It’s rare to see true horror in games anymore. Industry staples like Silent Hill and Resident Evil have long since moved past their horror roots, and even more recent entries like Dead Space have begun to incorporate more action. With the announcement of its first Unreal Engine 4 game Daylight , Zombie Studios is looking to reverse that trend.

Loading

“ I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen when I play it, which is really scary, but cool at the same time. And I’m making it.

“ We took it to Valve and showed it to them. They said ‘normally, any indie game that’s coming to us, we tell them they have to put it on Greenlight. But your experience as a studio, the game is solid, you’re using Unreal 4…let’s just skip all of that.’

Loading

“ Everybody that’s working on it is working on it because they believe in the whole concept.

“ We want to make a very high fidelity of art. We’re being very unapologetic with the min specs of the machines.

At the DICE summit in Vegas last week, IGN had a chance to sit down with Zombie creative studio head Jared Gerritzen and Daylight writer Jessica Chobot to talk about creating true horror experiences in an industry distancing itself from the genre, plus how Unreal Engine 4 changes the development landscape.“I don’t feel that the horror genre is a horror genre anymore,” Gerritzen told IGN. “Every single game that was a scary game now has more machine guns. You play with a buddy now. It’s not scary when you’re with a friend.”In Daylight, Zombie presents a world where the player is completely alone. With no weapons and nobody to help you, you play as a woman trapped in a scary asylum and trying to find your way out. With the power of Unreal Engine 4 behind it, Daylight’s environments are randomly-generated, giving the player a completely different experience every time.Chobot added that it’s hard to have a player feel truly horrified without turning them off of the experience, and finding that balance was difficult for the team early on. “She’s really messed up in the head and she’s been doing a lot of stuff. So much so that my producer had to leave when he read one of the stories,” Gerritzen told us.“Yeah,” Chobot said. “It’s a horror game, but I don’t want people to vomit. Here’s the thing. There’s a lot of different types of horror. It’s not hack and slash. It’s all very subtle and very implied. It leaves the player to their own devices. There’s obviously certain things that are going to scare you that are part of the world, but for the most part, it’s whatever is going on in your own head and how you decide to interpret the things that you find that is going to scare you. It’s not going to be a hack and slash, blood and guts kind of vibe. It’s going to be much more sophisticated, in my opinion. It seems like there are fewer scary games. There are just scary moments in games. You have that one thing or those two things that happen and you’re like ‘oh, that was frightening,’ but overall it’s not really a scary game.”“I think that a lot of people are missing that horror genre,” Gerritzen added. “American Horror Story, for example. That is very messed up. It’s horror, but it’s also like you don’t know what to think all the time. It’s exactly that. It allows people to draw their own conclusions. With [Daylight], the player doesn’t have a name. We don’t give any backstory on the player. She just wakes up. You need to find your way through, but there’s a lot of story elements that make you go ‘wait a minute. Is the player connected to this? What happened?’”"For people like me that prefer the other road, there’s nothing out there that allows you to do that," she continued. "There’s a few things, like Slender and whatnot, but nothing high-quality that would make you want to go out there and say ‘wow, this is the next step in this evolution.’ For me, at least, from a writer’s perspective, it was kind of an homage to the things that I really enjoy as far as horror genre games up to that point. It’s worked out really well. I’m excited to see people get back into that vibe again, hopefully, with our game.”Gerritzen told us that the unpredictable nature of Daylight is what excited him about the project. “It’s been one of those things where we don’t know. I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen when I play it, which is really scary, but cool at the same time. And I’m making it. I worked on F.E.A.R., and it was like ‘okay, I drive the player down this narrow hallway and I make a trigger. The trigger makes the guy jump through a window and scares the player.’ I hit that every single time. Now I know it. I then get used to it and it no longer scares me. With [Daylight], it’s like ‘I was in this room once, and I think this is the room, but it looks different now. There was a thing over there that scared me. Wait, it’s not there.’ Now you’re tense again. It’s a program that doesn’t allow it to just stack horror elements. But it also allows the pacing to work as well. That’s the big thing. It’s a major pain the ass, but it’s also the major thing that’s going to change this genre of horror. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, you truly don’t know what’s going to happen, when you’ve played this game a hundred times and you still don’t know what’s going to happen…that’s scary. That’s a really scary thing.”Beyond its horror elements, Daylight is a fantastic example of where gaming is headed. Aside from being built on a next-gen engine, the game was built by a small team, is being published independently and is focused on digital distribution.“I consider it a passion project,” Chobot added. “Everybody that’s working on it is working on it because they believe in the whole concept. They’re all fans of this genre. It’s solid. I think that if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, that’s going to be very disappointing, but at least we did it. It’s awesome. We’re really proud of it and we’d love to see it succeed. It’s just really unique, in the sense that you’ve got six people that are dedicating a lot of time to doing something that hasn’t been done before.”Daylight also stands out by bypassing the need for a publisher. “We took it to Valve and showed it to them,” Gerritzen recalls. “They said ‘normally, any indie game that’s coming to us, we tell them they have to put it on Greenlight. But your experience as a studio, the game is solid, you’re using Unreal 4…let’s just skip all of that.’ They gave us Steam IDs. It’ll be on Steam. It’s kind of a great thumbs-up from Valve, saying ‘yeah, you can skip Greenlight.’ That’s great. There’s these great partnerships that are growing with the project. Because it’s a digital download, because it’s controlled by us only, we can treat it the way that we treated Blacklight, where it’s constantly evolving. That’s the thing that makes digital distribution [exciting], or even free-to-play in a certain manner of speaking. The users are supporting it to keep on evolving. It’s not like ‘hey, here’s our money,’ and you walk away and start working on the second one. It’s more like ‘here, you bought it. Let’s start making it better.’”As for what will be able to run Daylight, Gerritzen explains that it will probably require a high-end PC. “The game itself, we want to make a very high fidelity of art. We’re being very unapologetic with the min specs of the machines.”Despite that, he wants to make sure Daylight is as accessible as possible when people sit down to play. “There’s still gameplay, but we wanted to make it very easy gameplay, as opposed to this, that and the other thing. It should be very easy for someone to get into. I want to be able to scare the sh*t out of my mom. That’s kind of the element with it.”

Disclaimer: Jessica Chobot is an industry personality who hosts The Weekly 'Wood, Strategize and Mix’d Reviews for IGN and works independently as a voice actor and television host for G4, Microsoft, and more. Jessica does not write about games for IGN and will not be involved in our coverage of Daylight.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.