Dead by Daylight fans will be immediately familiar with the asymmetric multiplayer gameplay focusing on horror found in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Four survivors are tasked with escaping the basement and then the house of the Slaughter family.
I am by no means an expert in Dead by Daylight. I only have 316.9 hours in Dead by Daylight currently and that may seem like a lot but the community is crazy and those are just rookie numbers. So take what I say here with a grain of salt but they are my honest opinions from what limited understanding I have of the game thus far.
In my opinion, Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a more chill experience. As a survivor, called victims in Texas Chain Saw, the game is more focused on stealth, subterfuge, wit, and sometimes straight out bravado when compared to Dead by Daylight.
It’s actually very difficult for the family members to find victims on the map if they only rely on sight. The maps are well made with multiple sight lines cut off by crouching. There are also small spaces that most of the family cannot access, spaces such as very thin openings you have to shimmy through, small crawl spaces, and crates with barbed wire. If all goes wrong on the surface, you can jump down a well back into the basement to escape pursuit but at great cost to your health and having to open the basement doors again.
This makes the game feel more intense if you run into a family member as the victim. While it’s easy to lose a single person chasing you, Texas Chain Saw Massacre has three people playing family members. That’s right, three people are playing the killers. Once a single family member has caught sight of you and if they have any level of coordination and communication at all, it becomes very difficult to escape alive. The map is quite large however and while the family members chase around a victim or two, the rest are free to make a frantic rush for the exit.
Now it may sound unfair to play as the family once people find out that the survivors do not leave a visible trail of movement as in Dead by Daylight but this is by no means the only way to track people in the game. As members of the family, you can gather blood by collecting them from pans located all around the map or by attacking the victims. Once you have some blood gathered, you can feed it to the grandpa usually sitting somewhere in the middle of the map.
This may sound strange but the grandpa is essentially a timed sensor that activates at set intervals, revealing the location of any survivor that moves during that short duration. By collecting more blood, you can level up the grandpa so that the frequency of the scan increases. At max level, survivors can no longer hide from grandpa’s scans. It is possible for the people playing the killers to spec their characters and work together to harvest as much blood as possible early on and max grandpa fairly quickly. This only happened in one match but it is a viable option. This scan may sound useless but it does force players to stop moving where ever they are, making them easier to spot.
This isn’t the only tool the family have at their disposal. Depending on which character you pick, you have plenty of ways to make anyone trying to escape have a rather difficult time. Some characters can set traps in key locations, causing injury and forcing them to free themselves slowly or risk being detected. Other characters can lock doors and add padlocks, forcing victims to scavenge for tools and then pick the doors open. Leatherface can cut down wood doors and the blocks with barbed wire so they can no longer be used by the victims to dodge anyone chasing them down. One person can even listen for movement and track the general location the sound is coming from.
There are plenty of ways to play and allowing even further customization is a skill tree with different perks that effect game play as well as being able to put points into stats that affect your base traits such as stamina. The same goes for the victims as well. Each character has different abilities in addition to the perks unlocked in the skill tree and stat points as well. One of the more skill heavy characters is Leland. He has the ability to actually stun killers by tackling them from behind. I met a skilled Leland character that ran circles around me and then tackled me to the ground multiple times, closing doors on me, and generally making me look like a fool multiple times before making a successful exit.
As for how to make a successful exit as a victim, the first step is to escape the basement. There are locked doors that can only be picked open with tool kits found scattered throughout the map. I guess the Lockpicking Lawyer would have a really easy time getting out. Scavenging a tool kit takes a lot of time unless you rush the process, making more noise. If you make enough noise, it will show as a red indicator on the screen to the family members. Sometimes rushing things and making a lot of noise is actually the move if you know the killers are preoccupied with chasing someone else.
After you pick the door and open it, it will create noise notifying the killers that you have escaped the basement. After that you have to open two sets of doors and turn off a generator before you can fully escape. This is the general path most people take and it requires two tool kits to pick open the doors. This path is usually the easiest to do but also the easiest for the family to guard against since it only takes one person camping that door to prevent access.
The game thankfully has multiple exit points but with varying difficulty. Some require you to take a valve and change the pressure level at a different location before opening the door while the most complicated exit requires you to find two fuses and place them in the proper location before exiting.
The game does have a time limit however. As a survivor you can’t just hide in a corner of the map indefinitely. Either grandpa will be maxed out, a killer will use their ability to track you one way or another, or you will bleed out and die. The game does seem to be fairly balanced for either side but still requires skill, communication, and coordination.
In my opinion, I do find Texas Chain Saw Massacre to be more enjoyable than Dead by Daylight as of now since it’s a new experience. I don’t know if my opinion will change over time, but for now it’s nice to play a round or two during the evenings. It is quite more stress and anxiety inducing when you’re found by a family member since it’s harder to escape and there are no redos like in Dead by Daylight where you can kite the killer for a while, get hooked, and wait for someone to rescue you. The two games are definitely alike but also quite different in many ways and I hope more asymmetric multiplayer games come out.
Additional Info
Steam Store Page : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1433140/The_Texas_Chain_Saw_Massacre/
Review Score: 82% positive with a total of 7,915 reviews as of this writing (09/01/23)
Developer: Sumo Digital
Publisher: Gun Interactive
Release Date: Aug 18, 2023
MSRP: $39.99
I received a key from terminals. Thanks to the leatherific person for approving my request!
Time spent: 7.3 hours
Achievement Score: 8/51
Ducky Obrien 