PAX East 2016: Kill or be Killed in Dead by Daylight

During my turn as a survivor, producer Matheiu Côté encouraged me to stick close to teammates, but not just for cooperation. He gleefully explained that often the best strategy for escaping the killer is to use your fellow survivors as a distraction. There’s cooperation only to a point, he said, because ultimately you only win if you get out alive. That dynamic extends to whether or not you want to save your teammates from death. You see, when the killer attacks you, he can’t actually kill you just yet. First, he has to hang you on a meat hook, which will slowly drain your life. You can tap a button to struggle and free yourself, but that will accelerate your rate of death significantly, which probably isn’t the best move unless the killer left to go hunt your friends. Sometimes the better move is instead to hang out on the hook for a little while and let a teammate come rescue you. Of course, there’s still real incentive to watch out for each other, like the ability to heal each other or work on fixing a generator together to speed things up. A one-on-one fight between you and the killer probably isn’t going to work out in your favor.

Once you’ve fixed all the generators, you can escape via one of two doors, each of which takes a bit of time to open — during which, of course, the killer will be making one final mad dash to kill you. At some point if you play Dead by Daylight, you’re going to be faced with an open escape door and a fellow survivor in need of help behind you, and which you choose is going to reveal a lot to me about your character.

Your goal is to fix five generators in the level that will power the door leading to safety and get out. The levels are procedurally generated each time, though, so you’re never going to be able to memorize the layout and map the most efficient routes; you’re going to need to balance exploration with stealth in order to find the generators without getting spotted and winding up on one of the killer’s meat hooks. Every time you run, you leave a trail through the woods the killer will see and follow straight to you, so when you’re looking around, tread lightly. Fixing a generator doesn’t require much more than time and a bit of timing as a prompt similar to the Gears of War active reload pops up occasionally to make sure you’re still paying attention. Missing that prompt is a surefire way to get the killer on your tail as it causes the generator to make a loud noise with a visual icon on the killer’s display.

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