Being the second game in a series is a tough position for a lot of games because they have the first game to either live up to or improve upon. For me, Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle had a bit of both aspects since I did mostly enjoy the original title, Daymare: 1998, when I reviewed it. Now, Invader Studios and Leonardo Interactive have released a demo for Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle for players to get their first hands-on with it, and having played through it already, I have to say that I am excited for the full game, but hopeful for a few changes before then.

Gameplay

This demo does a great start out by introducing you to the hectic world with an opening that appears to take place at the end of a chase sequence. As you hear whatever unknown enemy banging on the door you escaped through, the game gives you control to begin playing. Initial controls are very straightforward and you can easily stumble upon your first collectible resource, seen thanks to an arrow-like icon that will become a common sight.

Once you make your way through the first few areas, you will be prompted with tutorials on how to use different controls in the game. It isn’t long before you are shown the more unique stuff, such as the scanner and the frost spray. The scanner can be a direct use item to scan a computer for documents and likely some other uses in the future, but if you click the middle-mouse button then it will scan the area around you to reveal any collectibles and interactibles.

As for the frost spray, this will be a tool and a weapon in one. The frost spray is revealed shortly after your first enemy, which will have blue electricity flowing through them. Simply gunning the blue electricity enemies down will do the trick, so you don’t need the frost spray yet. After you put out some fires, you will make your way to the next set of enemies that will spawn in, and this time you are introduced to a red electricity flowing one. Red electricity enemies can not simply be gunned down and to actually kill them you will need to freeze them by shooting the frost spray as a frost blast or simply spray them, preferably while they are down.

These enemies don’t seem to have any direct attack against the player though, so just be ready to get grabbed when they do land an attack. When you’re grabbed, you have to smash your way out and then once you break free, there is a small window where you can do a frost slam attack in return. This will cause a frost blast that lands some cold damage on all nearby enemies. Utilizing this moment will surely help you escape some dire moments, which I would know since I used this during the fight near the end of my playthrough video at the top of this article.

Something to note is that I noticed that when multiple enemies are around, they will be a mixture of blue and red electricity ones. If you manage to kill a blue enemy, their spawn out electricity ball will charge a nearby blue enemy and turn them into a red enemy. This seems to happen to the red enemies as well, but either doesn’t have any effect or refreshes their health.

Your progress will bring you across a couple of puzzles as well, which were fun to solve and give a good sign that we will have a variety of puzzles in this game. There are also a few items to collect, notes to find and read, along with a voice recording that can be listened to.

Expectations

One thing I was a bit upset to not see in this demo was a mechanic that I thought was going to be a staple of the Daymare series; bullet management. In Daymare: 1998, there was a slow and fast reloading option where slow reloading would have you store the current clip of ammo in your inventory when reloading and the fast reloading would simply drop the clip of ammo to be collected later. The reason for this was that you had to manage your bullets and know how much ammo you had left before reloading, making the management of ammo-to-clip an aspect of the game. This is completely absent in the Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle demo. I really hope they bring this mechanic into the game, even if it is something that can be turned off in the settings or an option on a different difficulty.

So far, there are only two enemies that are very much similar. I am interested to see what other types of enemies there will be, how they will all play off of each other, and if this aspect of a dead enemy powering up a nearby one will have a major impact on the game in the future. There is a lot of potential with the new aspects they are presenting in this game, so let’s just hope that they take advantage of what they have started and keep the game progressing interestingly.

Verdict

Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle has an entertaining demo that has me wanting to keep going! It definitely felt like it was much too short, but now I can’t wait for what the full game will entail. I just hope that they decide to bring back that bullet management mechanic and keep the enemies as interestingly strange as the demo ones were. The story definitely seems to be off to an intriguing start with a lot of lore nodes already bringing up questions and the sheer fact that enemies straight-up spawn in right in front of you like the Terminator does is definitely a curious factor.