As I scramble amidst a rusty, dimly lit basement of an unknown home, I can hear the cackling of my pursuers through the walls, the haunting sound of their revving chainsaws not far ꦛbehind. I need to escape, but I can only narrowly avoid Leatherface’s watchful eye so many times before my luck runs dry. I desperately scavenge in the dark for lockpicks as he stalks my friends, picking them off one by one as I try to formulate my own way out of this twisted hellscape. Then one of them swings the loud shutters open. I shove him to the floor and sprint up the stairs, stumbling into the grass outside as the entire family pours out after me like a prodded ant hive. I made it.
Sumo Digital and Gun Interactive’s adaptation of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is as thrilling as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the 1974 movie it’s based on, capturing the raw voyeuristic horror of its tangible brood of serial killers in a way we haven’t seen in nearly 50 years. Wearing its 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead by Daylight inspirations on its sleeve, the game manages to carve out a unique identity by emphasising stealth and empowering its killers. You don’t need to be hooked three times to die, it just takes a few swings of the chainsaw or slashes of the knife. And to make things even more unsettling, there are three killers stalking you at once, w♚hile Grandad sits in h👍is chair, demanding blood as he occasionally lets out a siren call that marks your every move. TCM is all about being quiet and sticking to the shadows, avoiding chases at all costs unless you want to meet an early, bloody grave.
Asymmetric horror games are infamous for having long queues if you choose to play as a killer. Nobody wants to be a survivor, it’s dull. But in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the thrill of breaking free and outwitting the family is every bit as engaging as shoving a chainsaw through someone’s stom🎐ach. Surviving i⛎s a tense experience since getting cornered gets you killed almost instantly, with no way for your friends to help. Hiding in the grass and watching Leatherface angrily run around while yelling is like experiencing the film first-hand, and even though ✨there are three killers that can murder you on the spot, it feels balanced.
The objectives are simple—find a fuse for an electric door, lockpick a gate, or blow a valve. The difficulty comes in timing your escape, keeping out of sight as you sneak past each passing killer. There’s a gratification to narrowly avoiding certain death, a rush of adrenaline as you manage to unlock the door to a final area. The tension sticks because of how formidable the killers are, but you still have the tools to fight back, sho𝓰ving them to the ground and sneaking through cracks in walls. But it’s temporary and usually resets 𝕴your progress, making each match a constant dance as you retread the same steps.
😼What you have here is much more fragmented. Working together only ever hindered the team in my experience—if one of you got caught, three killers would descend on you like a pack of hungry lions, gnashing away until they’d won in a waterfall of viscera. Despite everything slasher films have taught me—don’t split up—this is a game about the individual. You aren’t going to screw your team over if you die or mess𝓰 up, since there are so many different exits that anyone can unlock alone.
If anything, spreading the killers thin across t♉he map is the best play, which is a refreshing change of pace that hopefully curbs toxicity. We’re still talking about an online game, but if victory doesn’t hinge on every one of your teammates surviving, that should lead to a few less angry messages. It also means that you can focus on yourself and enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay, rather than getting caught in the weeds of meta strategies. This is ultimately a horror game, and nothin♎g rips you out of tension like tactical competitive planning and frustration towards you for daring to be scared by a game designed to do just that.
Playing as the killer is still fun. Of course it is, you get to go around scaring the shit out of strangers before cutting them into tiny pieces. But I was anxious that Leatherface would overshadow the entire family. The game requires him to be in every matc🐠h, so you can’t go a few minutes without the sound of a chainsaw buzzing. Yet the others have just as much care put into their designs, and I often found myself picking the Hitchhiker and Sissy before even thinking of Leatherface.
Each has their own abilities, but it isn’t just skills that make them stand out. Leatherface is a big guy, so he can’t squeeze through cracks in the wall. Sissy isn’t as big, so she can follow survivors more closely and keep swinging a fast-flitting knife, even spewing toxic gas to choke them. She can also poisonꦫ the h✅ealth vials lying around, sabotaging the one safe harbour victims have to fall back on.
The thrill of stepping into the shoes of an iconic sla♒sher villain is enticing, but once the novelty wears off, experimenting wꦜith each member of the family proves to be just as fulfilling. The frantic chases that come from the more slender characters as you cut through room after room serve to complement the slow, thundering presence of Leatherface. There’s nothing like narrowly escaping a lengthy run-in with one of the family members just to end up face-to-face with that monster.
Where Texas Chain Saw Massacre falters is in its maps. They’re expertly designed and serve as labyrinths to master with winding paths to different exits, all of which keep the killers on their toes. But the rural Texan countryside eventually blends together. There’s little aesthetic diversity, which can be confusing at first as it’s difficult to separate them until you’ve explored each more in-depth. The game is styled on the ‘74 movie, down to splitting chain and saw in the title, so I’m not optimistic about the so-bad-they’re-good sequels getting any rep, but doing so would’ve helped diversify the maps more. As it stands, they could all be part of one bigger level—it’s hard to pick tܫhem apart.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the asymmetric horror game fully realised. It weave🌞s the horror of one of the slasher genre’s most guttural🎃 and unsettling movies with the thrill of Dead by Daylight’s action beautifully and stands a chance at finally offering a true competitor in the genre.
Bringing survival horror to your PC and consoles, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre draws from the classic 1974 horror movie. You play as various members of the Slaughter family in order to hunt down fresh victims, or you can play as one of the vic🔯tims in the hopes of escaping their bloody clutches.
