According to its Steam store page, Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle is described as such:

Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle is a third-person story-driven survival horror game prequel to the critically acclaimed Daymare: 1998. Step into the shoes of agent Dalila Reyes, a former government spy now in the service of H.A.D.E.S. unit and prepare to face the true horror.

I’ve not played Daymare: 1998, so I’m basically going into this demo completely blind. With absolutely zero expectations for a game in a genre I don’t normally play, what’s in store for me?

OPTIONS

It’s relatively barebones, all things considered. I wonder if more toggles and sliders will get added, but for now, here’s what stood out to me:

• Difficulty in Story, Normal, Nightmare options
• Auto reload on / off
• Always visible HUD on / off
• Aim Assist (only for Story mode)
• DLSS settings, in Off, Auto, Quality, Balanced, Performance, Ultra Performance options

PRESENTATION

I left everything on Ultra settings and DLSS on. My vocabulary for graphical fidelity is admittedly limited, but I don’t think the game looks especially groundbreaking to point it out. It’s fine, it does its job, and some areas are still too dark even though I turned the brightness up to the maximum. The survival horror genre isn’t my typical rodeo not just because I’m a big coward, but also because the genre typical effects give me motion sickness. It’s very tragic, I know.

Besides, the stuff you see here are still subject to change in the final product, so still time for it to look sexier. I’m more concerned about the visibility of prompts to interact with things, as I find the small white, unfilled, circles or triangles very easy to miss. Realism doesn’t mean your game should be hard to parse.

GAMEPLAY

To describe the game in one word, I’d use “clunky”. By default, the scroll wheel can’t be used to swap to the items equipped in your four slots. I can live with hitting 1 – 4 like a plebian, but what’s more unforgivable is that I can’t shoot without aiming down the sights. I’m going to assume this is mimicking the 90s games it’s inspired by, and is presumably in the original, but I don’t see why that should be kept in this modern age.

See, the demo area is pretty damn linear with minor branches you can explore for some lore or item pick ups. There’s plenty of set dressing to keep you on track, and I can’t vault over those. I must stress that the linearity by itself is fine: I can accept some tedium and backtracking for puzzles, even as I gripe about the extra inventory step to use a stupid keycard on the door.

The shooting experience is wholly unforgivable in my eyes. Maybe I’ve gotten this all wrong, and I should be playing it to survival horror standards rather than FPS and just run (kind of slowly but fast enough to strafe, I guess). I like the Frost Grip you get, which works out of combat to extinguish fires or used in puzzles, or in combat to, well, freeze, enemies to make them easier to shoot or melee down (melee did not work correctly for me, in this case).

The thing is, trying to use my gun on the enemies is so horribly glacial (haha) that I miss the window to kill them as I instinctively back off and stop aiming down sights, then I die because I get piled on. Sure, you can free yourself, but the process still chips away at your HP. I gave up playing the demo at this point, the animations feeling slow and overall jank putting me off.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I will freely admit that there are several contributing factors that don’t endear me to Daymare: 1994 Sandbox‘s demo. I’ve never played Daymare: 1998, so I don’t have any prior investment in the series. Shooters are not my forte, and I might just need to Git Gud. The game’s genre itself isn’t something I normally like either, my weedy constitution discouraging me from playing them.

I’ll leave this game to the good hands of its fans. Don’t let my incessant complaints put you off.