It’s been a big week for democracy in PvP games starting with the word “dead.” Thursday, Deadlock reprised its in-game voting table where players can vote on which of the next six heroes will release first. Then on Friday, Dead by Daylight opened up a voting booth of its own where players can select the appearance for the next killer and survivor.
You can cast your vote on the game’s website, where a spooky book seemingly bound in flesh contains various art concepts. There are four possible choices for the survivor, each of which has either heterochromia or a single blind eye. The figures are all scarred and grizzled to varying degrees, and they come with flavorful taglines if you expand the image: “Oft underestimated, your particular insights gave you an advantage in the wasteland,” one reads.
The design-agnostic description for the new survivor dubs them “a spiritual scientist” and “a divine investigator from a collapsed world.” It’s not clear how their theological insights will help them prevail against Chucky or the animatronics from Five Nights at Freddy’s, but I digress.
As is standard for Dead by Daylight, the killers look a hell of a lot cooler. The vibe here is a tyrannical angel or god of some sort, looking to “deliver your almighty punishments.” The three designs include a creepy take on a winged angel with a halo and spiky legs, a slightly different winged angel with a blindfold, and the clear choice as far as I’m concerned: a screaming face in a black cloud accompanied by huge floating hands.
Whatever people go with, it’s nice to see an evocative killer-survivor combo that isn’t lifted from a Netflix series or Assassin’s Creed. Not to be a curmudgeon, but it’s getting harder and harder to remember a time when Dead by Daylight was populated solely by its own characters and didn’t feel a bit like Fortnite’s goth cousin.
