Recent reviews by gak

The Clown is a cannibal, but Bubba is 'The Cannibal'. Both of them are obese men who can't stop giggling. This was the first chapter for 'Year 3' of Dead by Daylight, where they committed to making a chapter every 3 months. So it set the stage for the future DLCs to come. But where is Hannibal the Cannibal?

Killer: The most interesting thing about him is his jiggling tummy. I hadn't played many matches with him before his rework, but I do know he was a terrible killer before that because he got slowed down every time you threw a bottle.

After his rework, he got 2 bottles: A pink one to slow survivors down, and a yellow one to speed both of you up. You can use his kit to get hits in cheeky ways by throwing bottles above certain areas to spread your gas cloud and catching up to survivors without them realizing because of their blurred vision/ difficulty to compute distance because of the double debuff on speed when you get them intoxicated and you invigorated. But now Pinhead can basically slow you down in unreachable areas too, and basically does the same thing as Clown, but better. Brutal Strength works great on both of them because survivors will be constantly pre-dropping pallets.

As I said, he isn't very interesting, but his add-ons affecting invigoration (the piss bottles) are quite fun, especially the ones that let you see survivor's auras and the VHS P*rn add-on which has a funny name as you just saw.

All 3 of his perks are amazing though:

Pop Goes the Weasel is a great ruin alternative if you want a permanent perk to regress gens, but can also be used along with ruin when you want to kick gens after ruin has been cleansed... it's very oppressive on high-mobility killers and goes supremely with Tinkerer. I used it to reach Rank 5 and Rank 1 because it is a consistent and fair perk because it still requires a hook in order to use it, and if you suck at chase, you won't be able to use it :) But if you're on a no-kick-gen lifestyle, there are other alternatives too.

Bamboozle is a perfect name for the perk, because survivors may not see/hear the vault being blocked until after you've fully vaulted and then when they come face to face with a blocked vault, welp, they've been bamboozled.. It's better than Crowd Control because it's permanent, and also makes you vault slightly faster. It's best used on Billy, Bubba, and Michael at Tier 3, but I've mainly used it without a second thought on Billy. No-Bamboozle Billy is as rare as No-STBFL Demo; it's too good to pass on, especially for a killer that can struggle to get a chainsaw down even when the survivor went to deadzone and then spun you into safety. I agree it's a little boring to face as a survivor and forces you to leave vault loops and hold W, but you can still manage to connect 2 tiles with vaults, and then the killer cannot block both vaults at the same time.

Coulrophobia, not to get confused with Claustrophobia (or Cruel Limites (or Cruel Confinement)) is quite good to suppress the healing meta (at least the heals in front of your face). Makes the hit-and-run playstyle more viable as long as you're a 32m terror radius killer, and it can go well with Monitor and Abuse if you're always in a chase.

His best cosmetic is Mr. Puddles and it's hilarious to see such a thing existing since the elephant trunk also has physics on it. You can only buy it with iridescent shards because it was a 'community costume', and it was the best investment of shards I had ever made.

Because of Ash, and his prosthetic arm, in Clown's Mori, he cuts off the finger from male survivors' left hand, and from female survivors' right hand.

Music: There was no chase theme before the rework, but then they did it!... The mad lads actually did it! They put the tu-tu-tu-ru tu-ru Circus music as his chase theme as everyone wanted, but with an S-Tier DBD twist to it.

But 1 nitpick is that: All terror radius themes are split into 4 layers if you download a gamerip and later adjusted according to the actual terror radius distance just like an adaptive soundtrack... But with Clown's theme, there is so little difference between Layer 3 and 4, I sometimes fail to notice the continuity. Is that better though? It sounds monotonous that way, but I guess they didn't want to write any other jingle for the third layer.

His map has a carnival, in which there's a music box that constantly plays, and the notes it plays are a bit chilling when you think about it.

Survivor: Kate Denson is the first female survivor with boob jiggle physics in the game. It doesn't jiggle as much as Clown's belly, but it introduced a new form of horny to the game. Overall, this was a very jiggly update. Kate is actually connected to the Clown in some way (which wasn't a common thing for original chapters before this one) as both of them are traveling performers who might have met each other during a circus. Just like Felix and David mains, Kate mains want more skins of her with less clothing on so they can see her tattoos I suppose.

Kate was rumored to have been Leatherface's survivor counterpart, based on Alexandra Daddario from Texas Chainsaw 3D, but was removed in favor of releasing him as a standalone killer, and I'm ngl, they do share a resemblance. Just like Yui though, her in-game model doesn't do justice to the keyart even after the survivor beautification in 2021.


Her perk Windows of Opportunity is Zenshin Tactics but for survivors (or was it the other way around?). Boil Over and the wiggle meta was too good to be true and basically shut down within weeks, but swaying is still annoying on indoor maps with tight corridors, it's just that killers will look for a hook before picking you up because they are alerted if the perk's existence when they pick you up the first time with a debuff sign.

Map: This was the first DLC to re-use a pre-existing realm and make a new map out of it. The environmental assets are all the same, but the buildings and killer belongings were all made unique. Old Chapel was better than the reworked one if not for Crotus Prenn. The colors and atmosphere of the carnival/circus stood out so much more, the stained glass in the chapel have been reduced to dull shades of GTA IV, the horse named 'Maurice' scared the sh*t out of me, and the music box with the Jack out of the box illuminated was such a cool feature that fits the yellow and pink aesthetic of Clown. Now it's all GREY. Sad.

The first time I faced this killer was in the old Coldwind Farm, and I thought he looked really cool while carrying me, because I hadn't played against such a tall killer before that.

Killer: Every YouTuber that talked about which Killers to get first mentioned that if you are used to FPS games, then you'd be able to convert that skill into Deathslinger the most because other killers are very unconventional comparatively. He used to be able to instantly aim down sights and shoot, but since people have complained that it isn't enough telegraphing, they made it sluggish like Huntress and Pyramid Head, but not as bad of course. The speed at which the speed travels wasn't changed, so he still has the second-fastest projectile in the game, but still slower than a bullet (or Trickster's blades). Deathslinger's Redeemer feels like a shotgun to use, Trickster's Knifes feel like low-damage SMGs, Huntress' hatchets feel like a Rocket Launcher, and The Artist's birds feel like a Sniper Rifle... we have them all covered.

His gun, the Redeemer, feels an awful lot like Freddy's gloves because both of them crafted it on their own. Caleb uses all 3 parts of his guns to do various actions: The front blade to do melee attacks, the spear to shoot of course, and the back to break pallets and walls.

When his teaser trailer dropped, it only showed a chain moving on the ground, making people suspect the next killer to be Pinhead. They were wrong, but now that Pinhead is also in the game, I think it's fair to compare the way they use their chains:

• Deathslinger shoots his Spear projectile with the chain following it, whereas Pinhead creates a spawn for the chains to come out of, and then controls a hook projectile similar to Billy's curve.
  
• Once contact has been made with the survivor, it turns into a showdown between both him and the survivor whose camera has been turned to face him, with a chain between them, whereas 3 additional chains are spawned randomly and start harassing the survivor until they remove it.
  
• In both cases, when the survivor is chained, their movement speed goes down to walking speed.
  
• Deathslinger has to bring the survivor closer to him while making sure the chain's break rate is slow and doesn't degrade by coming in contact with the environment, whereas Pinhead has to catch up to the slowed-down survivor without breaking his own chains by walking through them.
  
• Once Deathslinger's chain breaks, the survivor would get a deep wound and escape, whereas it spawns new chains if previous ones didn't connect with Pinhead.
  
• Once you go from M2 into M1 with Caleb, survivors don't immediately return to running speed, giving you enough time to hit them before they can Dead Hard, whereas you can Dead Hard immediately after the chains are broken in the case of Pinhead.

The fact that Deathslinger's Chain can survive through objects whilst degrading fast is a very cool concept. Sometimes you can go around loops and hit a survivor after you've canceled M2 because they are still at walking speed, this is why you feel like your lunge is bigger. However, it doesn't help that he is a 32m killer but with only 110% speed because even though you can dominate at chase, your map pressure is weak compared to Pinhead.

His code is apparently superb for the chain system, which is probably why bugs on this killer have been low. Desync will always play poorly on you because the spear's hitbox is smaller than a hatchet and can't be used as frequently as blades, but predicting where a survivor would move next and deciding where you want to bring them so that they are at a disadvantage is still pretty cool even after the ADS nerf.

Though with the ADS nerf, his power to zone out survivors into Dead zones has become more powerful because he can now walk faster while holding down sights, and the survivors would be constantly trying to juke themselves or end up finding the least convenient line-of-sight blockage, whilst in that time you can just reach them and do a standard M1.

His perks Retribution, Dead Man's Switch and Gearhead were all buffed within the last six months, and even though they're not too useful on their own, now provide a lot of strong synergy with other perks (Plaything, Pain Resonance, and Hysteria)

His Mori is painful to think about. If you had a giant spear run through the back of your neck, through your throat, and out of your mouth, you'd wish you never lived.

Music: When his Terror Radius was 24m, you could barely hear it until he was onto you, especially when most Deathslingers used to run Monitor and Abuse. Now, you can hear it more clearly and differentiate between the layers. If I were to put the chase theme in a tier list, I would put it near the Blight's, because both of them give the same noisy vibe to me, except there's a lot of wild-west sounds thrown in.

Survivor: Zarina is the closest we've gotten to an Indian character in the game. She's ugly in most of her outfits though, except for the one where she has a DSLR with her. Her perk For The People is insta-heal in exchange for your health state, and it can be used in a number of clever ways, but most people run it just to earn more bloodpoints by healing people with FTP instead of a regular heal when both of them are completely safe and away from harm's way. It just turns into another No-Mither for those survivors, and the amount of time saved becomes meaningless. The best way to use it is to pick up downed survivors rather than healing injured survivors because they could have Soul Guard and tank another hit into safety. Of The Record, was just a worse distortion, but with over-a-minute endurance, it has become one hell of an anti-tunnel perk that can even be used along with Decesive to prevent killers that want to make matches a 3v1 as soon as possible. It even just buys time because killers may not even hit them once they realize the survivor isn't making any noise long after being unhooked.

Map: The Dead Dawg Saloon brought Breakable Walls to the game, but other than that nitpick, it's a pretty solid map. The skybox has an amazing starry night vibe with the sun barely set in the far end of the map, the vultures, the steampunk setting, the wagons, the unique exit gate switches, the dark bushes, the small size of the map. It is Haddonfield done right, with a road in the middle and structures that aren't too safe to either side. The main building can be annoying at times, but I've never had an issue with it, the map works well with stealth killers, ranged killers, high mobility killers, Blendettes, flashy savers, etc, literally, everyone would love this map because it's as balanced as Coal Tower, but way more fun.

Survivor: Ash is like the chad character of the group who literally radiates testosterone by literally just existing. Bill and Steve can't even come close to how Alpha he is because the Voice Actor behind the face isn't some squeaky pipsqueak like Bill and Steve.


Bruce Campbell is like my uncle (I don't consider him as my uncle, I'm just saying that he reminds me of him). And my uncle is literally the local embodiment of Hank Schrader to me. And there isn't a more chad-er Schrader than Hank Schrader. Maybe even Brucie Kibbutz from GTA IV portrayed by Bruce Willis can't stand against Ash because he's the only omega-chad who isn't bald.


His perk, Mettle of Man has a big setup and gives a satisfying reward. After taking 3 protection hits (hits near another injured survivor), you get a permanent Endurance status effect when injured which is basically the same as Borrowed Time or using a styptic agent, but with the upside of not needing to mend afterward. Since you won't have to mend you can even stack a styptic agent on top of that in order to potentially have a chase in which the killer would need to hit you once while healthy, hit you again and use up your endurance, hit you whilst having a styptic agent, and hit you through a Dead Hard.


Even though Object of Obsession was nerfed, you can essentially recreate its former self by bringing Mettle of Man because if you heal to full health after Mettle was used once, the killer can always see your aura beyond a certain range, and therefore you would too.


Flip-Flop used to be useless for a long time, but now that the wiggle meta has been defined, it is an integral part of it. Since Boil Over's drop boost is dependent on Wiggle Progression, recovering on the ground for even just a bit is quite useful since it could also be converted into a Power-Struggle proc if you were lucky. I'm not saying it's a strong perk or anything, but seeing Ash's winking face should be a good enough reason to bring this perk into your wiggle-meta build.


Buckle Up does something? It's like Wraith and Legion's red add-ons for monitoring gen-pressure but for Downed Survivors. And if the downed survivor isn't an absolute klutz, they'd at least know where the killer would be coming from, so I don't see the purpose of the aura reading once picked up... Old Buckle-Up became basekit and now indicates recovery on the HUD while the perked was reworked into the Old Borrowed-Time that gave the unhooker and the unhooked endurance but after picking up survivors instead.


uhh... the review is over :/

Adaptation: THE BOX, YOU OPENED IT, I CAME! The first Hellraiser movie didn't have any notable locations they could've converted to a map, but getting just a paragraph is indeed disappointing because Kirsty seemed like another Scream Queen that could've joined Laurie and Nancy (from Elm Street). Pretty much 90% of the adaptation is from 2 scenes, where Nancy first summons them, and then later when Frank had been corralled into the trap.

I got my adept on my first match with him, literally minutes after I bought the DLC, so I'm most likely one of the first people with the achievement.

Killer: Pinhead's model is so pristine, even though his robes only have physics applied on the lower half. The nails on his head, the facial animations in the lobby, all the electrical animations (used as hand-drawn visual effects in the film), THE mother f*cking VOICE LINES, and the lament configuration's unique killer instinct.

It was cool to get a charm of the Lament Configuration Box for survivors as I really liked the design and it actually feels like a 'collectible' charm for once.

For the sake of the game, his power had to be simplified to using his classic 'chains' from the comics. Playing him feels like I'm playing Clown, but with more finesse and culture. His anti-loop power is weaker than his passive. It's like Nurse when you set a portal, and then like Hillbilly when you're curving your chain. But most of the time, the RNG of the chain spawns pretty much decide whether the attempt you had was useful or not. The passive pressure he gets for free is far more lethal than Nemesis' zombies as it actually does have a significant presence in the trial. If one survivor doesn't constantly go for the cube, it would backfire on them when the chain hunt starts and it gets harder to solve the cube as chains will harass you/ interrupt you while you solve it, letting the killer know where you are without you getting any progress done. But if you're not a coordinated team, all 4 of you might potentially go for the cube, and waste even more time not doing gens, giving the killer way more pressure than the Pig ever would.

For how you make use of his Passive, there are 3 scenarios:

• Scenario 1: You ignore the box while you're in a chase to secure a down than gamble it to start a new chase.
  
• Scenario 2: You teleport to the box whilst someone is doing it far away and you're not in a chase.
  
• Scenario 3: You interrupt a person solving the box to start a chain hunt.

You can then keep chaining chain hunts as long as you keep finding the person holding the cube, which is relatively easy as they would be oblivious, they could be interrupted by a chain if they didn't go into a corner to avoid it at all costs, and because chaining chain hunts upon chain hunts is the best part about this killer, cause it's a different kind of snowball compared to what other killers offer. This keeps them under so much pressure even while they have full control of their character and aren't slugged... so you can giggle behind their backs as they try as hard as possible to get out of this situation.

His perk, Hex: Plaything is fun if you like it when survivors cleanse totems because that means there will be lesser and lesser places for boons to be set and it has amazing synergy with Hex: Pentimento I hate Deadlock because it has prevented me from kicking the gen with the most progress too many times. I don't care about Gift of Pain.

His Mori used to tear your soul apart, but now just has such sights to show you. It is quite literally the exact recreation of Frank's death from the 1978 movie. He's too lazy to use his hands, so the chains pretty much do everything for him, including opening lockers, breaking pallets, walls, picking up survivors, etc but the animations look cool, so that's a-okay!

Music: His 8-meter sounds like sirens blazing at very quick intervals, and it feels like a remixed version of the intro sound from the Silent Hill map, but his chase feels like non-rhythmic noise. The highlight of this category are his voices. In the PTB, he had voices done by a random guy, which sounded very 'post-nut climax-y', so a lot of people memed on it. But later in 2022, they got hold of the original actor, Doug Bradley to submit a whole bunch of voices that fit right into the seeker of pleasure, and they are a joy to hear every time because they aren't overused to the point of irritation, unlike the Trickster's voice lines.

Along with this update came MMR, which might have been the reason the game peaked just a few days before this Paragraph launched. No one really talks about the NFTs anymore, so I didn't bother mentioning them in my review.

Adaptation: Surprisingly enough, I haven't played a single Resident Evil game. I played the RE 2 and 3 remake demos, I've seen pretty much all of Resident Evil 4 played out by multiple different people, but I've never finished a game myself (maybe because of the time commitment compared to movies) I was there for the live reveal of the characters during the 5th-anniversary live stream, and seeing a legacy killer icon such as Nemesis rather than the Resident Evil Village rep revealed as the killer was a sigh of relief. This was the first DLC that I had bought at launch because I started playing this game only in December 2020 and Trickster wasn't interesting enough to me that I'd buy him at launch.

Killer: Why is Nemesis called 'The Nemesis' in-game, when he should've been called 'The Tyrant'?

Nemesis' model in DBD is pretty much the same as the one from the RE3 remake, but at a lower resolution. Capcom pretty much did all the work for BHVR and provided them with the models for Nemesis, Jill, Claire, Leon, Chris, and the entire RPD map too. All they had to do was rig the survivors' models to DBD's survivor animations and put pallets and vaults all across RCPD. They also just copy-pasted the animations for being infected from the Plague to Nemesis.

Nemesis' power is comprised of 2 parts: His zombies and his tentacle.

• Scenario 1: You are an M1 killer and it takes 2 hits to down a survivor.
  
• Scenario 2: You are a slightly ranged killer, but it takes 3 hits to down a survivor.
  
• Scenario 3: You can break pallets and walls faster than any other killer, and you can move while doing so, zoning survivors in the process.
  
• Scenario 4: Zombies are attracted to noise and give free pressure (when they aren't bugged or stuck)

Nemesis is pretty much all 4 of these scenarios combined, but gives you the option to M1 instead of M2 whenever you want and vice-versa. There is always a perfect time to do one of them except for at the start of the game where you're trying to reach Tier 2. At Pallets, when survivors are already infected, you basically become the same as a 50-50 huntress but with the added benefit of breaking the pallet automatically if you miss.

His perk Lethal Pursuer does one thing, and does it well, no strings attached. It's quite good if you don't want to look around for survivors at the start of the game around gens and get right into the action. Stealth Killers finally got a perk that will help them put some early-game pressure on without worrying about being spotted while looking for survivors as much because after your identity has been revealed, you lose a lot of your advantage. His perk Eruption was really good as it was one of the few perks that worked with non-basic attacks too, so it was great with Blight, Twins, etc, especially after also applying Pop on one out of the many generators. Particularly strong for 3-gen situations where you would be chasing 1 person while leaving the others to do the gens you've marked. The cooldown is also respectable unlike Surge or Oppression, but there is significantly more setup required with this. Hysteria is worse than Nemesis (the perk), Retribution, or Plaything with the only advantage being that you know when it has been set off and know who exactly has been inflicted by it. But Obliviousness and Undetectable don't matter much with Nemesis because your thumping-foot-stomps are louder than even the Demogorgon's and survivors can determine your direction anyway.

His Mori is quite tame for a man of his stature and presence. Even though he does say 'S.T.A.R.S' when killing Jill and Chris, it would've been cooler if he had a Rocket Launcher for them specifically lol.

Music: His sound design when infecting survivors is quite creative and he has the most exciting chase music to listen to. It sounds like one of those Lorrys playing a song out of their horn, and it also sounds a bit like generic trailer music, but it feels so majestic getting chased/chasing while hearing this magnum opus of a score. It encompassed the hype the reveal during the anniversary stream brought to me and my online friends who were watching it that day. The jingle played near the type-writers/ save rooms when outside the Killer's terror radius is ripped straight from the game even though the chase music is a Michel F. April original.

Survivors: Leon and Chris look alright, but Jill and Claire have been made shorter and stouter to fit the female survivor rig in DBD. Even though Capcom literally provided the original models from the remakes, BHVR made them ugly... par for the course I guess. Leon's perk Flashbang is very fun to use. It incentivizes working on gens and rewards you by giving you on-demand Firecrackers, which can be used to rescue survivors from the killers' grasp even after they've been picked up by secretly dropping a flashbang around a corner that the killer might walk into. The number of times I was able to successfully do this was far more satisfying than getting a regular flashlight-save.

Flashbang was truly the highlight of this update as a survivor because I couldn't even play on the map for a long time after it was released. More on that on:

Map: This update brought along terrible performance on consoles and the RPD map was the biggest contender for crashing the game for many people. It took them only a few hours after the chapter launch to disable the realm for a month, pretty much killing any hype it could've gotten, and cementing the RE chapter as anything but 1st place in terms of the best licensed chapter launch in DBD. After the map was made available again, we were exposed to the triple-floored maze that it was... the biggest, darkest indoor map in the game, hated by the DBD community and berated for being the most survivor-sided map in existence. The map is quite well-detailed and very atmospheric too, unlike some of the reworked maps released earlier that year, there were no breakable walls needed because the map was supposed to not have infinites in the first place. In every multi-leveled map prior to this, the hatch couldn't spawn on the top floors, but in RPD, it can spawn literally anywhere...

The scratch marks are very inconsistent after you go past a corridor on this map, and if Shadowstep is active anywhere in the vicinity in an x or y-axis sphere, you will keep losing survivors and just a moment of hesitation is good enough to make a ton of distance.

RNG was starting to become lesser and lesser of a priority with DBD apparently because the map layout was always the same, and the only differences were in the positions of hooks, gens, and exit gates... Pretty much everything else is exactly the way you might have remembered it the last time you played here, but since the map is so big, you might not have even gone through certain segments of the map in 1 match alone. At many times, I felt Claustrophobic with this map, not knowing where to go because the straight path to a destination was never the right way. You get used to it after a while though, especially after survivor mains keep sending you here to abuse poor map design and make your life a living hell... but just don't take it seriously, and you'll be fine. It'd be interesting to see how I would experience RE2 remake after playing DBD when I get around to it eventually, will everything seem familiar to me? I wonder...

Apparently, a year of foreshadowing with cool lava-dripping cosmetics and Tome mentions later, they released the Blight on Halloween 2020, when all employees are working from home and their focus was on graphically updating older maps rather than making new ones for original chapters.

Killer: Blight is like Sonic the Hedgehog, pinging and ponging from every surface after slamming into a surface with dodgy collision (which was pretty much every object on every map) and then hitting survivors with pokos lunges.

BHVR has buffed this killer pretty much some or the other way on every update. Post-release, they made him taller, fixed a lot of the issues with collision sensing on maps, pretty much doing the whole 'map reworks' just to suit this killer better, buffing every add-on every single time, and having him dethrone Spirit as the most powerful killer (after Nurse of course) with a nerf to her. Maybe they are proud of making the pinnacle of killer power design and they wanted more and more people to play/go against him because he is in fact very fun to play and and to go against.

Speed was the key to making him so satisfying to play. Just like Hillbilly, mobility doesn't come from boring teleports, instead, you get to traverse the entire map so painlessly and at such high speeds, playing other killers just feels slow and boring. Just like Myers, every single one of his add-ons is fun to use, and playing vanilla once in a while isn't really necessary because all of his mechanics would still be intact no matter what add-ons you were running, unlike Hillbilly. Comparing him to Billy makes a lot of sense:

• Billy needs turn rate addons to have more control during your chainsaw sprint, while Blight has enough control.
  
• Billy needs an uninterrupted path to make the most out of his sprint, while the Blight doesn't care because his charges are split into 5.
  
• Billy can curve on loops to catch survivors off guard, Blight can use bump logic and slam mind-games on loops to get to survivors faster than they can react.

Blight was the killer that got me to Rank 1 killer after Freddy left me off at Rank 5. My build was 'Zenshin Tactics, Pop, Eruption and Tinkerer' and it's also a Zero-risk build that would've pretty much worked the same on Freddy, but I have an extra chase advantage knowing where pallets and vaults are with Blight.

His perk Undying pretty much broke the game, making the Hex meta even more powerful. I wasn't around for too long before it was nerfed, but they made Devour Hope go along with it better than Ruin, so I don't have any complaints. The perk earlier just made Ruin last forever, which was obviously unfair, but now it's used more like a [b[Hex Insurance[/b], just making Hex Builds more consistent. His perk Blood Favour is boring in terms of it being used as a tool for blocking out options from the survivors and giving you an unfair advantage in chase rather than the typical OP perks that give you gen regression. It could go well with Croud Control, Bamboozle, and Spirit Fury, blocking out any decision a survivor could even make, basically giving you a guaranteed down after it is triggered. Dragon's Grip is the worst perk in the game because it has 2 lengthy cooldowns if the survivor doesn't immediately touch the gens basically.

The Mori feels like a 'Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde' scene, because the killer was vaguely adapted from that.

Music: Blight's chase music is loud and bombastic to an annoying degree. I liked the layers best when he's 8 meters away and it's just the anticipation violins playing.

Survivor: Felix Kjellberg is a german dad who was the most handsome male survivor before Quentin's face was reworked. Now he just hangs around, not played much, has some average perks, and has teen DBD fangirls begging for shirtless skins.

Map: No map. That sucks... this was a dry year in terms of new content just because 3/4th of the chapters released in 2020 didn't have new maps because they were too focused on 'Realm Beyond', which I'm not even sure helped much for game health other than shutting off infinites with Breakable walls.

Adaptation: Freddy is one of the only licensed killers in this game that doesn't come from the original story/ first movie in the franchise. If the license was for the 1984 original, we could've had the likeness of more charming Freddy, Nancy, to accompany Lauri as a fellow Scream Queen, or even Johnny Depp instead of Walter Jr. (Quentin) as the survivor, the chase music from him chasing Tina Gray, and so on... I don't know how his power could've been translated though.

Killer: 2010 Freddy does look more menacing and would've fit into DBD better back in 2017, but the render used for his Killer Select Menu and in the reveal trailer looked far cooler than the emotionless and clay-like face he has in-game. The best parts about him visually are the low-pitched and echo-y laughs, the grinding sounds he makes with his clawed gloves at random intervals and being able to see it for ourselves during hit cooldown animation, the dream world filter on most maps turns the skybox into a pleasant grey, and the lullaby which is more catchy than Huntress'.

His power revolves around the 'Micro-Sleeps' concept from the 2010 reboot, which was something they could've easily converted into gameplay and they did, but they screwed it up by just placing debuffs on asleep survivors rather than making you feel like a Dream Demon once you pulled them in. But I've never played this iteration of Freddy, so I'm not going to comment more on that.

The reworked Freddy focused his power around blood splotches which doesn't really represent Freddy in any way except for the constant flickering in and out of reality. They made him a map traversing, debuff-applying, anti-looping, snore-inducing M1 killer who had such a low skill cap yet promised amazing results if you were to bring the 'BBQ, Tinkerer, Pop, and Ruin' full-meta build, that most of the matches in Asia were just Freddy, all the time. I got to Rank 5 for the first time with this, and I couldn't believe how easy it was to just shut off my brain and never second-guess my decisions with the info I got from Tinkerer and BBQ and get the easiest 4Ks of my life. They made it such that the 'skill' was in the selection pre-game and not the plays.

I had a lot of 5th Anniversary cakes on him because I was in the process of prestiging him post-nerf. By the end of P1-50, I had over 70 cakes on him. So I reluctantly played him just to use up those cakes, knowing that the survivors I would go against would probably have a boring experience. But I switched out my build from full-meta into 'Enduring, Spirit Fury, Coup de Grace, and Ruin' with Dream Pallets and had a blast churning through matches without feeling guilty because, hey, I was giving them double bloodpoints too. Also, Dream Pallets are infinitely more fun than Snares. If you wanted to play Dream Snare Freddy without using your teleports, it was just a much worse Clown. The new Disturbed Ward is the best realm for Pallet Freddy because unlike other maps, you don't really get to place them before you break a pre-existing pallet, but in this there are pretty much a hundred pallet locations waiting for you from the very start, leading to early game pressure.

His Mori was quite cinematic for its time as it was in third-person and comprised of multi-angle shots even from the killer's perspective. Even though it wasn't the most creative use of the Clawed Glove (unlike the Wall Breaking animation), it's still pretty cool.

His perk Bloodwarden is the best thing that has happened in this game after the end-game collapse. No Way Out may be more consistent and practical to get some extra end-game pressure, but killing all 4 survivors at the exit gates after they were done being too altruistic is just too much fun to pass on.

Survivor Previously a gremlin, now there's literally nothing interesting about him other than the fact he looks handsome I guess... but every survivor in this game looks like a supermodel now, so he doesn't stand out at all. I've never seen his perk Vigil be used in any meaningful way unless they take advantage of how it stacks like Streetwise and play as a 4 man team without running much. He and Freddy are the only characters in the game who never had any cosmetics sold apart from the ones they come with and the prestiged variants.

Map: Why does the Badham Preschool need to be categorized into 5 different variants when they are barely different? When I first played on this map, the red skybox used to be scary, since it was darker than the Yamaoka maps. I've never had a problem with this map, it was very much like Haddonfield but without the ugly blue tint and a more apt adaptation of a suburb, but it isn't an outstanding masterpiece like Midwich or Hawkins or something, and it's a shame that it doesn't have any references to the original film crammed into it as far as I know.

Adaptation: Stranger Things Season 1 was the second thing I watched after Halloween (1978) after playing the associated killer in DBD. It was heavily catering to 80s kids, which is pretty much when most Slashers featured in DBD originated anyways, so this might as well fit into the theme of the game, even more so than Saw. The only reason Steve and Nancy were picked as the survivors even though they weren't the main characters was because they were adults as 'all characters in the game are 18 or above'.

The sheer fact that a licensed DLC was removed so easily completely invalidates my statement from my main review that any character added into DBD felt permanent unlike licensing agreements in other games like Fall Guys or Rocket League where items were only supposed to be available in that window/ time period. So DBD can also have any of it's licensed content easily removed if the license holders just decide not to renew the contract. When you BUY the DLC on Steam, you've also signed a license agreement as part of the 'Steam Subscriber Agreement', and you will be able to access anything you've bought forever, but in a world of digital mortality, there is no meaning to owning anything anymore and that's probably why people are flooding to NFTs even though blockchain isn't sustainable. In the end, nothing is permanent, and you should stop worrying about availability of random unreal things in the future and just interact with it as long as you can.

Even though the DLC came back in 2023, there was a period where we not only didn't have Stranger Things, but we also lost the Attack on Titan Collection. Even before One Punch Man and Cowboy Bebop in Overwatch 2, DBD was able to perfectly fit those anime characters into a horror game without feeling completely cringe. Even making them available for purchase at any time for the span of a whole year is more expensive than doing drops like other games, I still respect the commitment and time they're giving to keep them in-store for as long as they've been doing even though its a live-service game and nothing will be permanent. My thoughts on their FOMO event cosmetics are a different thing altogether, where discounts were replaced with sheer availability, but I guess its the same logic as with clutter in the DLC listings...

Map: I was never one to hate Hawkins. It was actually my most favorite map as killer. It was unique, a change of pace from all the maps with Standard Tiles and Jungle Gyms, and somehow managed to still fit into DBD's artstyle with all of it's post-apocalyptic-alien yet organic setting in a research lab with glass and see through-bridges. It was much different from the reworked Lery's Memorial too. I agree that it was confusing to find the open door/entrance to a room, pretty much every pallet was unsafe, going upstairs was a death sentence, stealth killers had a field trip, there was no grass whatsoever... but it was among the first few maps I played as Bill during Free Weekend, and the half of the map that turned turquoise when you entered it, the constant thumping noise coming from the testing area, the various bridge structures not seen anywhere else, the secret Polyester room just for the Nurse, the moving rats on the hooks, the tri-directional way the exit gates opened, the best hole in the game, etc. all leading up to the sad reality that most people have clips of this map only on low graphics settings and that I won't have any recallection of what it used to be like... I'm already missing it quite a bit. But no one will care for it's a live service game after all... eventually none of the licenses will be renewed, BHVR will move onto different projects and the game will be dead... and I will move on too, but someone who has invested this much time into a game when they're reached 18 will remember a game differently compared to someone at 12 or 34.

Killer: Dem-dems was never too special of a killer other than the fact that he was a 'creature' and didn't have a gender. Rule34 artists however decided to consider him as a male and proceeded to create digital sin since he was pretty much naked like Spirit and Hag to begin with. His portals were useful if you really needed them, but I don't bother setting them up if my chases are going good without a break and his shred is old reliable and the easiest killer to recommend Save the Best for Last on. I thought it was cute how the tips of his mouth petals twitched in his idle/walking animations. Many people complained that survivors should have been pulled into the Upside-down and had to fight Demo there, but that would've just been another case of the Dream World, and look where that turned out. The white portal idea was good enough, but sometime you jitter when traversing the upside-down because you collide into random things that stick out under the map. Hearing sounds of generators while under the ground is unreliable too because sometimes sound works and other times it goes too far. He is not an M1 killer, but isn't a ranged killer either; he is both. Many people like to call him the most balanced killer because he has everything in his kit: map traversal, range if needed, information gathering from channeling the abyss, and even a little bit game delay by making survivors cleanse the portals.

Demo has the Pig Syndrome where his Brown and Yellow addons that help on chase are better than his Purple and Green ones that buff the portals and traps respectively. Remember when I said the Doctor's more was a classic because he fries someone's face? Demo tried to rip it off their neck and opens his flower mouth to let out a screech... it's more comical/slapstick than an actual gory Mori.

Music: Do Doo Do Doo Do Doo x2
Tun Tyun Tun Tyun Tun Tyun x∞

Just like how Halloween's score was converted to DBD, Michael has done the same thing here by making the popular Stranger Things intro theme and made it more grizzly and action-packed rather than synthwave. The lobby music is more faithful to the tone of the sound from the show. Before Demo, every killer got unique lobby music but not chase music, but from this point on, every killer got unique chase music too but they got rid of the idea of having different themes for killer (killer's perspective) and for survivor.

Survivors: Steve and Nancy, like I said, this was the first time they released 2 survivors in chapter, so there were 9 perks in total this time. All of the Nancy perks were okay and all of the Steve and Demo perks were meh. But still, when they announced that Stranger Things is leaving DBD and they said it's the 'Last Chance Sale', I fell into the FOMO and bought 2 sets for Nancy, 2 sets for Steve and 1 set for Demogorgon... I had never bought cosmetics from Auric Cells on DBD before that because there is no incentive to do so as they will be there forever. In fact, unlike the limited-item shop in Rocket League, it's better to wait for outfits to go on sale for Auric Cells but buy them immediately if it were Shards because those never go on sale.

Atleast all the sets I bought were half-off, and the ones I didn't buy, I couldn't care any **** about like Cumogorgon.

And for the record, the perk names will always be Baby Sitter, Camaraderie, Second Wind, Better Together, Fixated, Inner Strength, Surge, Mindbreaker, and Cruel Limites/ Confinement.

The Doctor is a killer that nails the theme that he's trying to portray. His power is very oppressive to the senses and can quite literally demolish a team of new players. The graphically updated Lery's Memorial Institute is amazing. The central area with all of its moving parts, sounds, and lights are so fitting of Doctor. His model looked really goofy before, but now they have made him look really mean with the detail in his eyes and mouth.

His power, apart from the add-ons that basically take everything from the first paragraph and go even more wacko with the effects, is the shock therapy attack. Just like Pyramid Head, spamming it works out eventually but planning it such that the detonation will strike right before a survivor will vault or drop a pallet is quite satisfying too (seeing them squirm around not being able to do anything is a different kind of joy than the instant gratification you get from PPHead.

His perk, Monitor and Abuse is a great way to confuse survivors who aren't able to see you directly as you hop in and out of chases. It's specifically the best on Myers (and used to be on Deathslinger), but it's also good with 24m killers as well because of the increased movement speed perceived due to the higher FOV when not in chase.

His Mori is classic: build up static, pass it through the survivor's head, have it sizzle erratically until they are toast.

Music: He didn't have a unique terror radius at first, but at some point, before I started playing the game I suppose they added it. The terror radius and lobby music are meh, but the Chase Music is pretty much Psychedelic Trance music. It may seem like noise, but I feel like it represents the twisted madness that Herman has and his obsession with sparks and kinetic electricity.

Survivor: Feng Moon was the cutest survivor after Cheryl, but after the Survivor models update, they did something to her face that makes me hate it... As a new player, I used Lithe, Technician, and Alert a lot. She might just be the best pick for beginner survivors, and that would explain the number of Feng mains from consoles as this chapter is free there. Now, Technician is the best sandbagging perk: Go to a gen that is about to be completed by a teammate, miss a thousand skill checks, and get it back to 0%.

When I first played against her, I thought she was just a real pig mutated into female human form (like a Centaur but for pigs), until I looked up 'Amanda Young' on Google and saw that she was a human character in the films (I had never heard of any of the movies that DBD adapted prior to that search)

Adaptation: Rather than taking an old man with brain cancer like Jigsaw to fight against an old man with lung cancer like Bill, they decided to take Jigsaw's errand girl, Amanda Young who was a junkie who liked to self-harm... perfect for DBD's audience :D

Killer: Her crouch is too slow to be considered tea-baggable. She's a cute little oinker who makes cute noises when stunned by a pallet, when charging her ambush, when sitting on you while setting a trap, etc. As the killer, you can force the survivors to boop your snoot and you can pretend to Urban Evade with cute Cheryls if there are any.

Memes aside, her power is just an amalgamation of various references from the first 3 Saw movies. Her kit feels lacking for this reason alone as cooler ideas would have clashed with the IP since Saw isn't traditionally a Slasher series. The only part of it that's horror-related is its gore, but it's toned/muted as **** within DBD. Her Reverse Bear Traps are RNG-based, as in they'll either give you no pressure at all and they get the key on their first try or you get a couple of seconds out of the survivor who has to spend time running across the entire map until they get it off. Without add-ons, even an active trap can be removed with 4 searches, so unless you interrupt them or get another hook state in between them removing their trap, they have no reason to be worried. But if you do this, they'll feel like you're tunneling them, because you technically would be. So basically, trying to get head pops out of pig isn't a viable strategy without Purple Add-ons.

The only reason she has such a high kill rate is that new players don't know how to go against her because they don't bother reading the tips on the loading screen I guess...

Okay, what about her ambush dash then? It's pretty much a weaker Wraith. There are Brown and Yellow add-ons to make this playstyle more comfortable. She is good on small waste-loops where the pallet isn't dropped but she is so short when crouched (even shorter than Victor) that you won't even see if the survivor has held W from the junk-loop without Amanda's Letter. If they didn't leave, then it was almost a guaranteed hit in those cases before Dead Hard Validation (because your Dash can now be cut short because the server has decided it was not a hit, but the client still stops the dash thinking it was a hit). In standard tiles, however, you gotta be fluent in M1 killer mind-games or you're not too likely to succeed because ambush is pretty much useless there unless you're trying to do something Ghostface would by hiding his red-light mid chase.

Amanda's Mori should've cut off a Jigsaw piece from the survivor's flesh to send them a message or something... her Mori is short and lacks flashiness and I feel my idea would've been more fitting.

Music: Hello Zepp isn't in the game, which was a wasted opportunity in my opinion considering the number of times Lionsgate and BHVR have collaborated in promoting Saw in DBD (unlike other licenses like Freddy or Halloween)

Survivor: Tapp has Tenacity and Detective's Hunch, both fine perks. As for him, he's quite forgettable (maybe because he doesn't make cute pig noises, idk). Amanda being both the survivor and the killer would've been more interesting than having Detective Tapp in my opinion. But hey, he's here and he's here to stay.

Map: All the rooms in The Game are references to traps/people from the first 3 Saw movies as well, even things from different places are put together in this one map. The graphical rework for this map was released alongside The Disturbed Ward, but unlike the latter which added just 1 breakable wall, the Meat Plant has 2 breakable walls between every two rooms. But when the generator behind the doors is completed, all of these walls become pretty much useless. If you bring Windows of Oppurtunity to the map, you'll realize it's literally Pallet Town, and that there's like 1 vault in the entire map.

Overall, I don't think I'm disappointed enough to give it a 'not recommended', and if you're an incel who wants to play as a sadistic and jealous zoophile who likes to put on severed pig heads on her head, think she's cute/cooler than the Legion, and feel like it's a very apt adaptation of the crux behind the traps in Saw, you could buy her. If you look at her concept art for cosmetics and stuff, she looked way cooler in those compared to the model in the real game. You just have to make your choice.