Note: this is a review of the console version of the game. The PC version contains different content
Watching a good slasher movie is a highly interactive experience. You cover your eyes, you jump, you lurch forward on the sofa, but mostly you yell incredulous statements at the characters such as: “No, don’t go in there!”; “Make sure he’s actually dead”, and the classic “Don’t sneak off to have sex!”. As soon as you’ve seen a few Halloween rip-offs or Scream, which made a virtue of those tropes, you know all the beats of the slasher experience – and we always think we could make a better job of surviving.
Last year, little known Canadian studio Behaviour Interactive gave PC owners the chance to test this theory with the release of Dead By Daylight, an online multiplayer slash-’em-up. Now the game has been launched on PS4 and Xbox One, and with the similar Friday 13th also available, it is a big moment for the emerging genre of asymmetric multiplayer horror.
Here then, four players take on the roles of desperate survivors who find themselves trapped in a hellish enclosure with one other player, the maniacal killer tracking them down. The backstory tells us that some monstrous being known as The Entity draws humans into this slasher dimension in order to feast on their fear energy – so it is basically Cabin in the Woods meets HP Lovecraft. Which is fine.
The only way the survivors can escape is to repair five generators littered around the procedurally generated maps. If they manage it, two exit doors open, which also have to be repaired – then they get to run away. Meanwhile, the killer hunts them all down using an array of sensual abilities – if a player runs, or disturbs a crow, or clatters into something, the noise appears as an image on the killer’s screen. There are several different murderers to select at the beginning of a bout, and they all have secondary powers: Trapper can, yes, lay bear traps to injure people; The Hag can plant phantasmic beings at key sites which scare survivors and also allow the player to teleport in immediately.
If the killer injures a survivor, they have to be picked up and hung on one of the many meat hooks hanging around the grim, dark locations. When the victim’s lifeforce is drained to nothing, the Entity swoops down and impales the human sacrifice with its horrible talons. While the player is hanging there, though, others can creep up and rescue them, and survivors are also capable of healing each other – which is important because, like capturing bases in a multiplayer shooter, generators can be fixed faster with several people working on them at once.
And this is the whole dynamic of the game – a deadly cat-and-mouse chase around graveyards and auto wreckage plants. While survivors have no means to attack the killers, they can evade them by jumping through windows or over low barriers (killers cannot do this); they can also pull down scenic objects like wooden boards, which will stun the psychopaths if timed correctly; there are torches hidden around the map that you can flash in their eyes, momentarily blinding them. If all that fails, there are metal lockers strangely abandoned around each site that you can step into and lurk in.
Although the visuals are decidedly dated, glitchy and overwhelmingly brown, when this game works it is incredibly tense and compelling. Weighing up whether to risk your life saving another character or using their peril as cover is a nice little gameplay dilemma that crops up again and again; while playing as the killer gives you a thrilling sense of grim, misanthropic power. Get a few good, committed players in a bout and it is riveting amusing stuff. For a while.
Unfortunately, there is so much in the game that isn’t quite there. There is no tutorial or even a prerendered sequence to actually tell you the concept when you start up – you’re expected to read through several instruction documents, which is a crappy way to discover the experience. More importantly, the balance feels skewed in favour of the murderer. Discoverable items like health packs and torches are cruelly scarce, and without a decent communication system, collaboration between victims is random and haphazard. When you do find a decent bunch of players, there’s no option to stick with them into another round. Everyone is just ejected from the server, which is a shame because building a few moments of tense rapport with someone is a real rush, almost taking us back to the glory days of Left 4 Dead.
Between levels you can spend XP on bonus perks and useful kit, but if you die in your next bout you lose all the equipment in your inventory, which seems ridiculously harsh. And the fact that you have no way to attack the killer (beyond stunning him with a torch light or a falling scenic object) takes away those moments of empowerment that the best horror movies always provide. This doesn’t mean we need a sub-machine gun, but the odd one-use baseball bat or wooden plank – just so you can get a single strike at the killer – would have been a fair addition.
Add in a slow and poorly explained power-up system, lengthy waits between sessions and some awkward bugs and crashes (including a propensity to switch you into invert mode at the worst moments) and you have very much the gaming equivalent of a mid-tier early 1980s straight-to-video horror flick. It has moments of rollicking, gruesome fun, and those moments keep you coming back for more punishment (it is unsurprising that Dead by Daylight has been a hit with YouTubers: like the movie genre that inspired it, it is very watchable and very involving), but the good moments are hidden behind technical failings and annoying discrepancies.
And so, like Friday the 13th (and to some extent the similarly asymmetrical Evolve) there is a great concept here, but the balance and finesse are lacking – especially when you’re not playing with friends. Hopefully there will be patches and updates, bringing the console version more in line with its PC originator, which has been improved greatly since launch. Dead by Daylight needs and deserves a more nuanced, crafted and considered structure. It needs to be more Wes Craven and less Rob Zombie.
505 Games; PC/Xbox One/PS4 (version tested); £20; Pegi rating: 18+
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