Review
Phasmophobia
The best co-operative horror game ever made, and the funniest — usually at the same time.
No. 27 in The Noteworthy 50 · Asymmetric Horror
Dead by Daylight
Four survivors, one killer, and the most impressive horror licensing operation ever assembled.
Dead by Daylight's design is smarter than its reputation. Four survivors repair generators while one killer hunts them, and the tension comes from an information asymmetry that produces genuinely different games on each side. Survivors play a stealth-and-chase game about map knowledge and looping obstacles. The killer plays a resource-management game about pressure and patrol routes. Neither can win by mechanics alone.
The licensing achievement deserves recognition. Behaviour has assembled Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, Leatherface, the Xenomporph, Ghostface, Chucky and more into one product, alongside originals. For horror fans the roster alone is the pitch, and the studio has treated the source material with care.
Balance and community
Ten years of balance patches have never found a stable point, and the game's culture is defined by the resulting grievance. Survivors accuse killers of tunnelling and camping; killers accuse survivors of gen-rushing and abusing safe loops. Both are partly right, both behaviours are emergent from the design, and Behaviour has repeatedly patched around them without resolving the underlying tension. The in-match and post-match harassment is among the worst in online gaming.
The recommendation is conditional: with three friends on voice chat, it is one of the best evenings available in multiplayer. In solo queue, with three strangers who will not co-ordinate, it is frequently miserable. Budget for the characters you actually want and ignore the rest of the catalogue.
What works
- The asymmetric design is genuinely excellent and still unmatched at this scale
- An astonishing roster of licensed horror icons across every major franchise
- Ten years of consistent support and steady mechanical reworks
- Playing killer and playing survivor are two completely different games
What doesn't
- The DLC catalogue is enormous and expensive to complete
- Balance oscillates constantly and neither side is ever happy
- One of the most hostile communities in online gaming, on both sides
- Solo-queue survivor is a fundamentally worse experience than playing in a group
The Catch — what it will cost you
The base game is cheap and the character catalogue is not. A decade of licensed chapters — each with a killer, a survivor and cosmetics — adds up to hundreds of dollars for the complete roster. Licensed characters cannot be bought with earned in-game currency, only real money, which is where the real cost sits.
Who it's for: Horror fans with a friend group, and anyone who wants to play as Michael Myers or a Xenomorph.