My journey into the crazy rabbit hole that is the realm of horror games is fairly well documented at this point. You don’t need me to reiterate the fact that taking a chance on a Resident Evil game dramatically impacted my taste in games over the past year. That being said, there is a horror game from my early expeditions into the genre I haven’t touched on until now. Dead By Daylight is an asymmetric, multiplayer, live service horror game that’s been kicking around for nearly a decade. I picked up DBD during a sale on steam and I definitely got my money’s worth from it, but a number of factors made trying to review the game a monumental task and ultimately I didn’t enjoy the game enough to keep playing it in the long run.
Of everything that dissuaded me from reviewing the game however, the biggest problem for me was the game’s story oddly enough. DBD doesn’t have a story mode to speak of, but it does have 10 years worth of backstory tucked away within character biographies, event journals, and little details found throughout the game’s environments. The first issue this presents to any potential review of the game is that I try to analyze the story as comprehensively as possible to catch as much inappropriate or blasphemous content for the sake of CGR’s signature “Morality & Parental Warnings” feature. Needless to say, combing through a decade’s worth of lengthy lore dumps would have been a herculean effort for a single review. The second and more serious issue however, is the fact that playing the game with even a basic knowledge of the premise creates a huge problem for the game’s emergent narrative.
Emergent narrative is not predetermined by the hand of a writer, it unfolds naturally through gameplay. For example, in a fighting game like Street Fighter each match is its own little story where two characters fight to claim victory, but who wins and how they win is determined by the gameplay regardless of anything in the game’s backstory. Chun-Li versus M. Bison, a destined clash of hero and villain, is just as much a story as Akuma versus Dan, characters with no real connection in the game’s backstory, and the victors will not necessarily reflect what the backstory implies. I’m sure there are many power scalers out there who are livid at the idea of an incredibly powerful character like Akuma being bested by a pathetic buffoon like Dan, but if over the course of the match Akuma gets cocky and fails to respond to Dan’s low attacks correctly the emergent narrative clearly reveals a David and Goliath story where the underdog triumphs against all odds.
Big thanks to KAMaximilianK for letting me borrow some of his screenshots!
In Dead By Daylight each match features four defenseless survivors trying to escape from a bloodthirsty killer by restoring power to the exit gates and the emergent narrative is a bit more varied here than in a fighting game. Some matches will end with the killer executing all four survivors in a very bleak and harrowing turn of events. Some matches might see all four survivors escape the trial, revealing the killer as an ineffectual threat. But in my experience most matches end somewhere in the middle where the killer claims a victim or two before the luckier survivors manage to escape in a scenario where the killer is shown to be formidable, but not insurmountable. At first this sounds like a fairly reasonable arrangement for a horror game, but once you know the actual lore contextualizing each match you realize the emergent narrative is far less interesting than it might seem at first.
DBD’s matches are actually a ritualistic trial created by an eldritch horror known as The Entity which feeds off of strong emotions brought about by the suffering of survivors and the bloodlust of killers. Once trapped in The Entity’s realm there is no real escape. Survivors who escape the trial will eventually find themselves participating in another one no matter how many times they triumph and Survivors killed in a trial will eventually be resurrected so they too can face more trials. Even the killers are trapped in this endless cycle with no option to leave The Entity’s service and many of them never entered willingly in the first place. To the game’s credit this is the perfect setup to make every match fit into the game’s continuity no matter the outcome, but it renders all of the emergent narratives I just described completely irrelevant.
Every match is an exercise in futility. There’s no reward for winning and no consequences for losing, just an endless cycle of misery. My issue here isn’t that there isn’t a possibility for a happy ending, but the fact that even the bad endings are completely pointless. Part of what makes video games a potentially addictive experience is the fact that they are good at tricking you into thinking you accomplished something or at the very least made progress towards a goal. DBD’s lore denies the opportunity to feel either and ultimately drains your desire to keep playing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to play games in moderation, but that moderation should come from a place of wanting to be virtuous with your time.
The meat hooks make more sense when you realize the survivors are little more than a light snack to the eldritch abomination that runs this joint.
That being said, the fact that DBD has lasted a decade clearly indicates most people don’t typically read this deeply into the lore and continue to enjoy the game for its engaging gameplay mechanics. It also helps that the game has taken a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate-like approach to content where they license content from every horror and horror adjacent franchise they can get their hands on, meaning if you have a favorite horror movie or game it’s probably represented somewhere in DBD. As for myself, I don’t have much desire to return to The Entity’s realm, but at least it gave me the chance to muse on the artistic merits of emergent narrative. That or maybe the nihilistic trappings of cosmic horror just aren’t for me.
