If life were a Scream movie, I would likely have already been trapped under a garage door by now. It would have been punishment for spending $62 on a skort one time and watching Friday the 13th after eating a weed-infused chocolate chip cookie. It really enhanced the ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma of hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees’ main theme, but skorts, movies, and being a woman under the influence à la Cassavetes is a good recipe for getting slashed in most horrific situations. But that logic thankfully doesn’t hold in the asymmetric multiplayer and survival horror Dead By Daylight, which I played for the first time in celebration of today’s actual Friday the 13th and discovered that I’m a pretty good troubled-child-turned-murderer.
In Dead by Daylight, you choose between playing as a defensive survivor character on a team of four, or you go solo and play as one of the game’s 27 killers. If you’re a killer, your goal is to maim survivors and stick them through metal hooks as a sacrifice for your cosmic ruler, “Entity,” a vicious spider-legged evil.
In their perpetual games of cat-and-mouse, both survivors and killers can unlock performance-boosting perks, but killers also benefit from having unique “powers” which range from throwing weapons to spreading infection. I decided to play as The Trapper, a killer whose “power” is owning a bunch of bear traps, because I wanted to subvert the expectation of women being pursued not pursuers, and also because there’s an in-game tutorial for it. OK, it’s mostly because there’s an in-game tutorial for it and I wanted to summon my inner misunderstood lone wolf.
