Leonardo Interactive And Invader Studios they are ready to show us a little bit of Daymare 1994: Sandcastleprequel of Daymare 1998 ready to make us feel terror again. We previewed the demo that came out for it Steam Next Fest (you can download it and try it too), and we can immediately tell you that the steps forward are so many from the first children’s game.
An interesting past
Daymare 1994: Sandcastle is in effect a prequel, and as the best have taught us, it is precisely by telling the past that you can open up to the future. For this it must be immediately said that the new Invader Studios kids game is fresh, rejuvenated by a couple of mechanics that populated the previous title and with very interesting components in terms of gameplay.
Let’s start from the basics: in the game we will impersonate Dalila Reyesan agent of HADES who finds himself having to complete a mission. The demo eliminates narrative incipits to launch immediately into action and horror, and it takes very little to see the great leap forward made by the development studio.
Although Daymare 1998 had some interesting features and an intriguing playful construction (review here), it suffered from some mechanics that in this new Daymare 1994: Sandcastle they have been completely filed down. In addition, two ingenious features related to the Frost Grip and the type of enemies that we met.
As for the former, it will give Reyes the chance to freeze things (and therefore also monsters): it will be used above all in solving puzzles and to kill a specific type of enemy. Moving on to the seconds, these will be gods humanoids with strange blue or red effects: it will be very important to recognize them in real time – since they will run towards you and they will dodge cleverly your shots – because it is not possible to kill the red ones with conventional weapons.
If the blue ones can be knocked down with a submachine gun or shotgun, the red ones will be resistant and to kill them you will first have to freeze them completely with the Frost Grip (you will also be able to throw a sort of freezing grenade) and then dismember them (with rifle shots or other ways still unknown).
These two features, which may seem not very useful at first glance, in reality give a different tone to the game compared to the classic horror, without falling into the usual zombies, but on the contrary putting us in front of a reasoning that is no longer the “aim and shoot”, but adds the step of recognizing your opponent. Also abandoned the mechanics of the magazines of the first game, which required a more complex management of ammunition (although we liked it) and which now instead conforms to the rest of the landscape.
A bright future
Even if the narrated plot goes back a few years, we remind you that the writing of the guys of Invader Studios has always been brilliant: the story of Daymare 1998 managed to capture the player within his intertwining son of an unconditional love towards B-Movie Horror and Resident Evilas if the game of the development studio were a fruit that fell from that tree.
If though Daymare 1998 it was still a bit unripe fruit, Daymare 1994: Sandcastle it is mature from some points of view, to the point that it made us feel – and it may seem paradoxical – a detachment from those origins and an identity of our own. Obviously the references are many, both to the Capcom series and to the year in which the game is set (fantastic quote to find a Game Boy on one of the counters), but there is also more personality in the game.
Technically, the game is really well taken care of: we tested the title on an RTX 2070 Super and the game manages to display fantastic details, also thanks to the optimization of resources. It was certainly a demo, but we didn’t encounter any frame rate drops or problems of any kind. If there really is one out of tune in this score, it could be scanner, a system that allows you to take data from PCs and other equipment, but which basically avoids having to create dozens of different animations by relegating the interaction with objects always to that device. Another problem, which however is easily solved, is the run of the character: it may seem nonsense, but when Reyes runs, hopsin a way very unnatural and above all with a decidedly inappropriate approach to a secret mission of this caliber.
Objectively, however, these two problems are only details that do not affect the game; instead we cannot speak of enemies because we have seen a few types (two variations of the same), but we are sure that more will be added. Daymare 1994: Sandcastle will be released by 2022 and will arrive on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S and PC.
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