With the remake of Resident Evil 2 being one of the juggernaut games of 2019, I was particularly excited to get my hands on Daymare:1998 from Invader Studios. A studio originally set up by fans with the intent of producing an unofficial remake of RE2, their first property Daymare:1998 is billed as a third-person hardcore survival horror; a genre most of us reading this site are already familiar with and loving.

Daymare promises puzzles, unyielding enemies, inventory management and a multi-character story. Tick, tick, sign me up. I don’t want to constantly compare this to RE2 but it’s honestly difficult not to. You can see the work that Invader Studios had put into its original remake project that was unfortunately shut down due to Capcom’s official reinventing of the title. Now, it has been reworked rather nicely into a different-looking, if familiar package

So, how does it play? Well, unsurprisingly, a bit like RE2. As mentioned above, the inventory management, character status screens are all very similar. Even the loose storyline ‘town infected by biological nerve agent’ is a honking great throwback to that other zombie game. Importantly; Daymare is creepy, gory, definitely jumpy and despite the aforementioned similarities somehow feels different.

Generally, the game seems quite well thought out. The levels are pretty linear and there isn’t much room for error; you might miss the odd ammo drop (which is something you’ll particularly need to be careful of if playing on the hardcore ‘daymare’ difficulty level) but ultimately if you’re an explorer you’ll get there. Yet this isn’t a criticism, none of the levels feel incomplete or basic, the placement of the zombie mobs is enough to warrant having a change of underwear close-by. The use of off-camera sounds and some pretty eerie music (or silence) adds to the overall excitement and desperation of the game, I highly recommend playing with headphones on for that extra layer of suspense and fright.

A nice addition pretty early on is the inclusion of a timed level, we play horror games for the tension and this sets up the overall mood of the game nicely, I absolutely can’t pretend I wasn’t panicking there’d be another along in a minute. Every typical horror trope is present; you want things popping out at you in a low-lit hospital run by an absolute lunatic? Being chased through the woods by zombies that might be a hallucination or might be worth your last bullet? This is the game for you.

Mostly, Daymare is fun. Once you happen upon the shotgun, it’s incredibly satisfying to blow off the limbs of those unruly undead. The blood spatter, the explosion mechanic, it’s all good. Adding to the intended difficulty level, headshots absolutely matter as Daymare is intended to have limited ammunition to enhance the panic factor. So get practicing. Especially for the boss fights. Aside from slugging a few shells into your enemies various cavities and orifices, the visual placement of objects in the world ramp up the gore factor. There’s some really nicely designed scenery; headless women butchered? Hanged men? Unidentified (potentially fecal) matter mixed with blood dripping all over the walls, for… shits and giggles? It’s all there, with the bonus addition of a few humorous references to other games and movies of the ’90s dotted around. Well, they had to.

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Which brings me onto the characters. In Daymare, there are 3 playable characters, two with a vendetta; one with an agenda. I won’t spoil much but the storylines of the three are presented in a way that they nicely intertwine, although I have to admit that this is where Daymare falls a little short of expectations. Moving through the same level as a different character doesn’t really afford anything different; I think two small areas opened up that were inaccessible before. Overall, the story is a very loose, generic zombie story, you have to find the cause of the outbreak, you have to save the town, there are no major surprises here. Had the developers not mentioned in their description that they intended to recreate the iconic horror titles from the 90’s then this would be something to lose a few points on. Some of the characters also have some borderline hilarious dialogue, one of the more stereotypically gun-toting characters Liev had some lines which wouldn’t have been out of place in Duke Nukem.

Unfortunately, something that Daymare does lose a few points on is the characters faces. At times, they can be a bit two-dimensional. In the opening cutscene particularly I mostly failed to differentiate between three of them facially with any ease, hair being the only real giveaway. The games graphical capabilities on all other aspects surpass the intended connection to 1998, why have they left some of the faces stuck in the land of the Backstreet Boys and Silent Hill? I will note that there have been several large updates from the developers since the time I started to play the game, and as some of the faces later didn’t have the same feel I’m hoping that this is something that may have been improved on.

Aside from cutscenes, the story of Daymare is also told through the retrieval of various in-game documents, the majority of which are short enough to not become a huge burden to read. There’s also an accompanying website, http://hexacorebiogenetics.com, which contains password protected story documents presented in a typically 90’s browser style; if you yearn for the old days this might give you a kick for approximately five minutes but having to view this in modern browsers just feels a bit odd and would have been better included in-game rather than externally. There are audio logs to collect too, although not very many.

As part of the game, you have a very futuristic Buzz Lightyear-Esque interactive panel (it’s actually called a D.I.D) attached to the various characters arms, which manages the inventory, player health status, map and holds the key to re-reading the various documents you’ll need to access the secret ammo hoards. As a player you hold a limited inventory, you must juggle ammo, keys, and health fluids in 12 slots. Which means you spend a lot of time making sure you’ve squeezed all possible ammo into your weapons in the hope of freeing up a slot. My main gripe with the game is that the D.I.D, whilst it looks nice, takes a few seconds to load. Initially, it wasn’t a problem, you learn very quickly that some zombies reanimate whilst you’re trying to manually reload, pick your ‘safe’ spots better. It just became annoying. You’re going to tactically reload a lot in this game (particularly on the hardcore mode) and whilst probably very picky of me I became absolutely frustrated with watching the damn thing open up, wasting time for seemingly no reason when I just wanted to plow on through the unknown depths of zombie goo.

And zombie goo there is. Whilst the game isn’t riddled and swarming with the deadfolk, there’s enough to get overwhelmed at times. Moving tactically and avoiding zombies is also a legitimate strategy, which makes Daymare earn its description as a survival horror rather than a loud and proud mindless zombie horde swarm title. There are also puzzles. Do you like puzzles? There’s a few. Most of them are straight forward, one of them was so painstakingly obvious that I fell down the rabbit hole of trying every other possible more obscure solution first and winding myself up into a 45-minute frenzy. When I’d eventually solved it, I was so frustrated with myself and on edge that I spent the next 10 minutes bricking myself every time I walked somewhere near a corner. 10/10, Invader Studios.

Aside from running, shooting and solving, also included is a hacking mini-game. If you have fast reactions you’ll be fine, it’s a simple stop the bar in the correct space game. However, failure breaks your hacking cable, and you will need to get this mechanic down to access a few ammo drops. I couldn’t find many hacking cables throughout the game, and there wasn’t an overwhelming amount of hackable ammo drops, but they absolutely helped. Further on, you are presented with ‘a terminal’ that pops up at various in-game locations, which enables you to drop some items from your limited character inventory into storage, there is a save tab (although the games autosaving and checkpoint functionality was pretty spot-on) and there’s also a trade tab. Admittedly I got absolutely no value out of the trade tab, the intention is to swap unwanted items for other goods you might need, which I don’t think I ever had enough of initially.

The variety of zombies is, average to decent, where I’d say I was content mainly because the game is not described as a shoot ’em up. Aesthetically there are quite a few differences, for example in the hospital level there are nurse zombies, admin zombies, doctor zombies, and patient zombies. To my relief, you then don’t see these patient zombies after that level; hospitals unsettle me at the best of times, in the event of a zombie apocalypse I’m running as far away from any medical clinics as possible. Mechanically, however, there are a few differences, with their dress style mainly having no bearing, something that can be overlooked in other titles and adds to the variety and populace of the world. You have re-animators, zombies hellbent on mowing you down, zombies who shoot some kind of green toxic gunk at you…and a few different types of ‘boss’ zombie, the scariest being the ones who run the character down mentally. And yes, there is a seemingly endless swarm at some point for the trigger happy among you.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Daymare. It’s a nice homage to the horror games of yesteryear, I would say however that the game feels a little short, (there’s an achievement for completing the game in under 4 hours which you’re absolutely not going to do on the first playthrough) but any negatives I’ve mentioned don’t affect the overall enjoyment and excitement that the game brings. It’s jumpscare horror done well, for a first release from an independent studio I’d say it was a good effort, and should Invader Studios continue down the horror route they will no doubt be ones to watch out for at some point. If you have ever enjoyed any survival horror games and/or remember the 90’s you should pick this up; don’t expect anything new, but expect to have gory, tense fun navigating an already familiar environment.

Daymare 1998 review code provided by the publisher.

Daymare 1998 is out now on PC, and on PS4 and Xbox One in early 2020.