The Texas Chain Saw Massacre review-in-progress: "Occasionally thrilling, often frustrating"
I'm terribly conflicted about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. On the one hand, it takes almost everything I love about the asymmetrical horror genre and improves upon it, and yet it commits a number of sins even less forgivable than the spelling of "chainsaw" as two words in the game's official title. The result is a bloody, beautiful hodgepodge of genius and tomfoolery, making for an experience that's occasionally fresh and thrilling but more often dull and frustrating.
FAST FACTS: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Release date: August 18, 2023
Platform(s): PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One
Developer: Sumo Digital
Publisher: Gun Interactive
Born from the ashes of publisher Gun Interactive's doomed Friday the 13th adaptation, whose servers are going offline in January due to outstanding licensing issues, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre pits teams of four killer family members against three victims, eschewing the traditional one-versus-many formula popularized by Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th: The Game. I like this. A lot. Playing the killer in other asymmetrical horror games is devilishly fun, but inherently lonely. Texas Chain Saw Massacre effectively remedies that by adding more killers and balancing the game so that both sides feel fairly matched, and right from the jump things do feel impressively balanced.
Bloody beautiful
Before we go any further, it's worth lingering on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's astonishing art design. It doesn't take a fan of the movies to appreciate the staggering attention to detail that's present in each map. Whether cast in the painterly pinks and oranges of dusk or basking in the moonlight, Family House, Slaughterhouse, and Gas Station are utterly macabre works of art.
As an appreciator of the '74 classic, still regarded as one of the best horror movies today for good reason, I feel like a kid in a candy shop wandering around the remarkably faithful locations and exploring areas never before seen in the films, the latter baked in the same yellow hues and painstakingly crafted with just as much horrific detail as those created with established blueprints. All three maps hugely benefit from an absolutely hellish atmosphere that makes every second feel doomy and oppressive.
The customization options, from alternative outfits for the family and victims, to new finishing moves, and a laundry list of perks and abilities, are all loving odes to the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it's hard not to smile catching reference after reference. Your mileage may vary, naturally, depending on how much you like this franchise, but it's clear the developers have a deep love for Leatherface and co.
Another thing I adore about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is that it removes the players' ability to hold matches hostage by camping out in a closet or perpetually running from the killer. One of the ways it accomplishes this is with a tweak to the hiding mechanic, a common feature in multiplayer horror games that lets survivors sneak into a closet or under a bed to evade killers. Here, you can only hide for so long before your fear meter tops out and you're forced from cover. It's such a simple yet effective mechanic that I'm surprised it isn't more common.
At the start of each game, victims have to unhook themselves from a brutal torture device just to begin moving around the map, and since being suspended in the air by a giant hook lodged into your ribcage takes a toll on the body, your health continually dimishes as time goes on. That means if you don't escape in time, you'll eventually succumb to your wounds and collapse, adding a sense of urgency to your situation and removing the potential for games to drag on.
Out of gas
Unfortunately, as much as I appreciate many aspects of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I do have a few big issues with the game in its current state. The most immediate is the lack of clear direction for both killers and victims. There are 46 tutorials, none of them are playable, and only a few were selected to have voiced dialogue. I watched every one of them and I was still totally lost playing my first few matches, to the point where I was often begging for a family member to find me and put me out of my misery. Mercifully, the aforementioned in-game timer, i.e. the blood draining from my character's body, often did the killers' job for them.
Compare that to Evil Dead: The Game, whose tutorial is fully playable and still way less of a time sink than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's. And yet, even after the tutorial is over there are still clear quest and map markers letting you know precisely where you should be and what you should be doing. Here you're offered an absurd list of non-mandatory videos to watch and then thrown into the action without any in-game cues as to what the stacks of bones on the ground do, or where to find the fuse for the fuse box, or how to unlock this box, or the utility in feeding grandpa vials of blood. This is all included in the tutorials, but who's really going to watch all 46 of them? And among them, who will remember every minute detail?
The Cook is described as a killer with an intimate understanding of every nook and cranny of the area, and yet without an in-game map, I feel about as familiar as the victims who've been blindfolded, abducted, and trapped there. At the very least, a very basic map laying out the major landmarks would be incredibly useful whether you're playing as a killer or survivor, but alas, you're left to learn the lay of the land through trial and error.
It doesn't help that the maps are needlessly intricate, littered with chambered basements, shortcuts, barricades, sheds, barbed-wire fencing, and wells that lead to giant underground areas. The sheer size and complexity of the maps make them near-impossible to navigate until you've played enough times so as to memorize them. Admittedly, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's maps are comparable in size to those of its contemporaries, but they are infinitely more disorienting due to the simple fact that they lack any guidance whatsoever.
Falling short
Matchmaking sucks, frankly. You need exactly seven people to start a quick match, while four will suffice in private matches. The thing is, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is clearly optimized for seven players – four just isn't enough to fill up the large maps and often results in wandering around aimlessly just hoping to encounter another player, hostile or not. This shouldn't be as much of an issue once the game is out in the wild, particularly since it's coming to Xbox Game Pass, but these restrictions made it unreasonably difficult to find a match pre-release for the purposes of this review.
I hate to keep making comparisons, but Friday the 13th: The Game, Evil Dead: The Game, and Dead by Daylight all have bots you can add to a game to pad out the player count, but not The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
There are some smaller gripes I feel are worth mentioning too, like the awkward animation of Leatherface flailing around by himself that plays at the end of every match whether you're a family member or victim. And the fact that every killer, with the exception of Leatherface, looks too much like a victim to be clearly identifiable from a distance, meaning I constantly have to tolerate attacks from members of my own team.
If you asked me right now if I recommend The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I'd say only for the most diehard fans of the franchise, and even then simply for the wonderful art and content inspired by the movies. That could change in the coming days as I play with the skill tree, unlock more cosmetics, and generally sink more time into the game, but in the meantime there are much more fully formed and less bewildering options in the burgeoning multiplayer horror subgenre. Leatherface brings with him an iconic presence that puts Dead by Daylight's take on the chainsaw-wielding psychopath to shame, as well as a few truly ingenious refinements to the genre, but he'd better pull out all of the stops soon if he means to convince me.
