Hands on with Daymare 1998

Daymare 1998, if you didn’t already know, is a third-person survival horror game that recreates the mood of iconic titles from the ’90s with a fresh storyline. If you aren’t familiar with ‘90’s survival horror games, this one aims to emulate and join the ranks of elite experiences such as Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, Dino Crisis, and Clock Tower.

The game’s conception began in the Roman countryside back in July 2016, when a set of 10 professional figures comprising programmers; 2D and 3D artists; sound artists; animators and social/community managers formed Invader Studios. All founding members of the core team have an enormous passion for video games, and more importantly for their upcoming projects, an undying love for games within the survival horror genre.

Before Invader Studios was born, the team shot to fame as Invader Games, whose big break arrived in the form of a Resident Evil 2 fan-made game called “Resident Evil 2:Reborn”. This was eventually shut down when Capcom officially announced Resident Evil 2:REmake. However, before the user-generated  project was officially abandoned, the world’s video game media caught wind of the game and began to report on it. International media outlets like Vice, Wired UK, Kotaku, IGN.com, Automaton and Gamespot all brought Invader Games’ exceptional work to the eyes of players worldwide in the form of an ambitious tech demo which was praised for its vision. Capcom was keen to put a stop to the project, but invited the team to an exclusive meeting in Osaka, Japan where they were able to talk about all future projects, including seeing Resident Evil 7 and the up and coming Resident Evil 2:REmake. After having a life-changing meeting with their heroes Jun Takeuchi and Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, Daymare 1998’s IP was born and the company became Invader Studios.

Two years after featuring on Steam’s Greenlight programme, Daymare 1998 is now less than one month away from its official release on Steam. On August 17th 2019, Invader Studios surprised us all by releasing a fully playable demo to Steam which sees the player control Liev, the H.A.D.E.S (Hexacore Advanced Division for Extraction and Search) special agent. After playing through the demo live on our Twitch channel, we were ultimately blown away by how graphically polished the game was, not to mention how much of a “SIM” the mechanics of the game were. Players familiar with any of the Resident Evil games of the last three years will be able to pick this game up and play it without any problems as it’s very reminiscent of how they play. You have your HUD at the bottom of the screen (this can be turned off if you want it to be a clean feed) and your inventory can be accessed by pressing TAB on the keyboard (if played using a keyboard and mouse setup). We will not spoil the story for the demo as this can be played by anyone with access to Steam, we’d love to hear how you got on though!

This brings us to our Gamescom experience.

The Invader Studios team was exhibiting at Gamescom and at the time of writing this was nominated for this year’s Game of the Show award, which we were over the moon about. We headed over to the booth located at the business centre part of the exhibition. It’s a shame that it wasn’t a focal point of the show as we’re sure this would have been adored by the general public, but due to all they had to display and the equipment the team needed to have with them, this may not have been possible without further heavy investment. This didn’t take away from the experience both Bibby and Graham had though. Once at the stand, they were invited into a room which contained an exclusive Gamescom build, which could only be played at the event. As stated earlier, playing through the demo live on stream was a special moment which as a die-hard survival horror guy, Bibby was all too excited for! We sat down with co-founder Michele Giannone and he spoke in detail about how the game was created and how he had loved experiencing people coming in to play his game, especially genuine fans of the product that share his same passion of this particular genre of games. His voice was a little shot by the third day of the event, a testament to how much he loved to talk to people about this game and their interests in it.

The player begins the demo as a character called Samuel, a ranger of the Redcrest Mountains. Arriving back at his home from a late shift, he is greeted by an unknown figure who has decapitated his wife and holds her in the air by her throat. Samuel attempts to attack the man but is thrown through a window and rendered unconscious. The unknown man then hears some radio communications come through his walkie-talkie and heads off in his car to the destination  that he heard over the airwaves. Once awake, the character begins to see things differently – a red filter covers the screen and you can see things which have previously happened in certain situations. We got the chance to use a newer weapon, not seen in the demo (unless we missed it) a shotgun (which is so cool when you blow off the zombies head in one shot) and also try to complete a new puzzle at which we got the best time of the day, completing it in just 15 seconds!

We’d love to give you more information about the build, but we hate spoilers, and out of respect for the work that the devs have created for us we won’t include them, unless it’s featured in the main game.

We’d like to thank Invader Studios for taking the time out to sit and chat with us about its journey and we genuinely cannot wait to stream this game once it arrives via Steam on the 17th September.