Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle Review (dEEkAy)
Solid game, sequel to Daymare 1998 but a bit more sci-fi. While Daymare 1998 went for the same feel resident evil 2 remake did, this one wanted to be a bit more like dead space, without the space.
I gotta admit that i do not like the design of the enemies as much as i did on Daymare 1998. Here, enemies pop out of thin air (with a lore reason) and attack you by mainly charging at you and trying to grab you. You can either shoot them, run away or freeze/shatter/shoot them.
Story is okay, i liked the main protagonist you are playing and the storytelling was kinda nice. They removed a few things from Daymare 1998, like you don't have to manage magazines nor is inventory space a big factor here. What annoyed me was the fact that you pretty often had to discard items just to make room for a key item which after one use just disappears. A seperate "quest item inventory" would have been a very good idea.
One of the biggest cons though is the graphical fidelity. While it looks better compared to 1998, 1994 at the same time looks worse too. It's a lot darker, the flashlight isn't as good as it was on 1998 and it's just not sharp. Even going in, not using any upscaler like FSR/XESS and cranking up the render resolution to 200% (which ofc tanked performance), the game just looked way to soft, just like one would feel like looking at a distance without glasses (if you need any).
I played this both on my 32:9 5120x1440 superultrawide display and on my 4K/UHD TV. Sitting further away on the couch and playing on the TV, the blur and "softness" wasn't as noticable as it was at my desk in ultrawide.
I gotta say though that the devs made a good job when it comes to FOV and camera distance options. It works very well in 32:9 (and i do believe in 21:9 too) and i didn't need any fov hacks like i needed on daymare 1998. If you wanted to be nitpicky, you could say that an option to bring the HUD/UI further in from the edges would be a cool addition for 21:9 and 32:9 gamers, but i never really missed this option here.
Kudos to the devs for making this game very well navigatable with the keyboard and using WASD not only for walking but for menu navigation too. Far too few games actually do this and force you to use keys which are somewhere on the right half of your keyboard, which kinda contradicts the way we game with mouse and keyboard where one hand sits on the left half of the keyboard, while the other obivously uses the mouse. More so of an issue if you use a split keyboard like i do :D
Still i would prefer if they went for something more similar to daymare 1998 instead of daymare 1994 for their next daymare installment, as i do believe it was planned as a trilogy.
If you are looking for a solid third person survival horror game with an interesting story, go on, grab it, it's well worth it.