Brighter Day

For a horror game to be good, it doesn't have to throw body parts at you, screams of terror are not really needed and neither does it have to use direct scare tactics. What it really needs is to be that kind of strange which makes everything unsettling, the kind of weird that gets weirder as you keep playing. That’s exactly what Brighter Day does.

Brighter Day looks nothing like the typical horror game, reason for which it will catch you off guard. You start the game in what looks like a child’s room, it’s colorful and you have a small doll on the bed. Making your way to the bathroom you notice that it’s the arrangement you see in a hotel and stepping outside into the hallway, it becomes a sure fact that you’re in some kind of medical institution.

Because you can’t really help it, you start to look into other rooms that you can access and as you do, things get creepy. The place you find yourself in turns from colorful and delightful into something where experiments on children are carried out. But there are not children.

Most of the creepy factor is given by the well crafted audio effects and soundtrack along with a bunch of visual cues in the form of posters and scattered items that make no sense.

Brighter Day will manage to scare you without trying too hard. It’s sense of horror is simple, effective and delivered like it should be. A lot of the time you will feel as if you’re in a really tense thriller with danger lurking at every corner.

There’s no gore, no screaming, there are no bloody machetes or people nailed to the walls. In fact, nothing from a visual point of view makes this a horror game but it is. It’s a stealth game with a lot of questions to answer. The main one obviously being ‘what the hell is this place?!’. Just try and find out.

On a closing note, Brighter Day is something you have to play. It’s a different kind of horror game, well, mostly a suspense game but even so there’s a lot to it that makes it more than interesting. It’s just too weird to not give it a go.