Hang fire, Mariah. We’re not quite done with things that go bump in the night yet…

Whilst Dual Effect & Abstract Digital’s loving homage to the video game survival horrors of yesteryear – particularly those of the PSOne era – arrived on Steam and PS5 back in August (other platforms placated an indeterminate ‘early 2022’ date), it seemed a perfect title to hold back on experiencing until the Halloween period.

As a keen enthusiast of the Resident Evils and Silent Hills of the late Nineties/early Noughties, there is a lot that Tormented Souls does right in channeling the spirit of those celebrated, frequently frightening titles. Yes, they inject a limited dose of modernity into some elements of the control system and mechanics, but this is, for the most part, exactly the kind of callback to traditional third-person survival horror experiences that many fans of the genre have been clamouring for, for the better part three console generations.

With a suitably hokey story, following protagonist Caroline Walker travelling to a seemingly abandoned hospital solely off the back of a strange photograph she received in the mail, narratively Souls is as pulpy, simple and schlocky in execution as much of what came in early Resi titles in particular. This extends to delivery, too; with the voice acting of Caroline and the very limited number of characters she encounters on her journey performed in a juicily over-the-top, exclamatory fashion.

But as per its heritage, the slightly silly story of Souls is merely a framing device for its exploration into a creepy unknown, the solving of a myriad of some excellently-designed puzzles, bountiful amounts of back-tracking, and a liberal dose of combat taking out the twisted denizens of its sumptuously depicted locale.

The production design of the Wildberger Hospital, Souls principle setting, is gorgeously realised. And whilst many have jumped to point out aesthetic familiarities between it and the iconic Spencer Mansion of Resident Evil fame, outside of perhaps its main hall and adjoining corridors, much of what is found here seems far more reminiscent of, say, 2001’s Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, or the Silent Hill series, from the frequently limited lighting (Resi, conventionally, being much more generous in lighting your impending demise) with entire sections of the map bathed in lethal darkness, trips to a ‘dark’ alternative reality, right down to smattering of the industrial, occult and even tribal and indigenous.

But it is in its restrictive lighting mechanic that one of the game’s biggest bugbears rears its head. Players will frequently take Caroline into areas of almost pitch-black darkness, requiring her to forgo carrying any weapons in favour of a lighter, in order to avoid the almost-instant fatality of wandering around in the dark. This is not a commentary on its enemy design, either – if you spend more than a few seconds bathed in darkness, the game will quite literally kill you off in fairly unceremonious fashion.

It isn’t difficult to imagine the thinking behind the decision to rob players of their weapons in certain areas of the game, but in truth it is artificially attempting to up the scare factor when in actuality it becomes more frustrating than anything. Entering such an area is far more likely to elicit a groan than it is a gasp. Yes, at a handful of spots, it does factor in to map exploration and advancement strategically, but these are few and far between. For the most part, the dimly-lit sequences of Souls’ world are just unforgiving; not to mention meandering when combined with the unreliable control system, occasionally hyperactive camera jumps, and generally sub-par combat. It also robs the player of soaking in so much of the gorgeous world building and design work, with the game’s surroundings notably a step-up from its clunky, almost cartoony character models.

Thankfully, Dual Effect seem to have at least realised that their combat system – another area where it feels spiritually more akin to the laden, cumbersome shoot-or-smash mechanics of Silent Hill – is a bit of a lame duck at some point into development, as generally ammo is in bountiful supply, meaning a ‘kill it if it moves’ mentality quickly becomes a must, doubly so because of the sheer amount of back-tracking and revisiting of areas you will be doing over the course of the game. Just be ready to jostle with an at-times erratic auto-aim system, to0, that can easily see you waste ammo through no fault of your own.

Souls does encourage s0me trial-and-error, though, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the absolute smorgasbord of puzzles that have been worked into the game, many of which you can tackle in a fairly player-defined order. It is here where Dual really step up their game, with there being an element of early survival horror’s ‘fetch questing’, but invigorated with some more much interactive and inventive elements. Puzzles, and the items required to help solve them, frequently require direct physical manipulation, as well as a healthy dose of lateral thinking, to solve. There’s even some occasional use of time travel (we did say it was hokey) to create in the past the correct conditions needed to solve a puzzle – or access a specific area – in the future.

It’s a mechanic that creates a laughably bonkers disconnect between gameplay and storytelling, though, with our central protagonist zipping through time and materialising these time-centric changes and causality when under our control, yet in cut-scenes that follow, she acts not only utterly oblivious to it all, but so too is she seemingly actively confused by some of the changes her era-jumping results in.

For the most part, though, Souls is an engaging time, its focus on exploration and puzzle-solving particularly welcome when both elements are so well realised and executed. It can be a little unforgiving in its opening hour or so, but so too were its predecessors, and again, in bringing in a limited resource for saving (as close to ink ribbons as you can perhaps legally get), Souls demands players to plan routes, objectives and the gap they are going to leave between saving.

It’s at times like this that the game is at its strongest; exploring its beautifully macabre world, tensely venturing into the unknown and stumbling upon a particular item or file that suddenly makes that one nebulous puzzle click into place. Considering your path and options as you go between safe and familiar areas, managing your resources and planning ahead.

You know, classic survival horror.

Just don’t expect to rely too much on the game’s fairly useless map – which, even after you find the respective page for the area you’re in, is vague, confusingly coloured and gives little in the way of crucial information (bar the strange decision to very, very occasionally include an icon depicting a puzzle element).

Much like many of the titles that inspired it, Souls does has an issue with pacing, too. The game does eventually run out of steam, and much of this lies at the relative absence of bigger set pieces. There’s hardly anything in the way of boss fights, and whilst this isn’t in and of itself a dealbreaker, games like the original Resident Evil keenly understood how punchier moments like an attic encounter with a giant snake (after some suitably ominous build-up), or suddenly being sprung into a flooded basement full of Great White Sharks, gave shape and momentum to the overall experience. Souls, contrarily, seems mostly happy to recycle the same limited pool of regular enemies, which are themselves not terribly original, and almost all seemingly pulled straight from the nightmare-demons-by-way-of-hospital-equipment-gone-wrong monster mashing of the OG Silent Hill.

As we prepare to reach peak Autumn, before the steady, inexorable descent into advent calendars and mince pies (seasonal analogies pinging so much better with food), the gaming community welcomes its usual slew of Halloween-themed offerings.

Scream’s Ghostface has just popped up once again in, of all places, Call of Duty (seriously). Supermassive’s Dark Pictures Anthology just birthed its third of currently eight (!) planned instalments with the Iraqi-themed House of Ashes, and survival horror just got a vintage offering in the form of Tormented Souls on Steam and consoles. And, of course, there’ll be the inevitable straddlers only just getting round to taking on the brilliant Resident Evil: Village from earlier this year in time for the ‘ween.

But nowhere is the season more anticipated and celebrated within videogaming than perhaps amognst the booming online community for Behaviour Interactive’s Dead By Daylight.

Now pretty much synonymous with asymmetric online gaming (and not just of the horror variety), it seems difficult to recall a time when Daylight wasn’t one of the more popular and ubiquitous online multiplayer franchises. True, its roughly 120,000 monthly average player count is still dwarfed by the heaviest hitters in the genre – see, for instance, Fortnite, which hovers around the 40 million mark – but it would be churlish to call Dead By Daylight anything other than success.

Rewinding back to its launch in 2016, when it arrived with a comparatively minuscule roster of three completely original killers (and five survivors for them to go up against), it’s important to remember that neither Dead By Daylight’s cast nor title boasted anything in the way of brand power or recognition.

Conversely, indie develoers Illfonic were busying away preparing to release a similar ‘one-versus-many’ online showdown within the year that would bring with it one of the most iconic figures and titles in the history of horror – Jason Vorhees and Friday the 13th.

Behaviour’s response – pre-meditated or not (though it is worth pointing out that Friday the 13th: The Game had been a known entity since October 2015) – was suitably brutal. Initiating their first license agreement (a move that would come to burst the dam of potential Daylight had), October 2016 saw the equally iconic Michael Myers, of Halloween fame, arrive on Daylight in time for that year’s spooky season.

IllFonic responded to this gaunlet throwdown with something of a promotional splurge of their own – releasing a flurry of developmental footage, behind-the-scenes content, mo-cap tests and other marketing goodness, and pulling out coops like announcing original Friday composer Harry Manfredini would be returning to score the game, but both the player base and popularity of Daylight were steadily growing, and suddenly Friday the 13th: The Game’s eventual landing spot in the market looked a touch overcrowded.

As Behaviour settled into a routine cycle of releasing new killers and survivors in a roughly three-monthly cycle for Daylight, they shrewdly settled upon presenting players with characters both licensed and wholly original, and, in some cases, getting as close to licensed as possible where rights were perhaps unavailable or prohibitive. See, for instance, the distinctly Shimizu stylings of ‘The Spirit’, the vengeful spectre of a murdered Japanese schoolgirl who looks lifted straight from the likes of The Ring or The Grudge.

By the time Friday the 13th: The Game landed in May 2017 (initially as a digital exclusive) only Myers’ Halloween chapter was live in terms of Dead By Daylight’s pre-established faces, but not only were there now 7 other killers for players to choose alongside him, but Behaviour had cannily lined up their aces and had come prepared. Within the first six months of Friday’s launch, licensed killers from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Saw franchises were all released on Daylight. It remains, to date, the only time Behaviour have released three licensed killers consecutively, and suddenly Friday’s lone Vorhees looked like a very small fish in a shrinking pond by comparison.

Facing off against Daylight’s increasingly impressive roster was one challenge, but satisfying players and critics alike proved another altogether for Friday the 13th: The Game. It released to deeply mixed reviews, with many complaining about the glitchy nature of the gameplay, frequently buggy graphics (all notably worse on console), and comparatively slight content. Gamespot’s Peter Brown blasted it as “an unfinished game that shouldn’t have been released in its current state” in his scathing, 4 out of 10 review.

But IllFonic pressed on, releasing a series of refinements, extra content, patches and updates, and announcing new game modes such as the ultimately never-to-be-seen ‘Paranoia’, a sans-Jason mode set to take inspiration from the fifth film in the Friday film series (and be a spiritual precursor to the likes of Among Us) in having players attempting to deduce who within their group of counsellors could in fact be a killer.

Friday wasn’t without its admirers and supporters, either, and would even go on to pick up a handful of publicly-voted for awards over the coming months, perhaps most notably IGN’s ‘Best Multiplayer’ People’s Choice award, beating out heavy hitters including PlayerUknown’s Battlegrounds, Star Wars: Battlefront II and Splatoon 2 in the process, and garnering an accolade Dead By Daylight hadn’t even made the shortlist for twelve months prior.

With a physical release for Friday following in the tail end of 2017, new costumes and incarnations of Jason’s being added to the game in the hopes of countering Daylight’s triple-dip of Freddie Kreugers, Saw pig ladies (her name is Amanda, Kyle…) and Leatherfaces, as well as the promise of new game modes and other surprises, and 2018 looked set to be something of a duke-out between the two burgeoning horror bloodbaths.

The scales, however, were set to tip inexorably in Behaviour’s favour.

2018 brought with it a series of extraneous and fatal blows for IllFonic. Only a month into the new year, Friday’s publishers, Gun Media, announced the anticipated ‘Paranoia’ mode would be put on indefinite hold to instead focus on sorting out technical and server issues.

“We don’t get out of bed everyday to produce an average product,” Wes Keltner, the games co-creator and CEO of Gun, claimed on a blog post on the official Friday the 13th: The Game message boards, “I don’t want to give you content that doesn’t live up to the standards we have tried to deliver throughout this journey together. You not only deserve better than that, you also deserve this type of transparency.”

Sadly, it was to mark the beginning of the end for Keltner, Gun and their time at Camp Crystal Lake, as just a few months later another curveball – this time a long-running legal dispute between the original Friday film’s writer and producer coming to a head – threw a fatal spanner into the works. The longstanding legal tussling offered enough potential complexities and pitfalls to that, by June 2018, it forced development team to announce that all future content plans for Friday the 13th: The Game were, much like the doomed ‘paranoia’ mode, put on indefinite hold.

Although maintenance patches and upkeep were promised irrespective of the devolving copyright situation, by September 2018, Keltner and Gun were off the project entirely, with Japanese-based Black Tower Studios, who had formerly assisted with a handful of maps and content for the title, taking over development of the project entirely.

And it wasn’t long before the future ban on any new content saw Friday begin to haemorrhage players. On Steam, for instance, the game’s average monthly player count for August 2018 dipped to a measly 342, a far cry from the 5-6,000 of its launch months just a year prior.

By contrast, Dead By Daylight at its core keeps things much simpler. There is one, singular objective – repair five generators and then power up one of two exit gates – that all survivors must work together to complete. The killer, conversely, must dispatch said survivors before they complete this goal, almost always by way of downing them and hanging them off of various ‘hooks’ dotted around each map.

Casting aside the unforgiving misfortune of coming up against a high-ranking player early on, a plight that a recent matchmaking overhaul has tried to once again balance out, and anything outside of these two simple, singular goals mostly either aids the player in doing so, or hinders their opponent(s) from achieving their own goal. You can heal yourself as a survivor if you get injured, use flashlights and grenades to try and temporarily blind or distract a killer, or drop pallets in their path to slow them down, but the core objectives remain clear, distinct and accessible.

Daylight’s killers, whilst throwing up their own unique approach to hunting down survivors, are by no means an ‘easy’ mode, but neither are they impossible to go up against, either. Playing as Friday’s Vorhees can be fleetingly fun and hilarious as you hunt down and shred through counsellors with ease, but his implacable lethality can quickly become anticlimactic as you make short shrift of your opponents and draw the game to a disappointingly quick close for all involved. By contrast, the two-hit health system and ‘three strikes and you’re out’ (two if you get unlucky, one if you’re really unlucky) approach to killers and hooks in Dead By Daylight means a run in with a killer does not automatically equal instant death or game over. In fact, some of the game’s best moments are prolonged chase sequences or daring rescues of fellow team members from a hook, as the vengeful killer closes in on you.

In many ways, Dead By Daylight harkens back to the old adage of ‘easy to learn, difficult to master’, and indeed much of said ‘mastery’ and discussion within the Dead By Daylight community centres around which ‘perks’, items and optional add-ons coalesce into the most effective build for each individual killer and/or survivor.

It’s telling that even five years on, Behaviour have gone nowhere near adding new ‘modes’ or mixing up the core gameplay formula too majorly – the closest it came to doing so being a ticking clock element it added to its endgame in 2019 to redress balance at a stage of the game that had historically heavily favoured survivors over killers.

And although most Dead By Daylight players will bemoan the game’s approach to ‘balance’ (online gamers complaining about balance? – never!), Behaviour’s willingness to tinker with, and at times completely overhaul items, perks and even killers themselves to make them fairer and more viable (such as a complete reworking of ‘The Nightmare’ Freddy Kreuger in 2019) whilst keeping the core gameplay structure intact, at the very least demonstrates a keenness to offer as fair and accessible an asymmetric experience as possible.

So, did Friday the 13th’s almost paradoxical combination of being anaemic on content yet functionally overcrowded deter too many newcomers? Surely few would argue that Dead By Daylight has always been the easier game to get into (both in terms of gameplay and quite literally in regard to wait times for a match), but in fair countenance, there are those who find Daylight’s narrow field of options and objectives repetitive and dull by comparison to the far more cinematic, occasionally zany and distinctly play-your-own-adventure stylings of Friday.

The truth likely lies somewhere in between, and although the individual merits of each game can be argued ad nauseam, the truth is that much of Friday the 13th: The Game’s eventual downfall lay in situ before the game even entered development.

Licensing can be a mercilessly prickly area for video game developers, particularly when it comes to online multiplayers that rely on continued support, maintenance and updates, which, in turn, necessitates an ongoing relationship with any license holders. Behaviour have themselves felt the sharp end of this ownership and rights stick on more than one occasion – from the aforementioned ‘Ghostface’ complications, to the later Stranger Things chapter, which, for somewhat vague and nebulous reasons pertaining to its licensing agreement with Netflix (many hypothesise it being down to, of all things, an upcoming rival video game), will be removed from sale next month, for the first time seeing Dead By Daylight withdraw a killer and two survivors from its available roster (though those who have already purchased the Stranger Things characters will retain access to them).

Whatever the reason, as the dust settles on Jason Vorhees’ most recent grave, Dead By Daylight danced a merry jig over it as it recently welcomed the likes of Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Hellraiser into its horror-themed Battle Royale.

Whether fault for Friday the 13th: The Game’s demise was down more to the internal or the extraneous, few can definitively say. The lawsuit that undoubtedly delivered a crippling blow was in place before a single line of coding was complete, but could a better, more accessible title have weathered the storm?

Perhaps, sometime further down the road, Vorhees will bob back up from below the surface and off of the scrapheap of digital history in the much the vein of the final moments of the original Friday the 13th movie. Or maybe Behaviour’s genre power play and the legal to-and-fro plaguing the franchise will come to completion, and the character will simply find himself ultimately joining Dead By Daylight’s now-peerless and definitive lineup.

Either way, the bumpy road and ultimately unceremoniously short lifespan of Friday the 13th: The Game remains a cautionary tale for those tempted to dip their developmental toes into the enticing waters of not just Camp Crystal Lake, but indeed brand recognition and licensed content as a whole…