Many many MANY years ago a good old friend of mine mentioned a game called Dead by Daylight, a multiplayer horror game that we all could try and play. I did not know a thing about it and it could have been about literally anything with horror elements.
We all played, got scared from being chased by the first killer we experienced "The Nurse" and we kept playing and playing and playing, coming back every once in awhile to see what the game has added or what has changed.
Since 2016 this game has gone through many changes in gameplay balance, added a diverse array of killers some iconic and original with many perks and maps that allow for these abilities to shine and perks to be used to great advantage. Despite Dead by Daylight's downright basic gameplay loop the game still has managed to stay relevant and interesting where many other would be Dead by Daylight killers or copy cats go and fade off into the unknown or failing to capture the same success that Dead by Daylight has gained for the five years it has been around.
To be honest with any and all of you reading this I have been sitting on this review for a long time now. In 2019 I had a draft I wrote describing the many elements of the game, in 2020 I also did the same thing and I told myself "Okay, now is a good time to do this review" and then again and again I did the same thing but now I am actually going to sit down and write about what I think of the game and why I think the game has stayed around for as long as it has where many other games that tried to be like Dead by Daylight or tried to do their own game with horror like elements failed where Dead by Daylight succeeded.
Everyone is Here
Dead by Daylight's premise is that you can play as four survivors thrown into a randomly generated map with there being one killer chasing you and other survivors to stop them from escaping the map or you yourself play as this one killer stopping all the survivors. As the image suggests, this killer can be an iconic horror villain like Freddy Kruger or others like Michael Myers, Leather Face, Ghost Face, Pyramid Head, the Demogorgon from Stranger Things, The Pig from SAW and soon to be The Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 as well as a great list of unique original killers only seen in Dead by Daylight.
The title of this review is not a gag as the game director himself said a little video in the Resident Evil Village Live Note where he stated(and I paraphrase) "Dead by Daylight has become the Hall of Fame of Horror" and it easily seen with there being so many horror icons from films, tv series and games like Pyramid Head and The Nemesis.
This does not mean there's only iconic horror villains and monsters there's also iconic horror leads like Laurie Strode, Cheryl Mason, Detective Tapp, soon to be added Leon S. Kennedy and Jill Valentine and perhaps the most iconic horror hero like Ash Williams from Evil Dead.
And yes he is voiced by the man, the myth, the legend himself: Bruce Campbell.
There a few others like Steve Harrington and Nancy Wheeler from Strangers Things and with all those names I mentioned that's just who's in the game right now. There is another year for Dead by Daylight to add more horror heroes and villains yet.
For any horror aficionados like myself just the mere roster of characters in the game from iconic horror films of the past there is something to like to see such a well crafted roster.
(and yeah unfortunately Jason couldn't be in DBD cause he had his own game....and legal reasons)
A Simple Premise with Constant Variables
Dead by Daylight when you boil it down to the basics is this: Play as survivor, fix five gens, Play as killer, kill four survivors.
It really is that simple when you get down to it but when you start to play you realize there is actually a lot of little nuances that comes from both survivor perks and killer perks with their abilities they can use against the survivors. It can range from survivors being able to heal themselves faster after being injured by the killer's basic attack or ability or it can be searching chests located throughout the map faster or being able to use items much longer and having greater effectiveness in the match. The killer can combine their abilities with perks to make themselves faster in chases, give them more information on the map as to the survivors' whereabouts or slow down a survivor's ability to heal or repair the generators.
That's a simple run down of the abilities but when you get down to the nitty gritty of it there is an almost infinite combination of survivor perks and killer perks that can give both sides of the game advantages that the other side has to consider when approaching the matches they're playing and I think that's where Dead by Daylight deserves a lot of credit.
With the astounding variety of perks from both survivors and killers as well as a killer's unique ability they can use against survivors no one match of Dead by Dayllight feels the same. You can go on the same map and can see the same survivors and killers from before but the match itself could play out a lot differently than your previous match or the match from five games ago. The combination of perks and abilities found in the game as well as different ways to approach completing both objectives feel dynamic and unique from match to match as one killer strategy could work in one game but then fail in other forcing the killer to stay on their toes to solve how the survivors are approaching avoiding a killer's line of sight whilst completing their objectives. The same can be said of survivors where one strategy could confuse one killer but not fool the next.
Both killer and survivor have to constantly think on their feet as they cannot play the game one way and expect to win but instead adhere and adapt to the new rules being set in every match of Dead by Daylight.
Where all others failed, you succeeded
There have been many other multiplayer horror themed games that have come out over these last few years that have tried to do what Dead by Daylight has done but have failed.
The most famous of these is Last Year the Nightmare, a multiplayer horror game that takes place in a 90s themed high-school with high school based characters like the jock character, the nerd, the cool guy, the popular girl and the geeky girl and they face killers like the psycho killer that broke out from the asylum or the strong man that escaped police custody or the janitor that cracked and wants to take revenge on the students.
The last killer they added was a giant spider that ate the students and they teased a new killer in the form of a demonic priest but that killer was never released and hence the game has been dead for a good year or two now. When it was first released it was not on steam, then moved to steam. The dev team behind it would go through long periods of not working on the game and stop adding things like balance tweaks or new cosmetics, fixing bugs or changing game-play elements and this combined with being release on the Discord store that would end up shutting down a year later meant that Last Year was not long for this world and the game has since then faded into obscurity with there being only a double digit amount of players being online(and probably a lot less as of writing this). The game simply didn't have a lot of variety with there being less than four maps and it feeling like the versus mode from Left 4 Dead with a bigger emphasis on 90s horror.
Then there was a battle royal horror game Hide or Die that set a large group of players in an open world finding equipment or the item that turned you into one of three killers and you had to try and kill all the other survivors and be the last man standing. It also did not go anywhere and died off shortly after coming out of early access.
And then there's Soul at Stake that can be best described as Chinese Dead by Daylight and although early access was released in 2018 it seems to have not been released from Early Access and gotten a full release and it doesn't seem to be popular or taking anyone from Dead by Daylight.
If there are other games that look or sound like Dead by Daylight the chances are they may either lose energy along the way and for various reasons they don't seem to last long in the public eye.
The Realm of the Entity is here to stay
As mentioned earlier, despite the game's simple premise, Dead By Daylight's greatest aspect that keeps the game staying alive is the great variety of perks from both survivors and perks allowing there to be various game play strategies being created and shared among friends and the community that Dead by Daylight throughout it's five year life cycle has kept it fresh. While this may be the same game in name from when I first played it back in 2017 this is not the same game I first played all those years ago.
A lot has changed in Dead by Daylight and as time goes on there only seems to be more and more coming to the game as time goes on, not just from new killers, survivors, perks and cosmetics but game-play elements that Dead by Daylight can still explore as time goes on.
I can say here and now that when you enter the Realm of the Entity now, this will not be the same game in a year from now.
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