At it's heart, this is an asymetrical multiplayer game. One person plays a killer, who has a certain supernatural power or tech advantage (for example, The Wraith can cloak, and the Hillbilly has a chainsaw). The survivor team is up to four players, and they run around trying to repair five of the seven generators, after which they can open a gate (there are two gates) and run away from the killer. You know the killer's close when your heartbeat starts getting loud. You know they're really close when "o fuk you gon di" music starts playing.
The killer has to hit the survivors until they're incapped (which takes two hits) and then carry them to a hook, to feed 'the entity' which is causing everyone to relive the same night over and over again. The survivors take quite a while to die on the hooks, and they can be helped off them (they can also get themselves free, but it's really unlikely to work and speeds up your 'dying on the hook' timer).
That's it.
It's a really well-made co-op experience. There's no in-game chat, so people just have to get on with things. The survivors run off and either fix generators, clean up totems, sabotage hooks or - if you're Craster - stand in a cupboard. Fixing generators takes a long time, and involves several RTE skill checks. Fail a check (and they're pretty tricky) and the generator backfires, causing it to be highlighted on the killer's screen. It also sets the repair back around 10%, which is infuriating. Totems are found dotted around the map, and cleaning up a 'lit' one will cancel one of the killer's perks (more on them later). This takes a little while, but is much faster than fixing a generator and there are no skill checks. If you've got a toolbox (either because you bought one with some bloodpoints that you earn by playing, or you find one in a chest) you can sabotage hooks - this means that the killer may have to walk further to hang you up, giving you more time to wriggle free. You have to pass skill checks while sabotaging the hooks, otherwise they - er - explode, like the generators do. Finally, you can spawn really close to the killer and hide in a cupboard, only for the killer to decide to camp your area of the map so you can't come out of the cupboard. The game actively discourages this - if a survivor stays still for too long crows start to circle around their heads (or stand on top of the cupboard), and the killer wanders up to you and punches you in the face. Once five generators are powered up, the two gates around the map activate, and you can open them. They take around ten nano-seconds or eleventy billion years to open (depending on what side you are playing on) and then the survivors can run away.
The killer loses if anyone escapes, and they can prevent this by smacking people in the head. This sounds simple, but you're only slightly faster than the survivors and not as agile, so the buggers jump over fences or pull a pallet down in front of you and you have to slow down to deal with it, and it's dark out there and the fuckers are gone. Once they've smacked them in the head enough they can be carried to a hook, but the survivor likes to wriggle while this is happening, which makes it hard to walk in a straight line and eventually they're wriggle free and run the fuck away. Assuming you make it to a hook you can hang them on it, and then you have to make a decision: if you stand around making sure they're not rescued the other survivors will be merrily fixing generators without any worries, but if you run off to fuck up the other survivors then you can fucking guarantee one of the sneaky twats will pull your prize from the hook.
Win (or lose) a game and you'll get bloodpoints, which you can spend on items, perks or offerings (buying stuff also levels you up, which unlocks more inventory slots) you can take to your next match. There are a lot of perks and offerings, but only a few items (toolboxes help you repair faster, health kits let you heal yourself and torches can blind the monster). Perks do things like give you a 30% chance of the generator not exploding if you fail a skill check, or make you run 20% faster for 5 seconds after you jump a ledge. Offerings are consumed before the match, and might make it a little darker or make it more likely to go to a certain map. Killers have perks and offerings too, and they can upgrade their weapons.
If the survivors take an item to a map and don't escape, fuck them, it's gone forever. Also, items are limited use: if they run out of uses then fuck them, it's gone forever.
The game is tense as shit, we're terrible at it, there's a lot wrong (the graphics are a bit glitchy, it'd be cool if you could kill people in other ways beside the hooks, the items are pretty limited) but it's buckets of fun.
We normally play as survivors with party chat, which gives us a huge advantage (normally survivors can't communicate), but we still mostly lose.
We'll no doubt be playing Murderator again tonight. Until midnight, at which point we'll all be playing Mud Trucks 2.
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Grim... wrote: I wish Craster had left some girls for the rest of us.
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