Look, I enjoyed Dead By Daylight. It was a great take on the horror genre to give people ways to play along with their friends. Some people get to play survivors, and some get to play as the killer. You’ve gotta make your way out without getting demolished by the monster/kliller. Then came games like Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Killer Klowns From Outer Space. When one thing succeeds, there are going to be other ones that follow. Except now, the market feels a bit flooded and Dead By Daylight is the game that keeps going while others turn off their servers and stop the content flowing.

It’s a frustrating time for people who pay full price for these games and expect to get their value out of them. It’s also a frustrating experience when the popularity wanes and the games have no content outside of that multiplayer feature. So what’s a horror video game fan to do? How can we fix this issue and make horror games that people would be proud of? Well, you can look to the past.

There have been plenty of horror-themed games like Alien: Isolation, The Thing, and even Saw that have captured what the movies were going for. But this new trend of just reskinning Dead By Daylight has led to stagnation and not a lot of creativity.

It’s hard to make a game based on Halloween or Friday the 13th where you don’t just end up with the Dead By Daylight gameplay. They perfected it on the first try with that formula. But there has to be a better way to craft a single-player experience. These multiplayer online games might be fun, but the reason why we love these horror movies can be translated to a single-player experience.

Alien: Isolation works so well because it takes the lore and story of Alien and brings it to an absolutely terrifying gameplay experience. The thrill of the Xenomorph hunting you, the confined corridors, little to no light, it all is designed perfectly to scare you. Imagine a first-person Halloween or A Nightmare On Elm Street with the same AI as Isolation. There’s some room to explore here or even go back to something like the terrible NES games based on these movies.

We want creativity. We want fun. Fans want something that’ll make them feel like it’s worth spending their money on. This current crop of video games doesn’t feel like that. It feels like they’re made to cash in on the market and flame out just as fast. For developers and game companies, making a quick buck might be easy, but it ends up screwing the company over in the court of public opinion.

I know when I see a trailer for a new horror game, I get excited, video games are the most interactive and interesting medium out there. But when it ends up looking like another Dead By Daylight clone, it destroys any interest.

There are plenty of game developers out there that would love to tackle something as interesting as A Nightmare On Elm Street, Halloween, or any other big horror IP, they just have to not shackle themselves to the same old same old.

For more on Halloween, make sure to check out THS Fright-A-Thon!

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