The Evil Dead game perfectly captures the joys of torturing Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi-style
Playing as the "Evil" side in Evil Dead: The Game is a fantastic recreation of Raimi's gleeful horror chaos
Games Features Sam Raimi
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The moment I kind of fell in love with Evil Dead: The Game is the moment that I realized it was actually Sam Raimi Simulator 2022.
That is, I went from thinking the new licensed multiplayer game was pretty much just a moderately capable clone of the Friday The 13th game from a few years back—mixed with a bit of good, old, dead Evolve—until the exact moment that I first played as the titular Evil. (Instead of the Survivor team, made up of a lot of Bruce Campbells, and a few other characters from throughout the franchise). Which is when I discovered the single genius idea that elevates this entire package above those gnarly roots: When you play as the Evil in The Evil Dead, you don’t just play as a bunch of Deadites or evil clones or skeletons. You play as Raimi’s camera, careening madly through the woods to hunt people down, leap inside their bodies, and unleash chaos.
Genius. Genius!
In other respects, Evil Dead will remind you of those other asymmetric multiplayer games listed above; Survivors run around completing objectives (in this case, gathering a magic knife and pages from the Necronomicon) while the Evil is functionally on defense. The Survivor gameplay has a few interesting quirks, including a class based structure to differentiate Evil Dead’s Support version of Ashley Williams from the Warrior version found in Army Of Darkness. (Evil Dead 2 Ash is a Hunter; there are non-Ash characters, but are you really going to miss out on all those newly recorded Bruce Campbell quips by choosing them?) As with lots of games of this ilk (dating back to the evolving tactics of the Left 4 Dead games), much of the focus is on locking down enemies so they can’t use debilitating attacks to split up the party. It’s all fine, probably.
I wouldn’t really know, though, because after one Survivor-side match, I went Evil and never looked back.
It’s just too goddamn fun: Racing through the woods like an improvised Steadicam, setting up ambushes and fear-inducing traps, and then exploiting that fear by possessing the Survivors to make them attack each other. Saber Interactive may have only done a so-so job of recreating the feeling of being Ash and his pals, but the sense of being the invisible hand orchestrating all the chaos that goes down in these movies is damn near perfect. (Including an energy system that forces you to give your victims a breather before initiating a new burst of chaos.) I have cackled so many times while playing with my fresh meat: Spawning a bunch of Deadites to swarm a team, only to have one back into an Evil Tree Trap that thrashes them, allowing me to possess the pathetic mortal fool so that they can open fire on their buddies. Their friends run to grab supplies from a chest to recover—boom, evil hand leaps out and throttles them.
If Raimi’s great revelation was in spotting the slapstick heart beating under so much slasher horror, then Evil Dead: The Game embraces that principle. You always got the sense that Raimi was having just a bit too much fun torturing his old pal Bruce, and the game successfully exports that sensation, encouraging you to be a monstrous bastard even before Evil Ash starts stomping across the battlefield, summoning his skeletal army. After just a couple of days with it, I’m having an absolute blast.
Will I be playing it two weeks from now? Hard to say. There’s only a handful of (big) maps, and there may, in fact, be a limit to how many times I can chuckle evilly as an enemy team falls into fear and despair. (God or Evil God or whoever save us from a solved multiplayer meta.) But I’m having a damn groovy time with it right now.
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Hold up, they put the goddamn tree in it?
yup. watched CallMeKevin play it, and it seems you can whip people as a tree if they get too close 😛
Hold up, they put goddamn Ethan Hawke in it?
I wonder if Ethan Hawke or James Franco actually carries the fetus.
I believe Franco has the eggs, but then passes them to Hawke to carry in his belly, like seahorses.
That’s Ray Santiago, from Ash vs. Evil Dead! I ran into him a couple months ago in Silver Lake, he was sitting outside eating at a restaurant we went to. My wife (not knowing who he was) stopped to ask if we should eat there, he said yeah, I said “But would Bruce Campbell eat here?” and he guffawed and said “He might drink here.”
We…ummm…don’t talk about that tree. It knows what it did.
he never calls!
made up of a lot of Bruce CampbellsDoes it have Brisco County Jr., the forgotten Bruce Campbell?After being really lazy and just rolling with the Crystal Sword for much of Elden Ring’s post-Stormveil game, I’m finally on Team Moonveil Katana. The Crystal Sword does really good damage for my current build, but…it’s no Moonveil Katana. Not only is its damage comparable to the Crystal Sword, but it also has that cool sheate-and-strike (with moonlight magic!) skill (useful for staggering the beefier regular enemies; not sure how useful it is against bosses). The biggest downside thus far is that it takes way too long to guard counter.Pro-tip for those who hold their controllers with a death-grip: Fighting on horseback was always a pain for me because I have a tendency to click L3 (on the PS4 controller) in particularly tense moment, which unsummons your ghost-horse friend (or if you happen to be on foot, it causes your character to start sneak-crouching), which is not ideal. However, I found out that if you just unbind that button altogether in the settings (labeled as “crouch/stand-up”), it prevents that from happening. Granted, this means you have to use the spectral whistle to unsummon Torrent—and it completely removes the ability to sneak—but it’s a good temporary fix for times (like when a supertoxic swamp makes it hard to travel by foot) when you just need to be horse-bound for an extended period of time.
“Does it have Brisco County Jr., the forgotten Bruce Campbell?”The only reason I ever watched Burn Notice was simply for The Chin. If they could have found a way to license all the primary characters Campbell has played over the years and plugged them into this game it would have been fantastic.
Or even better, Jack of All Trades Bruce Campbell, Uncle Sam’s favorite son! A-ha-ha! (swings out of frame on rope)
Thank you so much for the L3 tip. Literally a game changer.
to be fair, I’m still terrible at horseback combat–I can never get the hang of the hit-boxes/hit-timing of my weapon and I tend to get disoriented quickly with my friend the lock-on to guide me–but it does make it far less frustrating learning it. Maybe I go back to the Swamp of Aeonia and try to take down that commander again, so I can…*cough*…drain the swamp.
“only to have one back into an Evil Tree Trap that thrashes them”As long as that’s the only thing the tree does to players.
Sam Rami thought the tree scene went too far, Rob Tapert was the one who thought the tree scene didn’t go far enough. He was also the one responsible for the naked girls being lead around in chains by skeletons in “Army of Darkness”
Lol when I think of Tapert, I always think of an anecdote on the commentary of Evil Dead II. Apparently, Tapert asked Denise Bixler if she wanted to play “Screen Door” so he could “slam you all night.” Presumably Denise was in the MSU shirt Tapert had wardrobe sew to make more revealing.
And yet, he’s still married to Lucy Lawless.
When I found out about his marriage to Lucy Lawless I immediately hated him. I don’t care that he’s responsible for my favorite movie. Get your hands off Xena!
*Bruces Campbell
Gonna try to finish up The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story this weekend. As far as FMV games go, this one is a lot of fun and well-acted, though perhaps a bit too much on the theatrical side for some people’s tastes. Still, I enjoy it for what it is.Also probably dipping back into the thoroughly mediocre Just Cause 4 just to see if it improves. I was looking for a big dumb action game, and I guess this fits the bill, but it’s just not very much fun, in part because it’s janky as hell, but also because it could stand to be a bit more goal-oriented and less loosely constructed.
I love me some Bruce Campbell in general and Evil Dead specifically, but this is a game formula I can only enjoy watching, not playing. Sounds interesting to watch, though, and it definitely sounds like something that’s going to sweep through the horror streamers I watch, so I’ll likely get to watch a few rounds before too long.I finished up Lighting Returns last weekend. I appreciate that they severely knocked down the stat reward for the main bosses on subsequent loops so the game’s not too one-sided, but with an appropriate number of ethers in reserve, nothing in the game stands a chance at being hard. Even on the brink of finishing my second playthrough, I found myself trying to find more sidequests, eliminate more Last Ones, see alternate branches of the story. I think the whole conceit of God as a giant space monster that needs to be taken down by an energy beam made of the power of teamwork is dumb, but everything the story tried to do on a smaller scale worked really well. Except Caius and Yeul, the two characters who only have one emotion apiece. In any case, I will likely be revisiting this game a few years down the road.I’ve started poking my way through I Am Setsuna, now the oldest game on my backlog. There are two things that really stand out so far: one, that – even though I heard the game had a piano score – I didn’t expect it to be just a piano with no accompaniment or obvious editing. It works. It’s just an unexpected choice. It helps give the game the unfiltered vibe of a folk tale told at a centuries-old pub. Second, I appreciate how the segments of the game are so far all self-contained stories that give more insight into the world and allow perfect stopping points when they wrap up. I’m still very early in the game, so I’m sure bigger character arcs are in the works for my party members, but for now I’m enjoying the low-commitment, bite-sized chunks of the game I’ve played while preparing for other things.Like… today we’re finishing Pandemic Legacy: Season 0. It has been a ride, and waiting weeks between sessions for the group to all be available has been agonizing, but the finale is here, and I’m excited for the extra challenge of a final showdown, for the conclusion of the story, for the freedom to look through the story choices we didn’t make, and for the freedom to, like, play other board games, invite other people over, get back to my neglected favorites, open choices up to games other people bring over, and learn some of my unplayed games. Mansions of Madness, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Isle of Cats, Everdell, Mysterium, Zombicide, Race for the Galaxy, Terraforming Mars, The Crew. My god, there are so many games.
Rifftrax the Game!My buddies and I have been writing and performing movie riffs for years so the game is kind of a limited version of that. But I love writing riffs so much I still find the game fun.As a bonus, it’s like a Jackbox game in that only one of you has to own the game.
God, that sounds insufferable
Oops, typo. Let me fix that.“God, MillignaOOO sounds insufferable.”That’s better!
there are non-Ash characters, but are you really going to miss out on all those newly recorded Bruce Campbell quips by choosing them?Yes because they include Kelly and Pablo who rule. So I powered through the end of Shadowbringers in FFXIV recently. Well, the main plot end, not the between-expansions stuff, you get what I mean. They sure do make it seem like you gotta urgently avert the end of the world while also introducing a whole new zone. Good stuff. I still maintain my position that Minfillia got a raw deal.Also making my way through the third act of Dragon Quest XI. I gotta say it’s not flowing as well as the first two parts, but there’s still fun to be had. It’s mostly a question of getting some characters back up to speed.
But does the game adequately capture Kelly’s masterclass-level profanity?
So far, I think so. She’s my go to as my friends always pick Ash. I’m actually having a blast playing as Kelly. I haven’t unlocked Pablo yet.
Is there any particular reason why the review makes sure to mention Friday the 13th, Left 4 Dead, and Evolve, but at no point references Dead by Daylight? For a lot of people, I think that’d be the more useful point of comparison. It’d be like if someone put out a platformer where you play an electrician who fights, I dunno, turnip people and gila monsters, but a reviewer went out of their way to not compare it to the Mario games.
There’s a marginal difference between Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th, so it makes sense to mention the one that’s also a movie tie in.
Fair enough. I think that still should be something worth mentioning at least as a point of comparison — especially since, y’know, Ash also appears in DbD.
It doesn’t really have any similarities to Dead by Daylight but does to the other games, Left 4 Dead in particular. DBD maps are much smaller than these games, in all the other games the evil player levels up as they play, and the survivors can actually fight unlike DBD. Not much point in mentioning DBD when it is a poor comparison.
Fair enough. I personally think it might be worth finding space for a line saying as such in a review, especially given that Ash appears in DbD, but that’s useful to know.
Bruce
Campbell’s son Andy aided Twitch streamer/”actress” Jessica Lynn
Verdi in abusing someone during the entire pandemic, which led to this person
attempting suicide as a result. Andy and Jessica are legitimate piece of
garbage people. More people need to know about their terrible behavior.
Installed Cyberpunk 2077 for the ~10th time to see if I’m yet able to find some connection to the world, characters, or narrative. Unfortunately, it’s still an offputting and somehow sterile experience unhelped by frequent framerate drops and stutters even with GSync.Guess it’s back to FFXIV.