What's Going On In the World of Daylight?
Let's start off with a little background on the game's story.
1983 - Present Day
Daylight's main character, Sarah Gwynn wakes up in the lobby of Mid Island Bay Hospital, but we don't know a lot about the history of Mid Island. Prior to present day, the last major interaction with Mid Island was nearly 30 years ago. In the early 80s, Mid Island Bay Hospital was a major interest to the G&C Investments Corp, who had designs on renovating the old hospital and turning it into a high-end hospice catering to the wealthy.
After spending a lot of money with the officials from the township of New Kipling, which claims Mid Island as its own, G&C was in the final stages of completing its due diligence to take control of the island and its property. They sent a team of contractors and experts to do on-site research, but after a short time G&C abruptly cancels the deal and leaves New Kipling altogether. Curious, the township sends in a team to follow up on G&Cs research, discovering, amongst other things, an abandoned excavation site with 12 grave-sized holes dug in the ground.
1948-1983
Mid Island Bay Hospital rots away in obscurity, left as a decrepit relic on the forgotten island. The doctors, nurses, patients, orderlies, and rest of the staff appear to have just left everything and disappeared one afternoon in the late 1940s. Furniture, files, and records were left with no hesitation, leaving a full shell of a hospital to age.
1939-1948
In the late 30s, a tourist steamboat caught fire and capsized off the coast of New Kipling, drowning more than 1000 passengers. The bodies of the victims washed up on the shores of Mid Island, and the hospital was quickly converted into a makeshift morgue to handle all the corpses. The remaining survivors of the shipwreck were treated at MIBH, but with limited resources and growing costs, the MIBH was unable to recover from the specter of a tragedy of that magnitude. The hospital closed its doors abruptly one day in 1948.
Subterranean Basement: Universally Regarded as Safe
Pretty creepy, right? The team at Zombie has been hard at work fine-tuning the environments. You'll notice above that we find out about one of the first locations that ISN'T the hospital, the sewers. Daylight gets subterranean when Sarah makes an escape from one of the hospital wards. Check out the concept art and how it translated to in-game screens below.
In-game Realization
You'll notice in these current screenshots that the mobile phone that accompanies Sarah now acts as a map. Zombie wants to keep players exploring and on the right track, so the current (and not guaranteed to be final) version uses this mapping feature to aid explorability. But the map will only complete for rooms that you explore, and doesn't have too much detail on it, so it won't become a crutch for players. Not to mention, it'll still be subject to any sort of outside interference ...
