V Rising's Sunlight Mechanic Is Extremely Cool, Until It Isn't

thegamer.com:

One of V Rising’s greatest strengths is how well it ties its gothic horror theme to its survival/crafting game. It feels like the fantasy of being a vampire was just as important to the developers as the resource-gathering and base-building fantasy. Those ideals don’t seem like they would fit well together, but they do. Stunlock Studios is bringing a lot of innovative ideas to the survival/crafting genre, and there’s no better example of that than sunlight mechanic - a common vampire trope that fits perfectly in a survival game. Sunlight has a huge impact on how you play the game. It determines when and where you can go, it affects the difficulty of combat encounters, and overcoming it speaks to both your mastery of the game and your character’s progression. It’s a clever mechanic that I appreciate a lot, conceptually. In practice, however, I’ve quickly grown to resent the sunlight and the hindrances it creates. It’s a good mechanic, but after a while it stops being a fun one.

Sunlight is pretty much the first thing you learn about when you begin V Rising. As soon as you step out into the sun you’ll see a bright red light coming down from the sky and pointing directly at your head. After a few seconds you’ll start to burn, and you only have a few more seconds to find cover or you’ll die. The forest is dense with trees, rock formations, and structures that provide shelter from the sun, but traveling during the day is never easy. The day/night cycle is always an important feature of survival games, and this is such a smart way to incorporate day and night into a vampire setting. It makes you feel free and powerful in the dark, like the whole world is your hunting ground, but during the day you become weak and vulnerable.

R