I have this thing for vampires. I admire them, I respect them, I’d like to meet a real one just to learn about their perspective on life, death and humans in general. I own Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and I’m hoping to add the Sookie Stackhouse books to my collection (well, when I can find the box set at a not so excessively high price). Bram Stoker’s Dracula made me cry. No, I’m not obsessed with vampires. In fact, I hate Twilight with a passion.
Dying for Daylight caught my eye because the story was created by Charlaine Harris, the imaginative brain behind the Sookie Stackhouse novels and the book-inspired True Blood (insert fangirl squeel here) HBO series.
In the game you play as Dhalia, a sexy, flirty vampire who searches for the Sun Potion formula, something that allows vampires to walk free during the day. One thing on her “to do” list is to travel around and be able to shop in broad daylight. A little bit of backstory: Dhalia is one of the vampires who lives in the True Blood world, however she isn’t connected to the characters in the series.
Dhalia is sent to New Orleans by her nest leader to investigate some murders that may be connected to the existence of the Sun Potion. There she finds a vampire circus and meets several strangely interesting characters, while gathering clues to discover the whereabouts of the precious formula.
The majority of the game is played as a point-and-click adventure. Explore, observe, interact, gather items that you will need for further progression, talk to people. Usually I come to a point in adventure games where I have no idea what to do and just give up or go read a walkthrough, so here I was somewhat apprehensive that I’d be encountering Monkey Island type of solutions where I’d have to piece random things together to see if any would work.
Fortunately, that never happened and I managed to progress fairly easily, with only a few head-scratching moments, but nothing that couldn’t be solved with some more backtracking, close inspection of the journal and inventory and a dash of logical thinking.
Aside from the adventure portion, there are hidden object screens where you must find a series of items from a list. “Bah, hidden object!” you may say. And I would too, but I actually really enjoyed these. They’re not incredibly difficult, nor do they leave you wondering for an hour looking for something stupidly tiny that could be just about anywhere. The hidden object scenes are clever and don’t take too long to solve. If you find yourself stuck, you can use a hint, which will pinpoint the location of an item you haven’t found yet. The jar of blood represents your hints, and if it depletes too fat it’s because it will refill again as time passes.
There are a couple of mini-games to be found. Inside the first hidden object scene you find, there is a Whack-a-Monster kind of game where you must leave the cute creatures alone and whack the zombies, vampires and the like. You will also come across a dress-up game which isn’t there just for changing Dhalia’s looks, the whole virtual boutique thing actually serves a purpose and you will find out how once you get to certain points in the story.
Dying for Daylight has great presence, especially for a casual game. The story is presented as a comic book page at the start of each episode, with a summary of the events thus far. The panels move into place as the story is happening and there are a few animations such as facial expressions or simple movements. Everything is fully voiced, and quite nicely. Kudos to the sound effects and background music, since they are the ones setting the tone in this adventure.
And what would the adventure be without our witty protagonist, who manages to crack jokes and still be somewhat creepy and scary.
Although not as dark and serious as True Blood (which is what I initially expected), Dying For Daylight manages to be interesting from beginning to end, with some light-hearted moments in between the overall creepy atmosphere. My only complaint is that in the end I was left with an “unfinished” feeling… which was soon explained as this is only the first chapter of Dahlia’s adventure. Now to wait for the others…
Special thanks to Chrissy Kelleher and I-Play for providing a copy of this title.