With twenty different Killers to choose from (so far), there’s no shortage of entertaining and diverse playstyles. The Hillbilly charges around the map with his chainsaw, the revving of the limb-lopping tool acting as a terrifying warning of what’s to come. The Trapper discreetly leaves bear traps on the ground, catching any Survivors who aren’t watching where they’re going in a crippling vice of metal teeth. Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head leaves a trail of horrible barbed wire anywhere he drags his giant blade, and he can send anyone who steps in it to his own special sacrifice areas.

Killers find themselves holding most of the cards when it comes to playing, and that’s the way the game likes it. Being a huge threat is a real treat, and it’s how Dead by Daylight creates the tense atmosphere it needs to succeed–Survivors know they’re outgunned (literally, if the Deathslinger is in the trial) but they do their best to live anyway.

To survive in Dead by Daylight, the four players without murderous intentions need to escape the trial. The exit gates are locked and unpowered, and to open them you and your team need to repair five generators littered around the randomly-generated map. The only thing complicating this is the Killer, who really doesn’t want you to leave.

Repairing generators is easier said than done, of course. There’s a risk associated with it, and there’s a tension created by needing to pass skill checks–timing-based events where a dial spins around a circle and you need to hit a button when it reaches the right spot (think Active Reloads from Gears of War, except the target area moves every time). If you fail it, a loud bang will directly alert the killer to your location. Successfully turning the generator on will also alert the Killer, as will dropping a pallet (which slows the Killer down as they lumber towards you), climbing through a window too fast, and helping other Survivors who have been indisposed–there are a lot of ways in which the Killer will know where you are.

On the upside, you’ll have an idea of where the Killer is too. Survivors play in third person, as opposed to the first-person perspective of the Killer, affording them a great deal of extra visual information. And when the Killer nears, their Terror Radius kicks in and a thumping heartbeat warns Survivors of their impending arrival, to great effect. It combines with the game’s dynamic metal soundtrack to quicken the pace of your own heart, your awareness of your imminent doom growing alongside the volume of the heartbeat.

If the Killer catches you, they’ll likely dump you on a sacrificial hook and leave you to dangle while you bleed out. Your teammates will be forced to agonize over risking the wrath of the Killer to save you or to leave you there to die while they work on the generators. And as you hang, helpless, you’ll have a bird’s eye view of exactly how bad things are going.

It is extremely unlikely that you’ll escape as a Survivor, and that’s part of what makes Dead by Daylight so exciting. The way it fills you with dread while still making you unable to look away is the sort of dynamic only the masters of horror ever really nail. Too often the genre leans into other tricks to get by–excessive gore, jump scares, titillation–but the classics all focus on that perfect moment where the viewer clasps their hands over their eyes to find some brief respite–only to split their fingers apart so they can see what happens next.

The thumping heartbeat, the staccato soundtrack, and the knowledge that the odds are terrible engulf you in an impending sense of doom, but the tantalising idea that you might be able to get away compels you to keep playing just one more game.

From 2016 To 2020

When I first reviewed Dead by Daylight in 2016, the one-versus-four multiplayer game was lacking in a lot of ways, but it’s come unbelievably far since. Behaviour Interactive took its fair game and worked hard to turn it into something that is now played by millions. Games that were player-hosted and often laggy messes–especially when you were matched against Killers half the world away–now run beautifully on dedicated servers. The player population is up thanks to cross-play. And where you once had to randomly queue to try and join a game alongside your friends, Dead by Daylight now allows party matchmaking by default.

That said, Surviving With Friends (as partying up is known) is highly controversial and highlights the inherent wrinkles in a game like Dead by Daylight. This is supposed to be a lopsided affair, a tense showdown between a solitary Killer and four crafty Survivors where both sides know one thing to be true–the Killer is almost certainly going to get their prey. It’s the thrill of gambling at a casino, except instead of a dealer hitting you with a King on double sixes, it’s a lady with a decapitated pig as a facemask hitting you with the reverse bear trap from Saw. Either way, the house is always supposed to win.

Outside of a couple of largely meaningless gestures, Survivors can’t communicate with one another in-game, and that’s what partying up changes. Once Survivors are able to communicate (through external voice chat programs like Discord), the ability for the Killer to divide and conquer becomes significantly more complicated, and it can negate a huge portion of the atmosphere the game is built upon.

However, Dead by Daylight has managed to survive as long as it has over the years because it cleverly leans into being lopsided. The more time you spend with the dozens of different Killers, Survivors, and maps, the more you get the feeling that it’s not supposed to be balanced at all. Instead, by featuring 20 Killers, all with a wide variety of playstyles and management techniques, the sentiment of the game in 2020 is to just have fun with it. Enjoyment is more important than victory.