Dead by Daylight is a fairly unique game, if you discount Evolve, playing out as a 4 v 1 experience where a single killer is tasked with tracking down and killing four survivors, while the four survivors have to mend five generators and escape before they are sacrificed to the Entity. As you can see from our recent review, the game itself is fun and tense, challenging even, but does suffer from a feeling of deja vu fairly quickly. So what’s the best way to get rid of this feeling? Why, introduce new content of course – that is where the Silent Hill Chapter DLC comes in.
Luckily, the developers of Dead by Daylight – Behaviour Interactive – have not rested on their laurels with this game, pushing out a host of great DLC. These have included some iconic killers, such as Ghostface from Scream, and also some famous survivors, like Ash from The Evil Dead (still one of my favourite characters of all time, by the way), as well as new maps.
The latest of these packs is the Silent Hill Chapter, and I think you can see where we’re going here! If you had to pick an iconic baddie from the Silent Hill franchise, who would it be? That’s right, old Pyramid Head himself, although here he is called The Executioner, for some reason.
Now clearly, with that big metal pyramid on his head, and with a honking great knife to drag around, you’d be surprised to learn that he handles like a cheetah on speed. Luckily he doesn’t. The big guy does feel his weight – ponderous and slow moving – at least until he gets up to speed; even then he never feels exactly fast and fluid, which is exactly as you’d expect. He comes equipped with some new powers as well, adding three new perks to the pool of those available in the game. These are, in descending order of helpfulness – perceived by me of course, your mileage may vary – the Trail of Torment, which means that after kicking and damaging a generator, you become undetectable for up to 16 seconds. The slight downside to this is that during these 16 seconds the survivors can see the generators just as well as you can. The second perk is amusing – Deathbound. Basically, with this perk, if the survivors play together as a team, and one of them heals another, as long as they are more than 32 metres away from you the one doing the healing will scream, showing you exactly where they are, and will also suffer from the Oblivious status affliction if they move more than 16 metres away from the person they healed. No good deed goes unpunished, right?
The last perk is called Forced Penance, and if a survivor takes a hit while defending another survivor, they will have the Broken status effect put upon them. I’ve never seen anyone help a survivor out too much – it is very much the law of the jungle out there – and so it doesn’t seem to do much, but it’s a nice addition if you feel the need for it.
Pyramid Head’s, sorry… The Executioner’s special attack is that of Rites of Judgement, and involves him dragging his big heavy knife through the ground, leaving a trail where he walks. Survivors who pass over this trail are afflicted with Torment, and it will also trigger the Killer Instinct buff on The Executioner. If a survivor is dying and afflicted with Torment, he or she can be sent to a special Cage of Atonement, without having to pick them up and lug them across the map to a hook. If anything, it saves you a bit of time.
As every Yin has a Yang, every new Killer is balanced out with a new survivor, and this pack is no different. Here we are introduced to Cheryl Mason, who has for some reason changed her name from the one we all know her as, Heather. After escaping Silent Hill, you’d have thought that she would have done her time as monster bait, but it appears that is sadly not the case.
Her backstory seems to be that Claudia is still able to call to her, despite being dead, and after a little light dimension hopping Cheryl ends up with the rest of the survivors. Again, as is traditional for new characters, Cheryl also has three new perks. These are that of Soul Guard, which allows Cheryl to have the Endurance status effect after being healed, making her tougher for up to eight seconds, as well as Blood Pact that brings some kind of psychic link with the Survivor who is currently the Killer’s Obsession; after either healing or being healed by this obsession, both Survivors can move faster for a few seconds.Â
Finally, Repressed Alliance activates after you have spent a while fixing generators in a level, allowing Cheryl to call upon the Entity to block a generator for 30 seconds. Affected generators are also visible to all Survivors, so that is jolly helpful. To be honest, there’s nothing really about Cheryl that stands out for me. Her perks aren’t great (for instance, if she becomes the Killer Obsession, one perk is deactivated entirely) and she just seemed a bit, well, wet, and certainly not a badass like I remember her from the Silent Hill games. There are better Survivors to choose, sadly.
The penultimate piece of the DLC is the new map, and here the development team have really gone to town. The new map, Midwich Elementary School, looks like it was lifted whole from the Silent Hill world and plonked into this game. The attention to detail is outstanding: the layout of the school is exactly as I remember it, right down to the location of the doors and the courtyard in the middle. The same grim decor, the same look, the same rusted world visuals – everything about this map is almost a love letter to the original map in Silent Hill. I for one applaud the effort that has clearly gone into getting this map absolutely bang on.
The last little bit of content that is included is a new universal charm, called the Seal of Metatron. This is a unique item to this DLC, and cannot be obtained anywhere else and cannot be bought on its own.
So, we’ve had a look at what’s included in Dead by Daylight: Silent Hill Chapter on Xbox One, but how does it play? Well, it’s pretty much a story of two halves. As I stated above, I find Cheryl to be a bit ineffectual, to be brutally honest. The Executioner, on the other hand, takes me right back to my PlayStation-owning, Silent Hill-playing heyday, and I love the way that he moves, exactly as you’d imagine. His perks are pretty good, his special power can be devastating, especially if you deploy it in a choke point, and he’s an all round charismatic character; an icon almost. The new map is great as well, a real blast from the past, and with lots of nooks and crannies to hide in it can turn into a real game of cat and mouse. Best of all, you get all this for the low, low price of £6.39, which sounds like pretty good value to me.
Of course, I’m somewhat biased as I love the Silent Hill games a great deal, but I suppose if Pyramid Head leaves you cold, then you may not enjoy this as much as I have. However, having fond memories of being chased around by Pyramid Head, I recommend this to fans of great horror games everywhere. Is it worth the money? Hell yes!
