Dead by Daylight
DEAD BY DAYLIGHT offers up the most interesting cat-and-mouse multiplayer on the market.
The Dead by Daylight premise is simple: Four players take the roles of survivors in a Saw-like bloodsport, fixing generators to power an exit gate before hightailing it to safety. The fifth player is a killer who has to prevent the survivors from escaping, impaling them on meathooks and leaving them for an eldritch force. In 2016, it was received as a way to indulge in a brief blood orgy before migrating to more refined multiplayer games.
What I don’t think anyone saw coming was for Dead by Daylight to mature into one of the best multiplayer experiences you can play, with razor-sharp mechanical intrigue, an ultra-complex web of versatile builds and strategies, and a diverse suite of characters. What was a comedy-horror romp mutated into something much closer to League of Legends in terms of depth. It may be bewildering to consider that hardcore players can spend months scrutinizing the relative power-level and optimization path for Ghostface from Scream, but that’s where Dead by Daylight finds itself at the start of 2021: An esports-worthy venture hosted by Freddy Krueger, Bubba Sawyer, and Michael Myers.
Dead by Daylight launched with three distinct killers and a quartet of survivors. Their unique abilities dripped with character, but the inflexibility of the roster ensured that the gauntlet played out in predictable ways. But as of this writing, Dead by Daylight includes 22 killers and 24 survivors, each of whom offer radically different toolkits.
HOPPING MAD
Load up a match against The Huntress, a killer in a bloodstained bunny mask, and expect to dodge the twirling hatchets that she can chuck across wide swathes of the battlefield. Or perhaps you will face off against the famous Pyramid Head—yes, that one, from Silent Hill— who can banish his prey to Cages of Atonement, which are particularly annoying to escape from. There are also complex perks and inventory add-ons, and at a high level of play, Dead by Daylight is full of the same jostling, hedging, and pre-match sizing-up of an uber-competitive MOBA or FPS.
There’s a great deal of skill and strategy to it. During a match, the killer plays in first-person with a limited field of vision. Clever survivors, who are all equipped with third-person cameras, know that the best way to evade them is to find what the community calls a ‘loop’—a structure or clutter on the map that allows the players to hop through windows and dart back around through open doors over and over again without ever running into a dead end. The killer chases them through that loop in vain, realizing that for all their might, they will always be just out of reach. Eventually, though, killers learn to feint and double back, attempting to catch a survivor mid-loop.
It’s funny: Dead by Daylight is a horror game, but at that level of play, it becomes a test of skills and tactics rather than anything scary. What you get depends on who you play with, and that’s part of the beauty of Dead by Daylight. For as much praise as I’ve heaped on the competitive scene’s exhilarating cat-and-mouse dynamism, it’s equally enjoyable among a bunch of idiot friends— people who might be playing for the first time—who only want to run away from Leatherface on a Saturday night. In that case, competitive intrigue becomes a distant afterthought, and the only thing that matters is the hushed tones between you and your brother as you slip by a murderer undetected.
I can’t think of many other games that possess both sides of that dichotomy. League of Legends and Overwatch are far too steeped in stately precision to ever be charitable to bad play, and it’s impossible to bring a newcomer into DotA 2 without forcing them to watch an hour-long tutorial video. Dead by Daylight brilliantly has it both ways, never abandoning its gory slasherflick joys while still laying claim to a rich competitive environment. It’s both Halloween pastiche and Hereditary psychodrama.
Perhaps you will face off against the famous Pyramid Head