Evil Dead: The Game
A surprisingly groovy good time.
Compared to its closest relatives, Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th: The Game, Evil Dead’s greatest virtue is that it manages to feel both meaty and uncomplicated; it arms survivors with an arsenal of weapons and skills to fight off deadites and gives the bad guys a lot more to do than just bash heads, and yet somehow it’s easier to pick up and play than both Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th.
Even though there’s a short tutorial priming you for success as a survivor and demon, real matches have an in-canon narrator walking you through each step. And yet, if you’re ever unsure about what you’re supposed to be doing, you’ll also find your current objective clearly laid out at the top right of the screen. Stuff like this makes all the difference for folks like me who feel like a nuisance trying to learn a new game while playing with people who already know what they’re doing.
Evil Dead: The Game also remedies an issue I have with these kinds of games where survivors are too often helpless against the bad guys. Just as Tommy Jarvis is no match for Jason Voorhees’ machete and victims can only pray Sadako isn’t crawling out of a well from behind the TV’s static, your only real option is to run from your pursuer in Friday the 13th and Dead by Daylight. But Ash Williams, brilliantly voiced by original actor Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead: The Game, doesn’t have a freakin’ chainsaw arm for nothing. You can, and should, give deadites absolute hell when you see them. You’ll find axes, hammers, pistols, shotguns, and rifles lying all around the map, and here they don’t just stun the enemy, they straight up kill them.
There’s nothing terribly groundbreaking here, but instead a culmination of the genre’s best ideas that finally gives survivors some agency and opens a big, inviting door for timid horror fans to walk through.
★★★★☆
It’s not perfect, but Evil Dead: The Game is the most approachable asymmetrical horror out there and breathes new life into a genre with badass survivors, wonderfully ruthless demons, and a palpable love for an 80s horror icon.