Joy. A multiplayer horror game I don't care about and a city-builder I've already pumped nearly 50 hours into. I guess I better go with Dead by Daylight then - better play it to see whether I actually like it or not, eh?
It's an asymmetric multiplayer game where one monster tries to stop four humans from escaping the map. It sounds like a simple formula and I haven't played anything like it, to my knowledge. Unless we count The Playroom VRs monster vs players level, which is much more interesting than Dead by Daylight and I want to play it more than write about Dead by Daylight. Am I biased? I think so. Better fire up the game to find out.
After skimming the help pages and finding out that I'd be starting this game as a dirty nerd with absolutely nothing of note on his person, I hopped into a lobby full of strangers and waited for the match to begin.
Your task as a human survivor is to fire up a load of generators to open an exit door, and then flee through it. The more useless you are, the easier it is for the monster player to find you and kill you by hooking you up as an offering to some warped demon God thing - I don't really know. You are a bloody sacrifice, that's the important bit.
So, to not be a bloody sacrifice, you must plan your way around the map, using your greater numbers to distract the monster. If you can make anything out in the next few images, you'll see what happened to me instead...
"Ooh, a generator! What are the controls? Oh, crikey, I've caused an explosion, that's not good. Ah, there's the monster. It's stabbed me. It's carrying me off. I've been impaled. What can I do? Struggle? Struggling's good. Nope, I've been hoisted into the sky. That's my game over. Well, that was a good thirty seconds. No, I do not wish to spectate."
Time to see what it's like as the monster.
These guys obviously have extra powers to make things more manageable, including some spooky sixth senses to view the locations of generators, but also lots of cues to point out that noises and movement has occurred in one area of the map, and that you might want to head there to check it out and snare some survivors.
The monsters control via first-person view, as opposed to the survivors third person view, to further highlight the differences and probably balance the game too. I'm more at home in first player multiplayer games, so I get round to ambling my way through the map in whatever way interests me.
Within minutes, I've gotten nowhere, two exits are open and some player is trying to communicate with me through emotes and pointing and whatever other tricks he can do.
As far as I could tell, these guys could have just walked through the exit and won, so I gave up and sat in the corner waiting for them to do something - anything. When they didn't, I just walked around the map as though they weren't there, only for them to keep getting in my way and try to get me to do something. What? I could cut you down but you'd wriggle free. What do you want me to do?
Eventually, somehow, the survivors won. Thank Christ.
Dead by Daylight sucks. I can understand the appeal it has to fans of the genre, especially a group of friends who want to chase and be chased by each other, but that first impression - for free, to entice me into buying the game - sucked.
Just what was the point? What was anyone doing? Why were they doing it? To farm points to unlock skills or items or costumes or complete daily bonuses? Ugh, it's just depressing. I wasted my time with this one.
Well, no, I confirmed that it wasn't for me, so all I wasted was space on my hard drive and the time it took to find that out. At least I can get the space on my hard drive back.
Dead by Daylight isn't for me. It reminded me that Until Dawn was still on my PlayStation 4, unplayed, so I played a bit of that. It bored me too, but much less than this did. Both have been deleted and I am a happier man.
Look, not every game will be in a winner in our eyes. I'm just not a fan of horror, and multiplayer games are, themselves, hit and miss. Dead by Daylight was always going to be a tough sell, and it won't be sold to me either.
Cleaned it from my library though, so that's good.