider how it might impact your reserves and if there might be a smart way to handle the situation. Aiming is under your control so the failures never arise from bad controls, but those moments where you do end up using more ammo than intended do weigh on your mind for a while. Playing into that are the mysterious Daymares that Samuel alone experiences, these hallucinations sometimes obvious as the world turns red and something awful appears before him, but not every instance of this odd phenomenon is easy to identify. A zombie will come charging at Samuel and after firing upon them you’ll realize it was just a hallucination, the player admonishing themselves for wasting a bullet on a harmless phantom when they’re so important to preserve.

 

While Daymare: 1998 could have used a few more distinct zombie types, there are a few tougher ones that crop up to drain your resources and test your resolve, but other ideas also mix in to help the game keep you engaged yet on edge. Autosaves are usually placed well so you won’t be thrown back too far if you die, making those moments where you maybe do squeak by with low resources easier to attempt again if you did find yourself in a bind. At one point the autosave function did bug out and stopped making autosaves, but some areas do instead have manual saves, a more open-ended space like the hospital or back alleys putting it in your hands to preserve progress and adding another key consideration that tests how daring you’ll be. Puzzles will often be a bit more than just identifying the obvious first approach to things, and if they are a bit simpler it’s usually because you’re asked to make that solution through something more interactive like rotating wire panels. Exploring areas for resources urges you to look around despite it potentially triggering any zombies you could have avoided, but the rewards are too useful to pass up, especially since the characters have their own inventories and health items are in short supply. Add in some references to 80s and 90s media to stumble across during these scavenging sessions and you get a little extra for taking the time to focus on the entertaining survival side of this horror game that can be a little rough in other places.

THE VERDICT: Daymare: 1998 has some surprisingly good lore for what is essentially a retooled version of Resident Evil 2’s broad plot details and its survival horror elements do an excellent job at making you always feel capable yet on edge. The ammo system in the intended 90s mode makes zombie encounters far more intense and layered as the management aspect is made cumbersome to encourage smarter cautious play, elements like the Daymares and occasional tough creatures adding to that terror of possibly wasting your vital resources that could have been used on what lies ahead. The main story and motivations aren’t the best and couple poorly with bad voice acting, but fighting your way past zombies and solving puzzles gets the greater focus and that is where the game finds its formula for success, its action able to bring fear and satisfaction based on how well you personally handled the demands of even the smaller encounters.

 

And so, I give Daymare: 1998 for PlayStation 4…

A GOOD rating. Daymare: 1998 isn’t getting extra points just for being an earnest independent attempt at creating its own take on Resident Evil 2’s plot elements, but it does fight a battle to push away some of its more obvious failures. Its central plot does weak work with its core characters before you even factor in the weak voice acting that can’t draw the right emotion out of a scene, but then you can read details of these characters in a document and find them far more compelling than anything you see them actually do. Having to visit a website sometimes to do so is another knock on things, but Hexacore Biogenetics has more to it than just acting as an off-brand version of Resident Evil’s Umbrella, there being a good degree of thought put into its history, how its chemical agent actually came to be, and how Keen Sight factors into everything. If Daymare: 1998 hadn’t even attempted to give its leads personal motivations and they were all just dealing with a crisis from their own perspective perhaps then it could just focus on those areas where its writing works, but that groundwork found in the documents gives it the needed plot elements to ensure you’re not just playing the game for some well done action mechanics. In a game where shooting was the constant focus the magazine system and cumbersome inventory reload system would be a death knell for the entertainment value, but with the intent here to terrify and keep you on your toes, you do weigh each bullet you fire heavily. They’re precious resources both due to the limits on how much you can carry and how much ammunition can even be found in the first place, and that inventory space is at a premium since it also needs to house healing items and other useful tools like the cables used for hacking rooms that have ammo stores. A wider variety in what shapes the zombies and mutated creatures could take would help to spice up the encounters a bit more, but they already manage to be compelling because they keep testing your resolve, situation handling, and preparedness. When it all goes to plan you feel accomplished, and when you’re struggling to even have bullets to fire you can’t help but panic at the results of your sloppiness, that more accurately capturing finding yourself in this unusual predicament then if you could always easily pop in more bullets and keep easily firing away.

 

Daymare: 1998 achieves a lot of its horror out of its gameplay systems and adjusting your mindset to its way of limiting you can still lead to moments of frustration. Once you have become accustomed to what it is offering and start to understand the balance at play though, it does a remarkable job at keeping things tense without forcing you to be helpless. You are mostly in command of how well an encounter goes, and while there are moments that strain it some including some late game boss fights, Daymare: 1998 achieves its intended type of horror quite well to the point it can effectively push past some of its failures.