Daymare: 1998 is a throwback to the old school Resident Evil series in its setting (maybe just a little too much of a throwback for its own good), with a modern twist in the gameplay. The game has been on PC for quite some time, but now console users will be able to get in on the action soon.

As announced with a trailer, which you can see below as uploaded via Gemastu, the game will release for both PS4 and Xbox One in April, which is coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally) the same month as the next Resident Evil game. The PS4 version of the game will even get a physical release which will be distributed by GS2 Games.

Daymare: 1998 is available now on PC. The PS4 and Xbox One versions will come on April 28th. You can check out our interview with the game’s developers for more on the survival horror tribute through here.

NOTE: This interview was conducted prior to the game’s launch.

"It’s never easy to try to create something new looking with a touch of the past at the same time. We tried to give the players a new experience connected to the mood or feelings of the great series from the past, while being careful not to make a mere copy or clone of another game. "

Daymare wears it Resident Evil influences on its sleeve- can you talk us through the process of conceptualizing the game in its early stages, and the balance you sought to strike between homage and something new?

It’s never easy to try to create something new looking with a touch of the past at the same time. We tried to give the players a new experience connected to the mood or feelings of the great series from the past, while being careful not to make a mere copy or clone of another game. What we wanted with Daymare: 1998 was to tell a story, our story, in a world of nostalgia that could mix the feelings we had as players in the 90s with something that came up from our creativity. A sort of mixture of the present and the past.

Not too long ago, Capcom released the Resident Evil 2 Remake – was there anything in that game that you looked at and went, “hey, we’re doing that exact same thing!”

Yeah there are several video on YouTube, made by fans, that show a comparison between our unofficial remake and the official one. It’s easy to see that some of the ideas we have had about mechanics, HUD and environments have been used by Capcom for the final version. Of course, Capcom improved them and added new ones to develop an absolute masterpiece.

Horror games sometimes struggle to strike the right balance between action and horror. Where does Daymare: 1998 fall on that scale?

It’s more horror and exploration than action. We love to put the player in hard situations against enemies that are hard to kill and with just a handfull of ammo or weapons, but at the same time, we want to put him in an immersive world, tell him a dark story that he finds out about through the eyes of three main characters. Jump scares are common in our game, but the player will probably be more scared in the moments when the enemies are not shown than while he’s fighting them. Two different kinds of horror then.

As far as the multiple PoVs of the game are concerned, can you talk to us how these will interact with each other and shape the game’s narrative?

They are not aware of what he’s happening just like the player. And for this reason, it will be more interesting and immersive for the player, because he’s investigating and finding out the truth with from three different angles. The player can figuratively put on the three different characters’ clothes at different times and live the story through their eyes.

"Daymare: 1998 is a single-player story-driven survival horror game, and for this reason, we focused on the main campaign only. For the future, who knows."

Do the characters differ from each other significantly in terms of how they play as well? For instance, are certain areas or weapons exclusive to any of the characters?

Yes. They have different weapons although they’re of the same weapon classes. They move through different locations, but sometimes the paths cross each other. Compared to the other two, the most interesting is Samuel for sure, because he’s also affected by mental illness, called “Daymare Syndrome” which brings him into states of hallucinations and paranoia that the player can see and feel.

What can players expect from the game in terms of enemy variety and boss fights?

There are several enemy classes. The classic zombie-like creatures are the basic enemies, then there are three different mid-bosses with different routines and weak points and then the hardest one, the traditional final boss.

Does Daymare: 1998 offer any sort of multiplayer modes?

No. Daymare: 1998 is a single-player story-driven survival horror game, and for this reason, we focused on the main campaign only. For the future, who knows.

Roughly how long will an average playthrough of Daymare: 1998 be?

Most of the players took more than 8 hours to complete the game, at the best. Finding collectibles, files and secrets Easter eggs hidden in the game can of course make the game much longer. Also, playing or re-playing on the suggested “Daymare” difficulty mode can add some time as deaths will be more likely.

Do you have any plans to launch on Switch?

Why not. We’ll see if we’ll have the chance to take it to Switch in the future.

Will the game feature Xbox One X and PS4 Pro-specific enhancements? Is 4K/60fps on the cards?

We can’t say anything about that at the moment since we are still working on it.

The PS5 is confirmed to have an SSD. From a development perspective, how will this help you to improve game performance in the future?

Our game has many loading points, so probably yes, the performance could be significantly improved.

"Memory has always been a bottleneck for console. Have more memory and more efficiency could mean a big improvement for the developers."

The PS5 will have a Zen 2 CPU processor which is a major leap over the CPUs found in the PS4 and Xbox One. From a development perspective, how will this help you in developing games of the future?

More power means better games. We cannot wait to work with this console.

Xbox Scarlett features GDDR6 memory. How will this increase in memory bandwidth help you in the future?

Memory has always been a bottleneck for console. Have more memory and more efficiency could mean a big improvement for the developers.

Backwards compatibility is a big feature PS5. How will it help your past library to evolve and grow?

Having the chance to play PS4 games on PS5 could be a big plus for us since the players can play our game also on the next gen console.

Daymare starts in traditional survival horror fashion: an evil company is playing with contagions that don’t understand, and somehow, that contagion gets out, infecting everyone in the entire lab. You start the game as Agent Liev, a member of H.A.D.E.S. (no, I’m not joking, though I wish I were) Hexacore Advanced Division for Extraction and Search. Like more paramilitary organizations, H.A.D.E.S. has terrible people to go along with its awful acronym. Liev is probably the worst of them, a generic no-nonsense soldier with nothing interesting to distinguish him from the stereotype he embodies other than a bad attitude and edgy dialogue. After an interminable cutscene bursting with bad writing, a monstrous dump of exposition, and the pseudo-military speak you only hear in video games and bad films that take themselves far too seriously, you are dropped off at the location of the accident to recover samples of the virus that has leaked, as well as research samples that have been left behind. Crew expendable.

"In case you’re still not sure that you’re playing the bad guys, the first major things Liev does is shoot a wounded survivor in the head. “Orders are orders,” he remarks dryly."

In case you’re still not sure that you’re playing the bad guys, the first major things Liev does is shoot a wounded survivor in the head. “Orders are orders,” he remarks dryly. Shortly thereafter, you learn that the people inside the facility have been turned into zombies (because of course they have), and you start killing them and solving puzzles to unlock other areas of the facility. It’s all very rote and uninteresting, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for skipping as many of the cutscenes and collectibles as they could to get on with the gameplay.

To be fair, the gameplay is better than the presentation, and the game largely looks and sounds fine outside of the abysmal character models and voice acting. The gameplay is classic survival horror, and you’ll pick up ammo, health items, and important story items as you progress, having to manage your limited inventory and resources. The game does have some good ideas here. For instance, you’ll have to go into your inventory – accessed by a computer on Liev’s arm – and reload your extra magazines with ammo from your inventory before you can use them to reload your weapon.

Going into your inventory doesn’t pause the game, so you’ll have to do it when you’re sure nothing is going to attack you. You’ll also have to equip them to a quick access screen (where you can also equip healing items), allowing you to fill magazines with different types of ammo and chose which one you want at any given time. You can also choose between a slow and fast reload. The first deposits your old magazine into your inventory, but it takes a long time. The second throws the magazine on the ground, giving you a much faster reload, but removing the magazine from your inventory until you pick it up. The trade-off is interesting, and I often had to think about what I wanted to do at any given moment.

"The aiming controls were wonky, at least on a controller, which was how I played, and I didn’t feel like I had the control of my weapon that I wanted. "

Unfortunately, Daymare’s combat can’t capitalize on these ideas. The guns feel and sound suitably powerful, but combat simply doesn’t feel good. The aiming controls were wonky, at least on a controller, which was how I played, and I didn’t feel like I had the control of my weapon that I wanted. In a game where ammo is limited and death happens quickly, unresponsive controls are particularly annoying. The game’s enemies aren’t particularly interesting, either. The zombies are the standard “they’re-slow-until-they’re-not” type who have basically one attack: grab you and puke on you until you manage to mash yourself free. Then there are the heavily telegraphed enemies who initially appear in tanks and you accidentally free. They can take more damage, and deal more, etc. Nothing here is exciting and fresh, and Inavder’s idea of difficulty seems to be to make their enemies bullet sponges. Except, inexplicably, when they’re not and this headshot happens to pop their skull. There’s no rhyme or reason here, and these enemies just aren’t fun to fight.

Daymare attempts to break these combat sections up with puzzles, but they’re just as tedious, and often poorly explained. One of the more egregious examples requires you to enter the correct answers to riddles on a computer. You can find the answers by examining the paintings in the areas nearby. Simple, right? Except all the letters on the in-game keyboard have been replaced with Greek characters. So, not only do you have to remember the answers, you must look at a real keyboard as you enter them so you can translate them into the Greek characters. This isn’t clever or interesting; it’s merely tedious, and it requires you to go outside of the game to solve the puzzle. Another requires you to determine a combination lock by looking at a bookshelf and noting the volumes that aren’t there. Unfortunately, there is no clue as to what order the numbers go in, and you have to sit there inputting different combinations until you find the right one.

The environments aren’t much better. You do get out of the facility, and you do play other characters, like Sam, a man who suffers from hallucinations without his meds (which he is, conveniently, unable to take for a while). The others are just as badly written and voiced as Liev is, and their motivations are just as full of clichés. The other environments include a small town, the woods, several houses, back roads, a hospital, etc. All these places feel artificial. There are knocked down items in certain areas to prevent you from exploring, and the environments are incredibly linear. Resident Evil’s mansion this ain’t. Invader tries to vary things up with environmental humor, poking fun at or making reference to Half-Life 3, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Resident Evil, and several others. This wouldn’t be an issue if these jokes were funny, but they aren’t. Putting several typewriters in a game obviously inspired by Resident Evil isn’t funny or clever, especially when said game isn’t good.

"Daymare may love Resident Evil, but it certainly doesn’t understand why it worked the way it did, and for a game that proudly wears its 1998 subtitle, it seems to have forgotten why those games were designed the way they were."

The game also fails to do the whole limited resources part of survival horror properly, and this factors into the game’s save system. Near the end of the first level, I was low on health, out of healing items, and nearly out of bullets. There were no more healing items (I found a grand total of 3 in the entire level), and at the end I was expected to hold out while I was rushed by several zombies. I died several times, and considered loading an old save. Unfortunately, since Daymare uses an autosave system, the only thing I could have done was restart the level. I opted to run around in circles until the door opened, and I could escape. Resident Evil understood that a game with limited resources meant that going back to older times and trying the same things repeatedly would be necessary, because you’d run out of resources and potentially be stuck. That’s why the game has a manual save system and uses ink ribbons for the typewriter to keep players from abusing it. Daymare doesn’t. It may love Resident Evil, but it certainly doesn’t understand why it worked the way it did, and for a game that proudly wears its 1998 subtitle, it seems to have forgotten why those games were designed the way they were.

And then, of course, there are the bugs. I got sound in the first few cutscenes, but after that, it stopped working completely, only to return when gameplay resumed. It wasn’t terrible, because it saved me from the game’s dialogue, but it was annoying, especially considering how long Daymare’s cutscenes are (read: too long). One enemy, who got up after I shot him on a pair of steps, fell through the steps and was trapped in a part of the environment where he couldn’t hurt me. The result is that Daymare feels unfinished, and in a game that already doesn’t play well, that’s unacceptable.

Daymare desperately wants to be Resident Evil, but it just doesn’t have the design chops. The environments are boring, the enemies are generic, the aiming is faulty, the writing and performances are awful, the title doesn’t make sense (most of the game takes place at night), the experience is filled with bugs, and the game mistakes difficulty (limited resources) for design. It’s a game with very little about it to recommend and if I hadn’t had to play it for review, I would had stopped after about an hour in. It’s hard to be angry at Invader Studios for this; they’re a small team and this is their first game. I hope that it’s something they’ll be able to learn from. But Daymare is just another in a long line of examples that proves that a developer loving design from a certain era doesn’t mean that they understand it.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Follia – Dear Father is coming from the independent Italian game developer, Destructive Creations. It got an announcement trailer today that shows off a pretty gruesome look at the horror title that’s sure to make your skin crawl a little bit. And if you’re brave enough, the game will also support VR play.

The game puts you in the shoes of Marcus as he goes in search of his missing parents after getting word of strange events happening at their work place, Frederick Fidelity University. You can take a look at the announcement trailer below to see that there is some pretty gruesome stuff you’ll have to contend with, as you wade through the corpse-ridden decrepit university. The game plays similarly to games like Amnesia and Outlast, with stealth playing a big part as you encounter freakish enemies.

Follia – Dear Father has no slated release date at this time, but it will launch on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The PS4 and PC versions will include VR support for the title with PS VR and HTC Vive.

https://youtu.be/EqiRf1TK9PQ

Ancestors Legacy will be launching on May 22, and Xbox One players for the game will get a special treat. The game will be launching with native 4K support for Xbox One X players, meaning they’ll get the best visual experience if they play it on Microsoft’s new superpowered console.

The game is an RTS, and it will be coming to PC as well as Microsoft’s console. Polish studio Destructive Creations has also confirmed to WCCFTech that they are looking at enabling cross platform play between the PC release of the game, and the Xbox One version. While this will not be possible for now (since initially, the game is only launching on PC via Steam), they did say it is something they would like to consider once the game hits the Windows Store.

For now, if you are on PC, you can check out the game’s beta, and you can also check out a trailer for the game below.

Destructive Creations’ isometric shooter Hatred, which has garnered a fair amount of attention for its graphic execution scenes and subject matter, will not be published by Valve through Steam Greenlight. This comes just several hours after it became available for voting.

Valve’s Doug Lombardi revealed to Eurogamer that, “Based on what we’ve seen on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.”

The developer later responded officially, stating that, “‘We wanted you guys to know that based on what we see on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.’

“Even though games like Manhunt or Postal are still available on Steam we of course fully respect Valve’s decision, as they have the right to do so. In the same time we want to assure you that this won’t in any way impact the game’s development, game’s vision or gameplay features we’re aiming for. The game is still to be released in Q2 2015 as planned.

“Moreover we don’t treat this as a failure because yet again this showed us a huge community support we’re totally overwhelmed with. After only a couple of hours Greenlight campaign being live, Hatred gathered 13,148 up votes and ended up on a #7 on Top 100 list.”

What are your thoughts on Hatred not being published through Greenlight? Let us know in the comments.