It’s been 50 years since Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre lit up cinema screens with its propulsive mix of desolation, buzzing tension and extreme violence. Saw-wielding maniac Leatherface is still up there with Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger as one of the most iconic depictions of murderous evil that cinema has ever produced – so it’s strange we’ve had to wait this long for a game to truly get to grips with this seminal work of rural horror.
Like 2017’s Friday the 13th, which recently had its servers shut down for good, and the still hugely successful Dead By Daylight, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM) is an asymmetric online multiplayer game, in which players take part as either victims or killers. In those titles only one player gets to be the bad guy, but in TCM, three participants play together as the film’s evil Sawyer family, working together to hunt down and slay their four desperate captives, who are all trying to escape. Among the victims, Connie can instantly pick locks and Leland can stun enemies, while on the family side the hitchhiker can set traps and new character Sissy can poison things. Players gain XP for upgrades after each round, whether their side wins or not.
The rhythm of each round will be extremely familiar to Dead By Daylight fans. If you’re a victim, you find yourself in a nightmarish location, being tracked by the killer, and have to escape by completing mini-tasks such as picking locks, finding fuses to open doors, or switching off electrified fences. If you get away, you win. Meanwhile, the killers have to stop you leaving – and also murder you. The latter team also has access to Granddad, the hideous near-dead patriarch of the TCM family. If he is fed blood, he can intermittently detect and reveal the location of victims, helping in the hunt, but if players get near him, they can attack him, reducing his abilities.
What you get is an incredibly tense, scary, jump scare-filled face off between the hunter and the hunted. TCM makes brilliant, knowledgeable use of the film’s setting, characters (several of whom are voiced by actors from the film series) and general atmosphere. Locations range from the labyrinthine basement beneath the family mansion, filled with bones and torture equipment, to the queasily sunny exterior locations – the gardens filled with wilting sunflowers and abandoned cars, the slaughterhouse and finally, if you’re lucky, the dusty road out of this awful place. As you scrabble for health packs and lock picks, the soundtrack, which is brilliantly resonant of Wayne Bell’s original, assaults you with grinding chords and weird samples, while often you hear the distant buzz of the chainsaw or the mad chattering of the hitchhiker.
More than the other games in this sub-genre, TCM really does require teamwork. Victims need to combine their abilities as a group to keep an eye on the family, while staking out escape routes, while the family need to combine their differing abilities to hunt, patrol and protect grandpa. Certain characters, are almost useless without coordination – Sonny, for example, can relay the position of doors and enemies to his team mates, but there’s little compulsion to do that if they’re not watching your back in return.
This is fine as long as you have three friends, or at least other players who have mics and are willing to use them – otherwise, the game feels lonely and random. Unlike Dead by Daylight, which allows two or more players to silently help each other, these tasks are all single-handed, so you don’t get those casual moments of interplay. You need to plan. Meanwhile, playing as the family is basically like being a parent – you have to keep an eye on the kids, ensuring doors and gates are locked so no one wanders out onto the road, all the while caring for an ailing in-law.
After a weekend of non-stop play, I was beginning to tire a little of the cat and mouse nature of the game; the grind of finding lock picks, searching for the basement exit then getting outside to hide among long grass for ages waiting to unclip a car battery so I could escape through a backyard gate. As a killer, I often felt like I was in a particularly dark Benny Hill sketch, haplessly chasing attractive young people around in circles while bumping into the furniture. But I know that, as team strategies evolve and developer Gun adds more features and variety, I will keep coming back, desperate for another heady fix of blood, guts and dopamine.
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It could be argued that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is limited by its concentration on one movie series, one set of characters, one location; in comparison, Dead By Daylight now has dozens of different killers and environments from a vast range of horror flicks. However, its purity of vision is its strength – this is Tobe Hooper’s putrid amoral universe perfectly replicated as an interactive terror ride – the twisted family, the horrible outback desolation, the dizzy, brutal violence, are all brilliantly realised.
With friends (or talkative strangers), a few spare hours a week and a good internet connection, you are in for a horrible treat that just keeps on giving.
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Texas Chainsaw Massacre is available now on PC, PS4/5 and Xbox, £35