As I crept through the basement of the Sawyer family in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (opens in new tab), past dangling bones, rotting blood buckets, and rusty meathooks, I experienced something novel for a multiplayer horror game: Fear. My years simmering in the Dead By Daylight (opens in new tab) meta has severed me from the actual immersion of the setting. Yes, on screen, I’m running away from a psychopath in an abandoned junkyard, but really I’m maximizing my angles, monitoring my health pool, and keeping an eye on my cooldowns. The horror itself becomes ancillary the more you see the bones of the mechanics. But when I was crouched in the darkness, a few feet away from a roiling, pissed-off Leatherface, the existential despair of the situation seeped past the PC screen.
