Daylight is an Unreal 4 engine randomly generated horror game from the Blacklight dev

Blacklight developer Zombie Studios has revealed its upcoming project, Daylight, a randomly generated first-person horror game powered by Unreal Engine 4. This makes it the first third-party Unreal Engine 4 game to be announced.

The game will take place in an asylum and each playthrough is expected to last a mere 25-30 minutes, according to a report by IGN who attended the game's unveiling at DICE.

This may sound short, but the randomly generated aspect and cryptic story encourages multiple replays. "Each time you might be getting different story elements" said writer Jessica Chobot (of IGN and Mass Effect 3 fame). "And over the course of that time, depending on how long you decide to play and what you find, it opens up the concept of the world a little more, the backstory, what your involvement is in it, how you find yourself here and whatnot. So instead of finding the same item over and over again and saying 'I'm not going to bother reading this piece of paper because I've seen it a thousand times,' it's different every time."

Interestingly, the game won't have weapons, and your primary tool will be your phone. This will be used as a flashlight, a UV light to retrace your steps if you get lost, a camera for picking up clues, a warning system that glitches when enemy phantoms are near (ala Silent Hill's walkie talkie), and sometimes it will get possessed and play freaky messages.

As the name implies, light will play a big role in the game with flares and glowsticks being used to repel enemies. "The flares will scare off all Phantoms, but it's also very violent and it's very bright and it drags shadows around. Because everything's fully dynamic lighting... it's very scary just to use," explained Zombie creative director Jared Gerritzen. "The other emergency kit thing is a glowstick, and that'll have a much bigger light. It's also kind of like the phone where you can see your footprints, but also you'll see messages written on the walls and you'll see other story elements."

Gerritzen explained that he'd like to make Daylight an episodic series "Chapter two and more chapters will come out, and each chapter will not be a reboot or anything. It'll just be more systems that get added to the bucket and more story elements."

Daylight is due later this year on Steam where it's expected to cost under $20.