Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle Review

Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle is a prequel to Daymare 1998 and puts players in the virtual shoes of H.A.D.E.S. (Hexacore Advanced Division for Extraction and Search) special agent Dalila Reyes as she explores an advanced experimental research center set in Area 51. What kind of nightmarish scenario will you uncover?

Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle is a third person survival horror action game where players, as Reyes, will need to eliminate threats and solve puzzles in order to survive the horror that awaits you. You have a machinegun and shotgun at your disposal. And then after a bit of progress, you’ll find the Frost Grip. This little gadget allows players to get the upper hand in battle and solve puzzles making it a unique and beneficial mechanic to use. You can either shoot a ball of ice or shoot an ice stream to freeze enemies/things. As you progress through the game, you’ll find upgrade to increase its reach or efficiency for example.

One the game’s unique feature are the enemies. While you’d expect zombies or aliens (given it’s set in Area 51), enemies are actually corpses reanimated by an electric ball that revives dead bodies and turn them into weird bland aggressive enemies. Once you’ve killed the corpse, you’ll need to destroy the floating electric ball. While blue enemies can easily be dispatched without the Frost Grip (you still need to shoot a ball of ice on the electric ball), red one are invincible until you freeze them. The shooting is fine and plays fine.

Similar to the series that inspired this new take on the survival horror genre, Resident Evil, Daymare has its fair share of puzzles to solve in order to progress. While some are simply finding items, examining them and unlocking a specific door, others will require you to use the Frost Grip to cool down pipes and tubes that are overheating and hindering your progress (for example).

Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle looks like a game that’s straight out of the sixth generation of consoles. It’s fine as a whole, but definitely won’t compete with AAA releases visual wise. The game is appropriately dark (maybe too much?) which allows the development team to avoid offering a higher level of detail in the environments and character models. Speaking of which, they look like mannequins you’d see in windows in clothing stores. The ambiance is quite unsettling; I’ve actually had more jump scares here than with the remake of Dead Space. The soundtrack is… non-existent? Even with every audio options set to 100%, all I heard was the sound effects of monsters spawning, Reyes’ footsteps, etc.

So what’s wrong with it? Well quite a bit. The first being that the game is way too dark. Even by cranking the in-game brightness to the max, with a 2021 Samsung HD TV, some areas, you can’t even see where you’re going… even with your flashlight. It can be a struggle just trying to leave a room that has no light because you can’t find the door. And by cranking the brightness all the way up, character models in cutscenes are horrifying.

While the Frost Grip is a neat feature, it’s slow to get going with a limited range/efficiency before being finally able to upgrade it meaning if three enemies or more are charging you, you’re pretty much screwed. There’s also a lot of sound issues where you’ll get into silent cutscenes; you’ll see the characters’ lips (barely) moving but no words/noise come out. The lack of a map is also infuriating; combines this with the insanely dark enviroments and chances are you’ll go around in circles a few times.

Daymare 1994 Sandcastle is below average. There’s nothing overly wrong with this game, but it’s far from being close to horror GOTY contender especially given we’ve gotten Dead Space Remake and Resident Evil 4 Remake this year. Despite being their second game in this series, it doesn’t feel like they learned their lesson from 1998. The controls feel floaty, combat is frustrating when surrounded. The Frost Grip is a neat feature, but its usage is pretty straight forward and simplistic. But the great ambiance makes up for it. This game has bargain bin written all over it.