Like 2017’s Friday the 13th, which recently had its servers shut down, and the still hugely successful Dead By Daylight, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM) is an online multiplayer game, in which players take part as victims or killers. In those roles only one player gets to be the bad guy, but in TCM, three people play together as the film’s evil Sawyer family, working together to hunt down and slay their four desperate captives, who are all trying to escape. Among the victims, Connie instantly pick locks and Leland can stun the enemies, while on the family side the hitchhiker can put down traps and new character Sissy can poison things. Players gain XP for upgrades after each round, whether their side wins or not.
Each round will be extremely familiar to Dead By Daylight fans. If you’re a victim, you find yourself in a nightmarish location, being hunted by the killer, and have to escape by completing tasks like picking locks, finding fuses to open doors, or switching off electrified fences. If you get away, you win. Meanwhile, the killers have to stop you leaving – and also murder you. The latter team also has access to Granddad, the near-dead patriarch of the TCM family. If he is fed blood, he can intermittently detect and reveal the location of victims, helping in the hunt, but if players get near him, they can attack him, reducing his abilities.
What you get is an incredibly tense, scary, jump scare-filled face off between the hunter and the hunted. TCM makes brilliant, knowledgeable use of the film’s setting, characters (several of whom are voiced by actors from the film series) and general atmosphere. Locations range from the labyrinthine basement beneath the family mansion, filled with bones and torture equipment, to the queasily sunny exterior locations – the gardens filled with wilting sunflowers and abandoned cars, the slaughterhouse and finally, if you’re lucky, the dusty road out of this awful place.
More than the other games in this sub-genre, TCM really does require teamwork. Victims need to combine their abilities as a group to keep an eye on the family, while staking out escape routes, while the family need to combine their differing abilities to hunt, patrol and protect grandpa. Certain characters, are almost useless without coordination – Sonny, for example, can relay the position of doors and enemies to his team mates, but there’s little compulsion to do that if they’re not watching your back in return.
This is fine as long as you have three friends, or at least other players who have mics and are willing to use them – otherwise, the game feels lonely and random. Unlike Dead by Daylight, which allows two or more players to silently help each other, these tasks are all single-handed, so you don’t get those casual moments of interplay. Meanwhile, playing as the family is basically like being a parent – you have to keep an eye on the kids, ensuring doors and gates are locked so no one wanders out onto the road, all the while caring for an ailing in-law.