A game that started its production as a love project to remake the original Resident Evil 2 title that was given its own rights of use from Capcom turned into a full title with its own merit. With the origin of Daymare 1998 by Invader Studios being tied in with the origin of the classic horror series Remakes presents the challenge of comparison, but I think it is best to think of Daymare 1998 as a title of its own.

With that being said, this survival horror game gives us a mixture of expected elements with unique gameplay twists. Obviously putting more care into the survival horror aspect than the combat and horde style enemy base, they did a great job making a modern version of a classic horror game. However, that doesn’t mean this journey is without fault, but let’s weigh out the pros and cons.

Story

After a horrifying incident takes place in a small town, three people will find themselves facing extreme danger as they attempt to complete their mission. Be it a personal mission or one given by your employer, these three people can’t slow down if they want to survive the night!

Gameplay

While this game offers a lot of very familiar gameplay elements, such as movement, inventory limitations, and interactions, there are a few things to get used to very quickly. The main aspect here is the reloading system they have in place. For this game, reloading has to be done semi-manually, meaning that you will have to open your inventory, combine the bullets you have with the correct magazine to fill it up, close the inventory, and reload the gun. You can either do a slow reload, which will have the current magazine put back in your inventory and the selected magazine put in the gun, or do a quick reload, which will drop the current magazine on the ground and load the selected magazine into the gun quickly. If you do a quick reload you will need to pick up the magazine you dropped. If you don’t have a magazine in your inventory then you will have to always reload your gun with the inventory option that lets you put the bullets directly into the gun, which is sometimes useful but not always. Note that you can find different types of ammo (regular, hollow shell, etc) and these will need to go in their own magazine; they can not be mixed with different bullet types in the same magazine, so keep extra magazines on you.

Now that you have a sense of how bullet, magazine, and reload management works, the next thing to learn is the different power-ups you can find. These will come in a variety of options like power bars, pills, but the main things you want are the syringes. The three different types of power-ups you can find are health, stamina, and mind. It took me a bit to figure out what the mind one does while the other two options are quite obvious. Mind power-ups will help you find objects on the ground, hidden objects behind walls or simply out of your view, and interactable items like buttons. Just keep in mind that both stamina and mind power-ups work immediately, but health items do a gradual increase over time. It doesn’t take long, but just know that it’s not instant.

Luckily, they don’t have your weapons take up space in your inventory and instead give them designated spots on the outside of the inventory slots. However, when looking in your inventory the game is not paused nor slowed down, so, much like Dead Space, you are vulnerable when the inventory is open. Make sure you are in a safe spot before you use the inventory and every time you open it, make sure you are geared up for whatever may come.

When I say they take the survival horror part as the focus, I am referring to your supply count. I didn’t find a ton of health items, so make sure to avoid taking damage and only use health items when you can get their maximum effect. It is worth looking around thoroughly though because I literally found boss sections impossible when I was missing one of the guns for a character. Six failure fights in, I backtracked just to find that I missed an entire weapon in the level which made the fight not only possible but satisfying. Besides, they do the same thing that Resident Evil Remakes do with the “Mr. Raccoon” thing, but instead, they have a collection of 20 horror Reindeers to find and destroy, each featuring a different Easter Egg style design. I found 16 in my initial playthrough, so keep an ear out for them because some are well hidden.

While on the topic of searching each map thoroughly, some of the things you can also find are documents. Some of these are to help with the puzzles, but there are plenty that is just to fill in lore details. An interesting aspect they include is that some of the documents are considered “confidential” and instead just give you a password. You have to take that password, go to the website listed on the document, find the file you are trying to open and enter the password to access these documents. If you want to know the story behind this game and the virus, it is worth doing because it is very detailed.

I do give props to the developers mostly for their puzzle designs. It has been a while since a game has given seriously cryptic descriptions or setups for the player to dissect that takes longer than a couple of minutes to figure out or can be solved by a simple process of elimination. They ease you in with a not-too-difficult puzzle first and then just throw you into the challenge with the Greek password puzzle. From there, I knew we had real puzzle designs coming and this game definitely delivered. There weren’t a ton of puzzles in this game, but the few they did have always had me stumped for a bit. My favorite one might not even be a puzzle, but I considered it a combat puzzle, and it takes place near the end. I’ll leave it at that to avoid spoilers, but for those wondering the section - the hallway just before the final boss; very tricky.

Graphics

Definitely not the highlight of this game, but it is well designed to match a modernized ‘90s horror game aspect, which is what they were going for. It was the right amount of realism reduction that gave a grainy style to the overall aesthetic.

Sounds

Well choreographed music and sound effects filled this game. Some of the sounds, or possibly music, just hits the ear in a way that makes you anxious even when there is no reason to be. The lack of music when an enemy is actually active makes it nerve-racking to decide if they are downed for good or going to get back up, so there you have to rely on sound effects. This mixture of making players listen for cues and then giving them anxious-baiting sounds helped drive the fear in every situation.

Replayability

Facing enemies on a harder difficulty, finding all 20 of the horror Reindeers, and trophy hunting is the only reason I can think of to play the game again. It is a fun, unique style of survival horror that is definitely worth more than one playthrough, so you can also add purely for entertainment purposes as well.

What Could Be Better

Movement and general player control feels very clunky. This made it a hassle when it comes to more intricate movements or quickly switching from fighting to running or vice versa. I can understand the slower gun switching speed, but when I found myself dying just because I let go of the aim and tried to run but just did it too quickly so it didn’t register, that is just frustrating.

Setting up a better beginning tutorial would help players understand each part of the game better. I shouldn’t have had to figure out what the Mind power-ups actually do with trial and error, but instead shown through gameplay use in the beginning. They did a good job setting up a lot of the basic stuff that most players would already know, but leave it to the player to learn the more unique things (aside from the ammo reload system) on their own.

Enemy AI could be a bit smarter than it is. Sure, I took advantage of this during the final boss areas, but I shouldn’t have been able to get him to literally stand still while I re-setup bullets and ammo in my inventory mid-fight. Once you know how to do it once, you can do it anytime you face them, and you can do it to a lot of enemies.

Conclusion

Daymare 1998 is a solid survival horror game that gets the majority of the aspects right. It has a few issues that could be patched up, but even with these challenges, I found it entertaining. The plot itself is well throughout and is interestingly set up to be open-and-shut, giving a finalized feel no matter how the ending played out. Altogether, it is a good game that I would recommend to someone looking for a new game with a classic feel.