Terminal Prequelitis

2023 is, for reasons I do not fully comprehend, The Year of Bubba. With a double-A-ish video game adaptation recently released as well as not one but two upcoming board games, it is a damn fine year to be a fan of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Which I am! How fortunate.

Not too long before the permanent delisting of their Friday the 13th game, Sumo Digital and Gun Interactive are back with a notably unique entry in asymmetric team count multiplayer infused with a license that’s significantly less likely to have a legal conniption. 3v4 sounds bizarre, and it is, but this was crafted with intent and care for its source material. We aren’t just dealing with survivors VS a killer here, it’s survivors VS a family, and family means nobody gets left behind. So why am I so convinced that this game will get left behind by its player base in a matter of months?

In a nutshell: I think the game is fragile. I think it will be uniquely difficult to maintain a strong update schedule for. And I think that its players, driven by passion to optimize their play in a framework that isn’t built to sustain that optimization, will kill the game they love. I will flesh out all of these points, but we need to start by talking about the grisly goobers that make up the game’s character roster.

TCM takes a lot from the original movie in terms of its gore-geous setting and framework but it needed room to breathe in order to broaden the game’s scope. That’s why this is set as a prequel to the film, and also why we have weird yet suitable adopted drifters that they made up with the licensor’s blessing for this game to expand the cast a bit. The family’s job is to murder everyone not related to them. Leatherface is appropriately massive and powerful but lacks any skill that isn’t destructive, relying on his two teammates to provide information via their abilities. As of right now two of them are good at tracking and two of them are good at trapping and chasing. This dynamic makes for some genuinely interesting interplay and any combination of them works well enough at finding 20-somethings to make head cheese out of, but that doesn’t mean they’re favored to win.

Victims initially appear to be the weak side of the field because, I mean, they’re called victims. Sure they have one more team member, but they can’t do much to fight the family directly in stark contrast to the counselors clobbering poor beleaguered Jason with bats in Friday the 13th. Their objective is simple: escape the basement, open up an area they can escape from, then perform said escape. These teams’ win conditions are not created equal and that is where the problems start to emerge.

Remember when I said the victims couldn’t fight? I lied a bit. They can’t permanently defeat any family members but they can inconvenience and in some cases even incapacitate them. Victims are favored in most chases as there are shortcuts everywhere, and no family member is quite as mobile as a victim. Loops can therefore be run forever, requiring ⅔ of the family members just to cut an exit off, which typically results in the victim simply leaving the loop rather than actually getting caught assuming they know what they’re doing. Couple that with being able to stunlock family members with well timed door slams, as well as intentionally force a one-sided QTE confrontation by expending a bone shard which also results in a hefty stun, and it starts to feel a bit lopsided. Also Leland exists and that boy is built like the space shuttle, capable of laying the smack down on any family member at will. He’s by far the least concerning ingredient in this slapfight sundae but he serves as a bruised and bloody cherry on top.

But wait, there’s another side to the victimization coin: speedrunning. At launch games of TCM typically took 10-15 minutes to wrap as the game of cat and mouse got increasingly desperate. We’re only a couple weeks in now and you’d be lucky to hit the 10 minute mark, with skilled teams busting out in as few as two minutes. I’ve personally only played solo queue on both sides and I’ve still pulled off a few three minute exits. Connie being capable of completing ⅓ of any escape route for essentially free is bonkers and needs to be completely re-conceptualized. Couple a few competent escape artists with 1 or 2 players ready to get rowdy, and matches start to feel far less frightening than they are funny. It was only then that I began to understand why poor Bubba does his frustrated interpretive chainsaw dance at the end of each match no matter the outcome; the game just assumes things haven’t gone to plan.

Make no mistake, some of this is easily fixed by tweaking numbers, but that will only lead to a new means of stripping interaction from the other side becoming the norm. Every day TCM’s players spend in the basement, learning the layouts, optimizing their escape plans, rerolling their random perks in the skill tree, they get one step closer to the game forever transforming into a dysfunctional but moderately organized cannibal family VS a SWAT team they accidentally abducted. The devs have stated that their goal is to make something thematically grounded first and balanced second, which is reasonable given the subject matter, but somehow managing to achieve the exact opposite the moment you put even a couple hours into the game is almost a feat.

One of the best ways to summarize the wonky side balancing is to talk about Grandpa Mechanics ™. If there is one thing about this game that will never leave my memory it’s the existence of Grandpa and his wide array of gameplay implications. Blood is collected from buckets littered around the map as well as victims upon hit, and gathering it all can be a fairly lengthy process. This blood can be fed to Grandpa, who rewards his progeny for delivering his Postmates by emitting a guttural roar that acts as sonar. The more you feed Grandpa the more powerful and effective this becomes, culminating in permanent UAV by level 5. A tangible advantage for the family! How do the victims counter this? By quickly stabbing Grandpa in the thigh with one of the infinitely respawning bone shards, at which point he alters his grandkids of his assailant before sleeping off the stab wound and immediately losing at least one tier of Grandprogress. Would it shock you to learn that there is currently a perk to make Grandpa lose up to 4 levels with a single drive-by? It shouldn’t! This is just how the game works!

The previous paragraph reads like I’m tripping on tainted Metamucil but I assure you it is very real. There are videos of powerful gamers forgoing survival in favor of going for the Grandpa Stab World Record. I once saw someone stab him 15 times in a match, and I know for a fact that’s been soundly beaten by now. There’s stabbing an old man and then there’s using him as a makeshift knife block. Why are players doing this? Because they’ve already run out of game to play. Escaping isn’t thrilling when it’s this easy and family players are borderline powerless to stop coordinated groups. When online multiplayer games run dry so quickly most players tend to leave, and the remainder bust out the memes. Friday the 13th: The Game had plenty of problems, but its fans stuck around if only so they could goof off as was somewhat befitting of the source material. TCM is already starting to break at the seams, but it takes itself far too seriously for the goofiness on display to be embraced or endorsed by the devs, and the lack of any response to the causes (or the massive list of bugs that range from inconvenient to gamebreaking) is a massive hit to my faith in the game’s longevity.

These aren’t issues that can be fixed with a content patch either. A new map would just contain the same 4 exits in a different arrangement. Adjusting victims to be weaker would lead to angry players until they found the next most optimal thing. A new family member would take maybe a day to figure out how to counter, assuming the answer isn’t to just slam their head in the bathroom door fifty times. Make no mistake, I prefer playing the victims in this game and find the dynamic amusing, but I can also recognize that it’s completely contrary to every stated goal this game had. Every single map favors the victims right now because they’re more mobile, capable of proactively advancing their win conditions, and altogether stronger than the family in every area of the game that matters.

TCM has the opposite problem of many short lived competitive multiplayer games, which typically have good core mechanics but lack hooks to attract and retain players. Its appearance and sense of style is almost flawless, pulling in the curious with ease and keeping lobbies full thanks to full cross-platform support and Game Pass. But its bones are brittle, filled with malk. There is a very weak foundation to build upon here, and I fear that unless Sumo and Gun take some serious measures to reinforce it that this game, despite all its potential, will collapse under its own weight and be as much of a ghost town as post-industry Muerto County.