Video Game / Dead by Daylight

Death is not an escape.

"Death is not death. In this place, life is fleeting. To whomever might find this lore, I can but only provide you with one advice: always move forward."

— Benedict Baker

Dead By Daylight is an asymmetrical multiplayer survival-horror game made by Behaviour Interactive in which one player is a supernatural Serial Killer, and the remaining players are the hapless Survivors who've stumbled upon their hunting grounds. The gameplay is best described as an elaborate game of Hide and Seek - the Survivors must sneak alone or work together, to hide from or distract the Killer, who relentlessly pursues them through a randomly generated map. The Survivors' main goal is to repair the generators hidden throughout the map, which will power the gates leading to the exits^note Though, if the Killer manages to kill all but one of the Survivors, a hatch will spawn that the Survivor can jump in to escape unless the Killer finds and closes it first., while the Killer's main goal is to hunt down, maim, capture, and ultimately sacrifice the Survivors by impaling them on hooks strewn throughout the map^note But with the right equipment, the killer can personally execute them. Survivors must deal with timing skill checks that can alert the Killer if they fail, while Killers have trouble navigating over obstacles like wooden pallets and windows. Special perks and equipment can radically change the playstyle of both killers and survivors, leaving both sides guessing how their opponents will react to the hunt and chase. Survivors can equip a small variety of special equipment that temporarily boosts their abilities, while each Killer has a unique power (and sometimes sub-abilities) that lets them control the playing field or improve their ability to hunt. And at the start of the match, no player can see the other players' abilities and must deduce their strengths and weaknesses, the most important of which is the type of Killer and their power.

The game was first released on June 14th, 2016 for purchase on Steam. The game was made available for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on June 20th, 2017 and Nintendo Switch on September 24th, 2019.

Check out the website here.

Spin-Off media includes:

• Deathgarden (2018-2020): An Action Spin-Off about a Sci-Fi Blood Sport that shared several similar gameplay elements.
• Hooked on You (2022): A Visual Novel game where the player gets to romance one of four killers between the Trapper, the Wraith, the Huntress and the Spirit. No, really.
• Dead by Daylight: The Board Game (2023) - A Tabletop Game funded through Kickstarter.
• Dead By Daylight (2023) - A prequel comic book series published by Titan and written by Nadia Shammas, which focuses on the origins of The Legion.
• A film adaptation was announced to be in development in 2023 with noted horror producers Jason Blum and James Wan.
• The Casting of Frank Stone (2024) - An upcoming single-player game created by Supermassive Games in collaboration with Behaviour.
• A second, untitled PVE multiplayer Dead by Daylight game is also in development from Midwinter Games in collaboration with Behaviour.
• Dead by Daylight Pinball, one of the Digital Pinball Tables available in Pinball FX's own spin-off, Pinball M, as a collaboration with Zen Studios.

See also Identity V, an extremely similar game by Joker Studio, Netease, and Behaviour Interactive itself assisting with the development for mobile phones, only Lighter and Softer and with a Tim Burton-esque makeover.

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Dead by Daylight provides examples of the following tropes:

• Achilles' Heel: Some survivor perks are only good against specific killers, and therefore see little use:
  • "Calm Spirit" completely negates the Doctor's tracking power, and at its maximum rank, also allows the survivor to fully counter the "Spies From The Shadows" perk, which gives killers a visual and audio cue, visible through walls, whenever a crow within a certain radius is disturbed by a survivor, effectively giving away the survivor's general location.
  • "Object of Obsession" used to enable you to see the Killer's aura when you were outside their terror radius, at the cost of them being able to see yours at the same time. This gave a survivor unlimited wallhacks while in the dream world facing the Nightmare, who has no Terror Radius in the Dream World, and could also allow them to pinpoint exactly where The Trapper is setting his beartraps in the game. The perk was eventually changed to work very differently, triggering a few seconds of Killer and Survivor being able to see one another's auras at regular intervals as well as whenever the Killer can see the Survivor's aura.
  • "Sprint Burst" allows survivors to easily outrun the Wraith's and the Pig's ambush attacks.
  • "Iron Will" can counter the "Stridor" perk, which helps the Killer track Survivors by listening to their breathing.
  • "Spine Chill" tips survivors off whenever stealth killers such as the Ghost Face or the Shape are stalking them.
  • The two trap-placing killers can be countered very effectively by certain items. Maps used to be able to reveal the location of the Trapper's bear traps and toolboxes render them temporarily unusable, while flashlights could be used to safely disable the Hag's Phantasm Traps and the Artist's Dire Crows. This was later changed, with the Hag's traps requiring manual dismantling and the Artist's crows no longer being able to be disabled.
• Adapted Out: With the sale of the mobile game to a different company, Steve Harrington, Nancy Wheeler, and the Demogorgon from Stranger Things are no longer playable characters on the mobile platform. Ash Williams is also currently not included since the change over.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: If a game isn't going well for a survivor, kneeling down in front of the Killer, as well as dropping their item, is a fairly common method of begging for some mercy. Of course, it's up to the Killer whether they want to grant it, and for how long.
• All There in the Manual: For a long time, backstory about the setting, characters, or the maps is on the official website, and not really referenced in-game. The 3.3.0 patch saw the introduction of the archive feature, with players being able to unlock pieces of the characters' backstory in-game by completing certain challenges.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: When you get to the max level of a character (Level 50), you are given the option to "prestige". Doing this will reset your character to level 1, and give you a tier of each characters 3 unique perks for every other survivor (with the exception of the Stranger Things characters) for the first 3 prestige levels. After the first 3 prestige levels however, you will unlock a version of the character's default outfit covered in blood, and you must do this an additional two times afterwards to get the full outfit.
• Animal Motifs:
  • The Clown is themed around birds. He calls himself "Jeffrey Hawk", and had a fascination with birds in his childhood that soon turned into torture and murder. He also used to collect feathers. Survivor Nea is also given a cat motif.
  • The killers in general have a Shrike motif, being predators that carry their prey to stationary spikes in order to impale them.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Endgame Collapse is intended to hasten the end of a game. Once the exit gates are powered or the Hatch has opened, the Killer can force Survivors to go for the riskier gate exit under the weight of the timer by opening a gate or closing the Hatch. This addition has effectively removed Hatch stand-offs, Survivors playing around in the exit, and other nonsense that used to drag out a match.
  • "Stillness Crows" will circle a survivor if they stand still for a full minute (doing something, like working on a generator, doesn't trigger them), or land on their locker if they stay in one for too long, and then make very loud noises that cause sound warnings as though the killer has Spies From the Shadows equipped. This keeps survivors from just jumping into a locker and going AFK for the entire match.
  • As frustrating as it may to have a "slugging" killer let survivors slowly bleed out, the death timer on being left on the floor was added due to necessity so that toxic killers couldn't hold a match hostage by downing all of the remaining survivors and leaving them like that until patience wore thin and people DC'ed to get on with it. Bleeding out ensures that a match will end eventually, one way or another.
  • After a full hour, any match will eventually end on its own. The odds of a match lasting an hour are nearly zero, but there are extenuating circumstances that can result in it, the worst one being a toxic hacker refusing to finish the match in the hopes that all of the killers/survivors finally lose their patience and disconnect - eating the penalties for doing such in the process. This hard cutoff guarantees that under no circumstance will a match ever be held hostage to the point a disconnect is the only outcome to leave it.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Of sorts. On a regular match, your standard attacks put a survivor on a "hurt" state, and a second attack puts them in a "dying state", after which you can hook them. However, you can bypass the "hurt" state completely via several means, which are widely telegraphed to the survivors. They are basically a hard counter to survivors' Self-Care perk and Septic Agent/Anti-Haemorrhaghic Syringe addons, which allow a sufficiently skilled survivor to heal themselves after being hit before they are hit again. Some of these include:
  • If you're using The Hillbilly or The Cannibal, you can put survivors directly in their "dying" state if your Chainsaw Sprint connects. Your Chainsaw Sprint creates a lot of noise when used, though, and it gets louder as you approach a survivor, giving them enough time to try to dodge or take cover (though you can reduce the noise made by your chainsaw with Add-ons). You also have reduced maneuverability, and get stunned if you miss.
    • The Oni gets a similar ability with a charged-up Demon Strike, which can also be done at the end of a Demon Dash move.
  • While playing as The Shape, your standard Evil Within power allows you to instantly put a survivor in their "dying state" when it reaches tier 3. Tier 3 of Evil Within only lasts for 60 seconds each time you achieve it, though, you can only achieve it a limited amount of times in a match (the standard hard limit being about 4 to 5 times), and the survivors are informed as soon as you hit tier 3. Differing from The Hillbilly's Chainsaw Sprint, you can do nothing to muffle the notification. Certain add-ons allow you to stay in Tier 3 permanently once you reach it; however, these add-ons also greatly increase the amount of time it takes to reach Tier 3.
  • Related to Evil Within, you can replace the "instantly put in dying state" with "instantly kills the survivor on contact" if you equip the Judith's Tombstone or Tombstone Piece addons.
  • If the survivor is inflicted with the Exposed status effect, they can be downed in one hit with a regular attack.
  • If you're using the Hex: Devour Hope perk, you can instantly down a person after getting 3 tokens. After getting 5, you can instantly down them and bypass the hooks entirely by just killing them on the ground. The great drawback here is that it requires the hexed totem to be intact (although the survivors are made aware of that totem's presence only once the killer gained three tokens and downed an exposed survivor), so you lose your ability completely if a survivor cleanses it. Even though there is no audible notification this time, the hexed totem shines in a less-than-discrete fashion, allowing survivors to locate it and cleanse it if you don't take precautions beforehand, making The Hag and The Trapper the only killers that can defend their totems without having to leave gens completely unattended while doing so.
  • When equipped with the Hubris perk, any survivor who stuns you by any means (whether it's with a pallet, flashlights/flashbangs/blast mines, or using Head On out of a locker) is put in the Exposed state for up to 20 seconds, meaning they can be downed in one hit during this time even if healthy.
  • The Iridescent Head add-on for the Huntress' Hunting Hatchets, which allow her Hunting Hatchets to instantly inflict the dying state on whatever unlucky survivor they hit. In addition, while the add-on does reduce the maximum amount of Hatchets she can carry from 5 to 1, the Huntress can just refill her Hatchets using the lockers around the map and equip an Infantry Belt for an extra 2 hatchets, which makes the drawback a moot point. Since patched, Iridescent Head no longer functions with add-ons that increase number of hatchets.
  • The Trapper's Honing Stone add-on inflicts the dying state on any survivor who gets free after being caught in a Bear Trap.
  • The Clown has access to the Redhead's Pinky Finger addon, which puts survivors hit directly by the Afterpiece Tonic's bottle in an exposed state. This means the next attack that lands on them will put them on dying state.
  • Similar to The Shape, Ghost Face can "mark" a survivor by stalking them. Marked survivors go down in one hit for a set amount of time. The only issue is, he can only mark survivors while in Night Shroud, and the survivors can force him out of it by looking at him for a short while (any survivor can do this, not only the one being stalked). On the bright side, stalking carries over between activations of the stealth mode, so long as you don't hit your target at any time with your basic attack.
  • The Skull Merchant deploys drones that scan any survivor who enters their radius. If the survivor stays in range long enough to be fully scanned, they become Exposed and can be insta-downed in one hit.
• Art Shift: Each of the Archive cutscenes features one of these, varying in style though most look like black and white graphic novels. The most extreme are the Trickster's which temporarily shifts to an Animesque style, and The Clown's, who gets dosed by his gasses during a struggle with one of his victims and makes them both hallucinate, causing the short to shift into a 1940s rubberhose cartoon-esque style - albeit, with (cartoony) gore and blood still intact.
• Asshole Victim: If you thought the killers were bad, you should take a gander at each of their Start of Darkness. You almost start to feel sorry for (some of) them by comparison.
• Asymmetric Multiplayer: Up to four survivors, who are playing a Run or Die game, and one killer, who is an unstoppable slasher movie monster.
• Aura Vision: The bread and butter of the game's detection abilties is revealing the auras of affected beings and objects, with their colors being reserved for specific things related to the character equipping the aura-reading ability. Yellow is for things helpful to you, red is for your objectives, white is for items or killer-specific puzzle elements, and so on.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Some of the more rare killer addons work like this. Generally, at least one addon of very rare quality or higher per killer either fundamentally changes how the power works or powers it up heavily, but in both cases renders it situational at best, requiring the killer's entire loadout to be built around it.
  • Both the Fragrant Tuft of Hair and Judith's Tombstone for the Shape, especially if used together. They allow you to get unlimited tier 3 of Evil Within and instantly kill survivors while in Evil Within 3, respectively, at the cost of slowing the progression from Evil Within II to Evil Within III to a crawl. If you don't have a build made specifically to slow generator progress down significantly and constantly, don't expect to reach tier 3 until at least most generators are completed.
  • Iridescent Seal makes the Plague gain Corrupt Purge every time a generator is completed. While it's great since survivors cannot deprive you of your power by not cleansing, it also severely restricts the amount of time you can hold Corrupt Purge, and the addon also slows you down. Overall, it's a great effect limited by overbalancing.
  • The Nurse:
    • Realistically, any add-on on The Nurse. With a power that relies entirely on muscle memory, equipping almost any addon can upset your timing and hurt you way more than help you. However, if you can get accustomed to a specific combination of add-ons, they can make you steamroll even a coordinated SWF team with ease. That is, if you can feed the Bloodweb enough to be able to use those addons consistently in the first place.
    • After Nurse's rebalance as of October 2019, Torn Bookmark has become the only addon that gives you additional chain blinks. People usually stacked them together since additional chain blinks meant more room for committing mistakes and countering certain survivor perks like Dead Hard. Upon the rebalance, however, you had to be damn sure you wanted that extra blink, since the Bookmark also removed the Nurse's ability to blink into places that you cannot physically see, which is almost always the preferable way to meet survivors at the other end of a loop, a jungle gym, or basically any Line-of-Sight blocker. Also, good luck with indoors maps, where blinking through solid matter would be pretty much your only way to traverse the map at something faster than a snail's pace. This downside was later changed to simply vastly increasing the time needed for the Nurse's Blinks to recharge.
  • For Hag, the Mint Rag. When equipped, she can literally travel to any trap in the map, triggered or not. This means, most importantly, that survivors cannot perform unhooks without you being instantly beside them. However, it introduces a 15-second cooldown when used, severely limiting its potential.
  • As far as the Spirit goes, a combination of Mother-Daughter Ring, which increases your speed during Phase Walk at the cost of no longer being able to see Scratch Marks, and Prayer Beads Bracelet, which caused all Survivors to hear the Spirit's phasing sound regardless of location, had the potential to be absolutely devastating. With the ability to move at the fastest possible speed in the game without giving away your location at all, you would be yanking survivors off generators and generally be applying pressure anywhere you want. The problem? The Mother-Daughter Ring causes you to lose your ability to see scratch marks when phasing, which means you have to rely on very subtle hints, like the movement of grass and outright colliding with survivors, to figure out where they are. The Prayer Beads Bracelet was later removed from the game when the Spirit received an addon pass.
  • In general, most Hex perks are considered this. They often have outstanding effects, such as letting you outright kill survivors without the need of any addon or offering when the right conditions are met, but they are always bound to a totem. The hexed totem glows, making it easy for any survivor to spot it and just cleanse it, an action that takes 5 to 6 seconds at most. Once that totem disappears, the effects of the perk are nullified. Realistically, unless you get good totem spawn RNG, you can be denied of your hex perks within the first 30 seconds of the game. Oh and, by the way, totems can spawn right next to generators, which survivors are naturally attracted to. In high ranked play, the only hex perks that see any action are Ruin and maybe Blood Favor, the former being considered almost essential, just because their effects can greatly benefit the killer regardless of how long they stand. This can be mitigated with totem defense perks such as Hex: Undying, which destroys itself in place of the first cleansed Hex, Hex: Haunted Ground, which if destroyed makes all Survivors Exposed for a period of time, and Hex: Retribution, which if destroyed causes the Survivors' auras to be revealed to the Killer. Another game changer is Hex: Pentimento, which allows the Killer to restore broken Totems with new nasty effects.
  • Once enraged, The Oni has two attacks that can put a survivor directly into the Dying State: he can either charge his Kanabo for a 1-hit, or he can slam his Kanabo after a sprint, similar to Hillbilly, in order to put survivors in dying state. The catch? It's obscenely hard to actually hit anything unless your target is either running in a perfectly straight line, or is funneled into a narrow passage.
  • The Deathslinger's Iridescent Coin exposes all survivors speared from 12+ meters away, for as long they are speared. Actually being able to reel in a survivor from that far away and hit them without the chain breaking is another issue altogether.
  • The Blight's Iridescent Blight Tag can put the survivors into the dying state if you manage to hit them during a Lethal Rush if you have zero rush tokens. Considering you cannot start a rush with less than a full stack (5 by default), and you have to bump into things to consume the tokens, actually pulling it off consistently is awkward, to say the least.
  • The Huntress and the Trickster can use Perks and add-ons that reduce the size of their terror radius; with any other killer those would be beneficial, and with a ranged killer they'd be especially useful, but they're all rendered moot by the fact that reducing their terror radius doesn't affect their vocal cues, such as the Huntress's humming, making them completely useless.
  • The survivor perk "No Mither". On the one hand, the ability to fully recover from the Dying State is an incredibly useful ability, as are leaving no pools of blood while having the noise you make drastically reduced while injured. On the other hand, you're a One-Hit-Point Wonder for the entire game, and the amount of situations in which a killer will let you recover from the Dying State can be counted on one hand. Especially as the Killer will be able to see you're suffering from the Broken status effect and thus know you have No Mither.
  • The Trickster's Death Throes Compilation addon initially allowed his blades to inflict Laceration based on proximity, and also inflict up to 200% damage per blade thrown. This meant you'd need a minimum of 4 blades to hit their target whereas normally it would have to hit 8. The big problem is that, if you want the bonuses, you cannot miss a blade throw, ever. This is on a killer whose power revolves around spamming knife throws on the hope at least some of them hit their mark. Two other addons even give him an extra chance to still hit a survivor after "missing". Good luck with your 100% accuracy. The add-on was later changed to simply refill his stock of knives after existing his Main Event power-up state.
  • The Legion's ability to insta-down Survivors after the fifth Feral Frenzy hit seems rather powerful on paper, but the problem is that it's really hard to chain 5 hits together if the opponents play smartly.
  • Interestingly, this also applies to a map of all things. The Raccoon City Police Department is incredibly faithful to the original game and is visually amazing, but it's widely considered the worst map from a gameplay standpoint in part for precisely that reason. The map, designed primarily for single player survival horror, doesn't translate as well to asymmetrical multiplayer.
• Ax-Crazy: The killers, being bloodthirsty lunatics who mostly were Driven to Madness in their backstories and now spend their days as The Entity's hunting dogs.
• Bad Black Barf: When The Plague consumes the corruption within a Pool of Devotion, her puke goes from green to a very dark shade of red, to signify it will hurt survivors if it connects.
• Bilingual Bonus: The Trickster speaks with actual Korean.
• Blinded by the Light: Survivors can use fireworks or a flashlight to blind the killers and possibly make them drop their victim if they're carrying another survivor. It can be somewhat finicky, as it entirely relies on the killer actually looking at the light for it to work.
• Boring, but Practical: To note:
  • Freddy has a wide array of powers at his disposal, including some addons that allow him to switch his power around. However, he is most effective with a gen denial build with the Swing Chains addon and one of his Ultra Rares that limit survivors wake up options. Considering how fast games usually go, pairing the Swing Chains (which slightly decrease survivors' action speed and the penalty increases for each survivor asleep) with Ruin, Thanatophobia, Pop Goes the Weasel and/or Huntress' Lullaby (preferably a combination of 2 or more of these) can bring the game to an utter crawl for survivors, giving him enough time to at least whittle down the survivors. This works even if Freddy actively ignores his primary ability for the most part, which is to teleport around generators.
  • Out of the Trapper's many addons, one of the most practical to use is the Iridescent Stone ultra rare, which just makes it so that traps can reset themselves. You don't get any other bonuses or nasty effects like with the other addons, but there is a distinct advantage in that survivors won't see you resetting a trap ever. This may cause them to fall for them just because they thought they had already disarmed it, and they didn't see you place it again at the same location.
  • The Pig's standard ability is to crouch. That may not sound impressive, but the crouch removes her terror radius and gives her access to an incredibly effective lunge ability, meaning that she can come out of absolute nowhere to attack whichever Survivor she happens to see.
    • Moreover, the Amanda's Letter addon makes her reverse bear traps effectively useless by reducing them to 1 and reducing the Jigsaw Boxes to 2. However, it does let you read the aura of any survivor in a 12m radius. Survivors usually don't expect you to be able to see them hiding. Match that up with her ambush ability and you got yourself the most effective way to clear the Rite of the Ungrateful dailies.
  • The perk "Pop Goes The Weasel" isn't nearly as flashy as many other Killer perks, but it is reliable to activate and will get use in almost every match, making it one of the most practical perks available.
  • The perk "Sprint Burst" allows a survivor to sprint faster than usual for an incredibly short amount of time, and the cooldown doesn't change while that survivor continues running. However, if you max it out to increase the sprint time and decrease the cooldown, saving your sprint for the right moment can mean the difference between a killer hitting you/knocking you down and that killer whiffing their attack, giving you time to hide.
  • In general, the less flashy and darker your character’s skin is, the better chance you have of hiding from your opponent than using the expensive and flashy skins that light you up like a Christmas tree. It’s incredibly useful for Survivors, less so for Killers due to their immense size.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Some of the survivor cosmetics unlockable through the in-game store give the player increased camouflage capability. For instance, equipping Feng Min with the "Day Off Wrap" and buying and equipping the "Long Black" hairstyle and the "Cypher Skinny Jeans", thus dressing her in very dark clothes, makes her much more difficult to spot compared to her default cosmetics.
  • Almost all of the top Killer and Survivor perks are associated with licensed characters that you can only buy with real money. The Shrine, which allows you to unlock four random perks each week (two Killer, two Survivor) isn't guaranteed to have every perk show up in rotation.
• Challenge Run: Certain Killer add-ons actually make your power weaker (for example, the Hillbilly's Speed Limiter add-on removes his chainsaw's One-Hit KO ability, so it needs two hits to knock down a Survivor). The only upside to these add-ons is that you earn more Bloodpoints, so they're only good for those looking for a harder, but more rewarding game.
• Combos: A common one to see with Survivors is for them to stun the Killer with a pallet, and then immediately follow it up with a blind from a flashlight while the Killer is locked into the resulting animation frames (either the stun itself or breaking the pallet).
• Company Cross References:
  • To celebrate the launch of Meet Your Maker, Behaviour ran promotions in both games to unlock various cosmetics. In this game, these include Pentekath's suit for Meg and three custom weapons for the Trapper, Huntress and Wraith.
  • The back half of 2023 will see the release of a unique skin for the Trapper which lets him become Naughty Bear, complete with a customized Mori.
• Competitive Balance: An interesting variant. In a game in which you can either be a godlike Implacable Man or a whimpering, frail normal human being, one would naturally assume that the game is balanced in favor of the former. And you'd be right- at low levels of play. At higher levels of play, survivor tools, map design and perks ultimately tilt the game far in favor of the survivors instead of the killers. The result is that experienced killers often cite earning two kills as a "victory", with a Total Party Wipe (or a "4K" as the community calls it) being nigh impossible.
• Continuity Nod: The bathroom from the original Saw shows up in Gideon Meat Plant, containing a generator. Near the generator is a corpse slumped against the wall, next to a toilet with its tank lid on the floor. This is a nod to the film's ending, where Adam crushes Zepp's head with the lid and is later left to die.
• Creepy Basement: On maps, there's a house with a basement that only has one way out and hooks that can't be taken down by the tool box. In most cases, if a killer brings you down there, there's little to no chance that you're getting out alive.
• Creepy Circus Music: The Clown's theme, naturally.
• Creepy Crows: Ravens are common wildlife in the maps that aid killers in finding survivors
  • Ravens are normally found perched throughout the map that fly away when people get near them, possibly alerting a nearby killer that a survivor is close by. Survivors can keep the ravens from flying off by crouching (though getting too close will still startle them); killers, on the other hand, always startle them (unless they're crouching as the Pig or Ghostface).
  • If a survivor hides in a locker for too long, ravens will perch on it and make noise, giving away their location.
  • If a survivor stays still for over a minute, ravens will noisily circle above them, loudly giving away their location until the survivor moves.
  • On the Pale Rose map, there are ravens all over the Paddle Steamer landmark. Whenever someone enters it, the birds fly off, making a hell of a racket.
  • The Artist utilizes crows as her power, sending them out to hit Survivors and swarm them so that they would mark the victim's whereabouts.
• Crossover: Enough to fill its own page.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The killers usually have to hang victims from a meat-hook contraption so that they can be sacrificed to the Entity. Usually. See Finishing Move below, for an exception.
• Deadly Ringer: The Wraith has a bell that turns him invisible if he rings it, an ominous warning for anyone nearby.
• Deal with the Devil: If Cheryl Mason's perk, Repressed Alliance, is something to go by, her and any survivor willing to learn the skill are not above appealing to The Entity for an advantage against the killers, as fleeting as it may be. It still does not mean The Entity will actually let them escape, though. To a lesser extent, survivors using the Blood Web can be seen as them exchanging their grief and despair for boosts to their abiities and items to use on their trials.
• Death Trap: Amanda Young's whole schtick. After downing a survivor, she can place a Reverse Bear Trap on their heads. The trap has a countdown that starts ticking after the next generator, counting from the moment the trap was placed, is completed. Once the count reaches zero, or if the survivor tries to escape through the exit gates, the survivor dies instantly. The only way to get them out is to check the several Jigsaw Boxes in the map for the necessary key. However, only one of the boxes has the necessary key, and there can be any number from 2 to 6 boxes to search from, depending on the addons the killer has equipped. Of course, the boxes are rigged: survivors grunt in pain when searching the box, and they do cry out in pain if they fail a skill check. Oh, and also depending on the addons, both the reverse bear traps and the boxes can have some nasty stuff in them, from razor wire, utility knives and face masks all the way up to interlocking razors and slow release toxins.
• Deathly Dies Irae: It's built into the theme song and subsequently remixed for the various Killers and Survivors, especially those coming from established franchises.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Nurse in general. You will be getting curbstomped every match until you learn how to effectively use her power. Once you get her down, though, she easily becomes the best killer in the game for the sole grace of being able to completely ignore almost every single method survivors have to defend against killers. Including pallets. Especially pallets.
  • For The Shape, Scratched Mirror. It forbids him from ever going out of Evil Within I. This means he is stuck with a below-average speed and a pitiful lunge. He, however, gains the ability to read survivor auras in a 32m radius around him, with no restrictions. This, paired with the fact that Evil Within I reduces your Terror Radius to nothing and grants immunity from any detection perks, ensures you always know where survivors are, but they cannot detect you. Even Distortion's tokens would get consumed too fast for this ability to not be useful to some degree. That said, there is exactly one map where Myers can capitalize on all of this, and a few others where he might have an advantage, but at the end of the day, you are a big hulking man in a white mask, so your stealth can only go so far.
• Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: Not so much that first part (see "Game Lobby" below), but as of patch 7.1.0, any Survivors who disconnect no longer screw over the team, as they will be taken over by an A.I. bot. By most accounts, they perform fairly well as teammates.
• Early Game Hell: High-level players with 4 optimum synergized perks have a massive advantage over new players with one completely random perk. They even have a large advantage over mid-level players who have unlocked all 4 perk slots but are still stuck with 4 random perks. The game's matchmaking system doesn't care, either, so unless you're playing at the very highest ranks it's pretty common for high-level players to be pitted against very low-level players. It also takes a couple dozen hours of grinding to even reach the point of having 4 perk slots at all for a single character.
  • And of the five base killers, two (Nurse, Hillbilly) are undisputed as difficult to play, two are middling power at best without specialized equipment, other characters' perks and knowledge a new player doesn't have (Trapper, Wraith) and one is a projectile fighter without an aiming reticle (Huntress). None of these characters has much gameplay in common with the other four.
• Easter Egg:
  • There's a golden toolbox hidden in almost every map.
  • Inputting the Konami Code^*W, W, S, S, A, A, D, A, D, Right Mouse, Left Mouse, Enter for PC and Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start for the console versions while having Pyramid Head selected in the menu will play a short, faster-paced retro version of the Dead by Daylight theme and unlock a Vic Viper charm.
  • Speaking of Silent Hill, on the Midwich Elementary School map, there is a rather complicated Easter Egg that references the original game: By repairing two specific generators, the ones in the Music Room and Chemistry Lab, the clock will move and two medallions will appear on the sides of the tower. Then, upon triggering the Endgame Collapse, the Clock Tower will open up, revealing a hidden chest. This is a reference to the clock tower puzzle from Silent Hill 1, where you needed to complete two puzzles in those rooms before obtaining the medallions, which would then allow you to enter the clock tower.
  • After buying the Sadako DLC, booting up the game after seven days has passed has the game playing its own version of the cursed tape to the player, as well as unlocking the Wrathful Well charm.
• The '80s: The 80's Suitcase DLC gives the survivor's a bunch of 80s themed cosmetics to die fabulously in.
• Expy Coexistence: The Hillbilly and The Spirit are expies of Leatherface and Sadako respectively, both characters would later join the roster themselves.
• Fate Worse than Death: As described by the tagline, not even death is an escape from the killers, as the survivors find themselves repeating their attempt of escaping. How much they know about where they are and how many times varies. A few explicitly understand their situation and others are implied to. Then there's the occasional survivor who comes off as stark raving mad to their "new" friends...
  • Whether they grasp it or not, the end result will be the same. Survivors that become emotionally dead are tossed into The Void, which is probably timeless but proven as a place what's left of a person can be aware and able to act. So yeah, Hell within a Hell.
• Finishing Move: Memento Mori, the special offerings that allows a killer to personally finish off a downed victim at their leisure, in their preferred fashion. There are three versions of these offerings:
  • Cypress: Can only kill the last survivor who hasn't escaped yet.
  • Ivory: Can only kill one survivor at any point as long as they have been hooked twice.
  • Ebony: Can kill every survivor as long as they have been hooked twice.
  • Unique to Pyramid Head, survivors who are afflicted with the Tormented status effect and that have already reached stage two on their hook/cage countdown, can be executed on the spot with an abridged version of his Mori. This makes him the only killer (at the time) that has two different execution animations.
  • Sadako is also able to kill a Survivor without a Mori offering, provided that their Condemned status bar is filled. Much like Pyramid Head, she uses an abridged version of her usual animation to quickly finish off a survivor.
• First-Person Ghost: Averted. While playing as any killer, looking down will reveal your feet. ^Exception The Hag's forward-leaning posture makes it so you cannot see any part of her besides her hands.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • It is possible to fall out of the map, both as killer and survivor. If this happens, you might as well disconnect.
  • There are various ways for the game to become stuck in an infinite loading screen, requiring a restart.
  • In December of 2016, various exploits of the perk and item system were publicized. It was possible to pass survivor perks to a killer and vice versa, stack four of the same perk, give killer powers to other killers, and much worse. While very few people exploited the various glitches on the Ranked servers, a few players brought intentionally broken combinations into Ranked and used them to rank up and be a griefer.
  • The introduction of The Twins resulted in a bunch of bugs, including the newest Killer being left unable to move for the rest of the match.
• Game Lobby: Survivors are shown their whole team, what cosmetics they're wearing and what items they might be bringing while waiting in the lobby; the Killer is shown all of that, too, to inform them who they'll be hunting and what sort of tactics they can reasonably expect.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Nearly everything in the game has a lore explanation behind it, such as...
  • No matter the outcome of each trial, survivors find themselves back at the campfire because the Entity forces them to be.
  • The Entity is an Emotion Eater, so you gain bloodpoints by performing actions which encourage emotions like hope and fear. This can explain why the Entity allows the survivors to have items and escape routes, so they can experience greater hope - and have it torn away.
  • The maps are altogether wonky, half-built, and filled with generators and wooden pallets because the Entity is an Eldritch Abomination and has a twisted comprehension of what the actual places look like.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Naturally bound to happen when killers and survivors are fairly free to enact whichever kinds of playstyles they want.
  • The lore for the survivors specifies that many of them are altruistic by nature (with Dwight, Kate, and Vittorio being just a few of many notable examples), while others are at least more "loner" types (Feng, Ada) if not outright selfish (Yun-Jin). While their personal teachable perks often reflect these attitudes and may encourage playing this way, you'll really only see newer or lower-level survivors playing with only their own perks on; otherwise, most players will have unlocked many, if not all, different perks on most or all survivors, making which survivor people play as into mostly a cosmetic choice based on their own preferences. This ultimately means that you'll see plenty of Yun-Jins or Fengs who are great team players, and many other canonically-selfless survivors mainly focused on escaping the match (sometimes to complete a daily or archive objective) at the expense of their teammates.
  • The killers, in canon, are bloodthirsty, Ax-Crazy murderers who are utterly merciless in attempting to kill as many survivors as possible to appease their Entity, and are thus not at all the types of people to willingly let one escape. In-game, many killer players will occasionally let the last survivor go (via giving them hatch or letting them leave through the exit) if they feel that player has earned it by playing well, or out of sympathy for them if they were actually trying while the rest of the team threw the game. You're also free, if you choose, to just meme around with the survivors and let them all go rather than actually attempting to kill them; you'll get fewer bloodpoints for doing so, of course, but you're not forced into killing them.
  • Several killers and their respective survivor counterparts are stated to have a deep hatred for one another in their lore. For example, the Knight betrayed Vittorio for very selfish reasons, stole his fortune and property, and murdered his people and family in an attempt to break him. In gameplay, however, nothing is stopping a Knight player from throwing the game to let four Vittorio players goof off with them and do objectives freely.
• Golden Snitch: Of a sort. If only one survivor still lives, an escape hatch appears somewhere on the map. If the last player can enter this hatch, that survivor gets an easy escape, even if not all the generators are online. If the killer gets to the hatch first, though, they can close it and cause the Endgame Collapse. This powers up all exit gates and triggers all endgame perks such as Adrenaline. The survivor can still escape, but they still have to evade the killer while opening the gates, an action that is by no means instantaneous.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: According to the manual, the survivors are stuck in a loop of being chased by the killers until they either escape or are killed by the Entity, only to find themselves repeating it.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Practically nothing beyond basic gameplay is explained, not by in-game prompts, not by the tutorials, not even by the online manual. Figuring out how to actually escape from a meathook without help, for example, is entirely an exercise in frustration, made worse by the fact that most player's first instinct actually decreases the amount of time you have.
  • This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that there are playable tutorials for both killer and survivor, that provides a very general introduction to their playstyles. Good luck with all the killers' powers, items and addons you can use, though. Or figuring out how much does a "moderate" buff actually means, and how it differs from "considerable" buffs.
• Harmful to Touch: Evan's bear traps, if he equips the Bloody Coil addon. If a survivor succeeds in either disarming or sabotaging one of the traps, they are put in a hurt state immediately after.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: Plays with increasing intensity as the hunter nears a survivor player.
• Hellish Horse: On the Father Campbell's Chapel map, you can find the Clown's circus caravan. The horse driving it is laying on its side beside it, now mutilated and demonic with a third eye, moving and neighing.
• Hell Is That Noise: Most of the Killers have a distinctive sound that can be used to discern which Killer is being played, such as the Wraith's bell, the Nurse's scream, or the Deathslinger's gun firing.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Can happen if a killer pursues a second survivor after crippling someone in/near tall grass, and loses track of where they downed the first victim.
  • Killers that can hide their Terror Radius and stain, such as the Pig, the Shape, and the Ghost Face, can become this. Unwary survivors can get yanked out of generators/totems just because they didn't see the hulking man in the white mask approaching just behind them.
• Hide-and-Seek Horror: One player tries to seek out four other players trying to escape from a map. When the hunter finds the players, he needs to wound them, then carry them to a hook for a sacrifice to an entity.
• Hillbilly Horrors: The Hillbilly and the Cannibal, of course. There's also the farm level with the wide open cornfields, mutilated animals, and is in a decrepit state.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Upon learning that each of the cars he crushed had people inside of them, Philip Ojomo (now known as the Wraith) opted to inflict the same punishment onto his boss, who was responsible for Ojomo's victims.
  • Can also happen to the Trapper if he accidentally steps into one of his own bear traps while pursuing a survivor, although this only momentarily stops him as he will just pry himself loose and reset the trap. This can also happen while the Trapper is carrying a downed survivor, forcing the Trapper to release his victim so that he can use both hands to reset the trap.
• Homemade Sweater from Hell: No word on whether they're homemade, but the Ugly Sweaters collection includes some garish apparel for several survivors — and another two for the Legion.
• Hope Spot:
  • Tends to crop up in gameplay with distressing regularity. A survivor goes to rescue a friend, only to find the Killer waiting behind a wall. Another makes a dash for the open gate, but gets caught by a bear trap in a bush.
  • In story, there exists a man known only as "The Observer", who has an eldritch artifact that lets him move through the Entity's realm freely, hide from its sight, and slightly manipulate reality within it. His ultimate goal is to find a way to destroy the Entity and free existence from its threat and the survivors from their inevitable fate as drained husks trapped in the Void for eternity after the Entity's gotten all the nutrition it can from them, and his musing in each of the Archives seems like he's getting closer with each one that opens...
• Imminent Danger Clue: As a survivor, your heart beats louder when the killer is nearby. You'll also be lit by a dim red light when he's right behind you, and at that point you better be running.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The Killer's goal is to pierce the survivors with hooks to be used for sacrifices. If the sacrifices are successful, the survivors get impaled by the Entity's spider legs.
• Instant-Win Condition: For survivors, crossing the exit threshold or escaping through the trapdoor. Both of these can become Thwarted Escape under certain conditions.
• Interface Spoiler: The Killer is hidden from the survivors in the lobby, which could make for a couple minutes of tension not knowing who the Killer is (especially helpful to stealth killers like Michael Myers or Ghost Face). However, each killer has a few specific loading screen tips that tells survivors how to interact with their power. The first few times a survivor is matched against that killer, the first loading screen tip will be one of those hints; Each hint is only shown once, and after a player has seen all of them, any future matches against that killer will only be generic tips, meaning that it's once again a mystery who the killer is.
• Jump Scare: This effect can be achieved by the killer using the Insidious Perk, allowing survivors to approach into their radius without triggering an alert, until the killer moves to strike.
  • The Nurse's Blink ability is prime material for this. You can be fixing a generator or hiding with no Nurse in sight. You think you're safe and then BAM, there she is right beside you!
  • Normally, this isn't the case for the Wraith, since, even if he gets close to you while invisible, he still has to ring his bell to uncloak and attack, alerting survivors to his presence. However, if he uses the addon that completely silences his bell, he can uncloak around a corner with survivors none the wiser, then run right up and attack or pull you off a gen out of nowhere.
  • Survivors can jump scare the killer sometimes. If you have wandered underneath a pallet by accident and you get pallet stunned.
  • Michael Myers, at tier 1 of his Evil Within ability, has practically no heartbeat. Meaning he can get real close to you without you knowing until you turn around...
  • Similarly, Amanda Young has no heartbeat when she crouches. This combined with her small size means she can easily sneak up on an unaware survivor.
    • Another perk specific to Amanda is that not only does her crouch allow her to completely kill her terror radius, it allows her to move virtually the same way as a survivor who's using "Urban Evasion." She also has other outfits beyond her standard bright red overcoat, and one of her pig mask choices comes with long dark hair, making her appearance in it slightly more human. With all these things combined, she can approach a busy survivor at a generator, and if they aren't watching closely enough, she can give off the appearance of simply being another survivor and move right beside them to allow her to quickly attack or pull a survivor right off of repairing a generator in the blink of an eye, especially when she's wearing an outfit other than the default red overcoat, as that's the outfit survivors are usually expecting to see her wearing.
  • The Doctor's hallucinations that can appear after a survivor's Madness has risen high enough. One moment you can just be walking around, the next The Doctor's standing right in front of you or behind you.
  • The Plague's Dark Devotion perk allows her to pass her Terror radius to the Obsession she hit for a set duration - meaning she can leave them to run off on their own and hunt down a different one while in "stealth" mode.
  • Sadako can pop out of the TV right next to survivors and quickly strike if they're being careless.
  • The Xenomorph can emerge from one of the nests scattered on the maps without notice.
• Killer Rabbit: In Tome 12, the video for "The Observer: The House of Arkham (II)" shows the story's characters, Lori and Ian, finding a bunny in the middle of a forest road. Lori offers it a carrot, only for it to reveal it and several other rabbits have Monstrous Mandibles as they swarm the two, chomping them to death.
• Konami Code: Entering the code in the lobby while any of the Silent Hill characters are selected will play an 8-bit version of the Dead by Daylight theme and unlock a special Vic Viper charm.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Rochelle's iconic Depeche Mode T-shirt is available as a cosmetic for Claudette, only all mention of the band is removed and replaced with a vague "True Artists" name and design.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In the Hag's backstory, after escaping from the cannibals that had held her hostage and brutally tortured her, and deciding she wanted vengeance, she goes back to the cannibal house where she was kept and brutally murders all of them.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: While a Genre Savvy horror fan might think it's best to stick together, since you can do generators faster, more experienced players will want to stay a good distance away from their teammates. This is because the generators you have to repair are scattered all across the map, and if multiple Survivors are working on the same one, that means the Killer can simultaneously pressure that many players and stop them from getting anything done. Sure, if you split up, that makes it easier for the Killer to catch one of you, but it also means that the other three Survivors can fix their own generator in peace while the Killer is busy chasing you.
• Light Is Good: The flashlight can be used to force the killers to drop their victim, and from the safety of being outside machete-range. Also, repairing generators is required to escape from the killers, and a fully-repaired generator always powers a spotlight which puts it into a circle of light.
• Living Weapon: As of A Curtain's Call chapter, Evan's Diamond Stone add-on was replaced with the Iridescent Stone. This add-on allows every single trap in the map to set itself, one every 30 seconds. The flavour text reads that the traps gain "life of their own".
• Lord British Postulate: On the Temple of Purgation map it was originally possible to drop the temple's main gate on top of the Killer by completing the basement generator while the killer was immediately under the gate. While this didn't actually kill the Killer (as they have no death animation), it would effectively immobilize them for the rest of the game. While extremely hard to pull off, it was doable by a coordinated team on comms by having one survivor block the Killer with their body to force them under the gate while another survivor finished the generator. This was removed for obvious reasons.
• Lost in the Maize: The various Coldwind Farm maps are colloquially known as "corn maps" because they all have one trait in common along with decrepit structures and mutilated cattle — fields of corn in the open spaces. These cornfields tend to favor Survivors and their Third-Person Viewpoint over Killers, who are locked in First-Person view and are thus more likely to have their view obstructed by it.
• Made of Iron: A downplayed example. The survivors are capable of surviving a remarkable amount of punishment that would, at best, be permanently disfiguring and more than likely fatal. Only bleeding out while incapacitated or a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown can kill one of the unfortunate victims.
• The Multiverse: Implied by Arcus 2217 in the 5th Tome, when the Observer sees memories that do not belong to the Claudette he's familiar with. There appears to be multiple Claudettes and Haddies, from different timelines, trapped in the fog. Nicolas Cage's addition corroborates this, since the one from our world is clearly present and accounted for.
• Mythology Gag: With all the crossovers in the game, they got their own page.
• Neck Lift: The Shape's Finishing Move begins with this.
• Neverending Terror: At best, escaping will only slow down the number of trips to the Void the Survivor takes. Also, every trip to the Void depletes some of the Survivor's soul and willpower, eventually destroying their hope and will to live. Since The Entity feeds not only from the sacrifice, but also the false hope and fear of the Survivors (in addition to the rage and bloodlust of the Killers), a Survivor with no will to live is no longer useful and thus sent permanently to the Void. That basically means that once the Entity has chosen a Survivor, they are utterly screwed. To make matters even worse, those who know about The Entity but aren't part of its sadistic games are aware that with every Sacrifice, the Entity grows stronger and spreads its influence further in the world, able to take more and more Survivors until eventually it reaches everyone on Earth. And there's NO WAY to stop this.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • If the Nightmare is being played, then Survivors can be woken up by failing a skill check at a generator. Expect to see many players running around the map blowing up the first generator they find to wake themselves up as fast as possible.
  • The Legion's Iron Maiden perk is mainly used to locate survivors that hide in lockers, but Huntress and Trickster can utilize it to reload their projectiles much faster.
  • Basically everything Ghostface has to offer. His main ability, the Night Shroud, buffs him with Undetectable and allows him to stalk survivors until they are marked. Marked survivors go down in one hit. Night Shroud, though, can be negated by survivors by just maintaining him in their line of sight for about 2 seconds. Additionally, any progress on the stalk of a survivor is completely negated if Ghostface stabs them before it's full. As a result, some players have taken a different approach to his ability: they go into Night Shroud to get close to survivors and then just stab them normally, and rarely ever use the stalk for anything that's not getting a general idea as to where they might be (since stalking does make them glow white). Some even go even further, and use the Night Shroud not for stealth, but to bait survivors into getting him out of that state, the rationale being that survivors will be too occupied with breaking Ghostface out of stealth that they will (hopefully) fail to pay proper attention to their loops and pathing.
  • The Legion's Frenzy move: At first glance, Deep Wounds seems to be the main draw of the ability. However, its secondary effect Killer Instinct is far FAR more useful. Deep Wounds can be countered by perks. Killer Instinct gives you a speed boost, allows you to leap through windows and pallets for a short time and allows you to see anyone on the map that is NOT inflicted with Deep Wounds. Information and movement are key in this game so at a quick glance you can tell which gen Survivors are likely to take next, what their routeing is and where they are located. With good map knowledge you can hit a person, run towards the other people doing a gen on the other side of the map, manually deactivate the ability and potentially stop a generator from being taken. Then do it again when you need info.
  • Nicolas Cage's perk Plot Twist allows him to purposely down himself, making himself vulnerable to simply being hauled away by the killer, but the caveat being if he fully recovers he can not only revive himself like with Unbreakable and No Mither, he'll get up fully healed. The unintentional use cases come in that combined with Ash's perk Flip-Flop and Élodie's perk Power Struggle survivors can down themselves in the middle of a chase under a pallet and if the Killer attempts to pick you up, a teammate can come drop the pallet or you can drop the pallet yourself with Power Struggle, and if the killer, understandably errs on the side of caution you can just revive yourself at full health in their face if they toil for too long.
• One-Hit Kill: Perhaps the most straight examples are provided by the Judith's Tombstone and Tombstone Piece addons for Evil Within, Michael Myers' ability. At the expense of needing to stalk survivors for more time and, in the case of Tombstone Piece, losing a considerable amount of evil after activating it (read: you'll have to recharge your evil after using it), those addons replace Michael's regular short-range attack when he is on Evil Within tier 3 with a nigh-unavoidable attack that instantly kills any survivor unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end. Differing from Memento Moris and the Hex: Devour Hope perk, you don't even have to actually down your victim prior to killing them; you can just automatically remove them from the game, even if they have not been hit at all before in the game. You can double the fun by pairing one of those with a Fragrant Tuft of Hair, which makes Evil Within tier 3 last forever, at the expense of having to stalk the survivors for pretty much the entirety of the match before achieving tier 3.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Survivors go down in two hits — less under certain conditions.
  • David King's perk 'No Mither' (and its teachable variety for other survivors) reduces any survivor using it to the wounded state for the duration of the game, with no way to heal back to full health. The upside is, if downed, you can fully recover.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. There are two survivors called David: David King and Detective David Tapp.
• Overheating: Hillbilly's chainsaw, while retaining unlimited fuel, does become overheated with repeated use. If the killer lets the overheat bar fill, the chainsaw will malfunction and be unusable for about 10-15 seconds, depending on addons.
  • Leatherface similarly got an overheat mechanic for when he revs his chainsaw for too long. However, instead of his chainsaw malfunctioning, he'll just randomly throw a tantrum.
• Pink Is Erotic: Implied, Yui Kimura is one of the survivors and she is a street racer who uses pink as a motif. Her pink hachimaki became a symbol of feminist empowerment after she had to defend herself from a stalker who broke into her apartment. While the game doesn't outright say what the stalker's intentions were, it's pretty clear that he broke into her apartment with the intention of raping her. Afterwards, her pink hachimaki also became a symbol of unity for women who suffer from stalkers and abusers.
• Player Elimination: It's an Asymmetric Multiplayer game where one player tries to kill the hapless remaining players. If the killer lands a shot and the other survivors have no way to bail out the victim, that player is out of the game.
• The Plague: Adiris, a Babylonian priestess, attempted to cure people from a necrotizing disease by praying to the gods, and got herself infected for her efforts. She began using veils and crowns to mask her infection, and carrying a censer to mask the odor. She was snatched by The Entity before the plague killed her, and became a killer in the fog.
  • Adiris' special ability is the Vile Purge. After a short channel, she can projectile vomit. Survivors that get vomited on or that interact with objects that were recently smeared with Adiris' puke will get infected with her disease. If left unchecked, they will eventually become afflicted with the Broken status effect and will infect anything that they touch or get touched by (excluding the Priestess herself, for obvious reasons). The disease can only be cleansed by interacting with a Pool of Devotion, after which it becomes corrupt and cannot be used for cleansing anymore. Adiris can then consume the infection from the used pools to upgrade her vomit into Corrupt Purge, which makes it deal actual damage to survivors for a short while, in exchange for it not being able to infect anything for the duration.
• Play as a Boss: Four players play as the survivors trying to escape from the Killer, who is controlled by a fifth player. The Killer is a far more formidable being, untouchable by the Survivors and easily capable of killing them.
• Power Limiter: A number of add-ons significantly weaken a Killer's powers, in exchange for letting them earn more Blood Points (in-game currency) during the match. Notable examples include the Trapper's padded jaws (traps do no damage, but still prevent survivors from moving), the Hillbilly and Leatherface's speed limiter (the chainsaw is no longer a One-Hit Kill), the Hag's scarred hand (prevents the Hag from teleporting, which is her main power), and the Wraith's "The Beast" sigil (his invisibility no longer hides his heartbeat).
• Pragmatic Hero: This can be one of the more successful strategies if a survivor gets strapped to the hook — just ignore them and complete the other objectives. If you can, get them down, but if the killer is camping them... leave them to die.
• Press X to Not Die:
  • While a killer is carrying them, a survivor has a chance to struggle free by mashing. You can also escape from a meat hook by doing the same, but this trope used to play into full effect once the meter reached the halfway point. At that point the survivor had to mash to delay the Entity killing them.
  • Pyramid Head's cages of atonement provide a more QTE oriented example, as you have to succeed skill checks to stay alive once you hit phase 2 in them. This was eventually expanded into regular hooks as well, replacing button mashing.
• Prisoner's Dilemma:
  • The Pig's gimmick is called Jigsaw's Baptism; she places the Reverse Bear Traps iconic to the Saw series onto Survivors she downs. These traps are inactive until a generator on the map has been completed. Once that happens, the trapped Survivor has only a limited amount of time to remove the trap or die. This means the other Survivors can either hold off on generators to avoid risk to their teammate, or keep going and potentially doom them while saving themselves.
  • The Plague's power, Vile Purge, consists of her vomiting on Survivors. If the vomit is not cleansed by using Pools of Devotion, fountains scattered around the map, the Survivor will eventually become a One-Hit-Point Wonder until they do and spread the sickness to any other Survivor or environmental item they interact with. Cleansing the illness, however, allows the Plague to go to whichever fountain was used and upgrade her Vile Purge to Corrupt Purge, changing her vomit to red and allowing it to damage Survivors she hits instead of infecting them. The choice for Survivors then becomes either don't cleanse and heal, meaning the Plague can down them in one hit instead of two, or cleanse and potentially give the Plague a much more dangerous ranged attack.
• Product Displacement: After Behaviour lost the rights to Stranger Things, the unique perks for Steve, Nancy and the Demogorgon were genericized and introduced into the Bloodweb, and the chapter's associated achievements/trophies were given new, unthemed requirements. Two years later, the rights would be regained and all associated perks would return to being unique perks for the respective Survivors and Killers.
• Randomly Generated Quests: The game gives you a maximum of three Daily Rituals which award Bloodpoints, the currency used to level up characters. You can replace a single ritual once a day. The rituals will typically consist of performing tasks as either Survivor or Killer, such as hit a Survivor 3 or 4 times with a specific Killer's power or successfully escape using a specific Survivor.
• Rule of Three: A survivor can survive being placed on a hook only two times. The third time will see them instantly killed by the Entity, presumably since being repeatedly slashed and hung up really takes it out of you.
• Run or Die: What the survivor gameplay boils down to, as there is literally no way for them to hurt a Killer. Survivors are slightly slower than the Killers as well, so they have to rely on misdirection and quick thinking using barricades to give them enough time to get out of the hunter's sight, as empty ground will see them caught eventually.
• Sadistic Choice: Just like the source material, The Pig specializes in this, creating several of them in many different ways:
  • The very concept of her reverse beartraps creates one of these. The trap activates upon the completion of a generator, meaning that if a Survivor gets stuck with one, the others are given a choice: continue the generator at the possible expense of the other Survivor, or stop your progress until the Survivor gets the trap off.
  • Her perk Make Your Choice also creates one, as it severely punishes a Survivor that rescues another Survivor from a hook with the Exposed status effect. This effect causes the Survivor with it to go down in a single hit, so if the Pig is being played, anytime a Survivor rescues another, they're left with the chance that they're going to be the victim of a One-Hit Kill.
• Ship Tease: In the promotional image for the Intensity Collection, Meg is sitting in front of her open locker, in which a photo of Dwight can be seen inside.
• Single-Use Shield: Hex perks are Killer perks that generally have powerful effects with the trade-off that they are tied to a totem on the map. If the perk's corresponding Hex Totem gets cleansed by Survivors, the perk is lost for the rest of the match. The perk "Hex: Undying" is designed to take the bullet for other Hex perks. While Undying has its own effect of showing the auras of Survivors around unhexed Dull Totems, the perk's primary effect is that the first time a Hex Totem on the map is cleansed by Survivors, Undying will always be the one that's lost no matter which totem was actually cleansed. If Undying was not the cleansed perk, it will move to Undying's location.
• Suddenly Voiced: The only vocalizations the survivors and Killers would make are grunts and screams, but there are a few survivors and Killers who have proper voice lines.
  • Ash Williams was the first survivor to be added with proper voice lines, which include being selected as the player's survivor or remaining idle in the lobby.
  • Pinhead is the first Killer to be voiced fully in English, indicating that he's much more in control of the trial than many other Killers.
  • The second Resident Evil chapter gave voice-lines for all survivors (and Palette Swaps) included in both Resident Evil chapters and Albert Wesker.
  • Nicolas Cage is incredibly chatty, easily having the most voice lines for a wide range of situations.
  • Alan Wake has a lot of reactions to various situations he may face within the Proving Grounds.
• Supernatural Floating Hair: Spirit and Oni.
• Temporary Online Content: The game itself cannot be played as intended offline^note the tutorial has the option to trial match types with bots involved, but they're extremely limited, and bot-controlled Killers are not an option in custom games, meaning it will become an example eventually; but any and all licensed content attached to it are nested examples as Behaviour lose the licensing rights for them. As of 2023 alone, the Attack on Titan cosmetic packs have been delisted from digital storefronts.
• Ten-Second Flashlight: Probably because of The Entity's interference, flashlights only have a few seconds of battery life, even with add-ons to extend their longevity.
• Thwarted Escape: Can happen with a canny killer. Or one who just refuses to leave after they hang another player on a hook. Killers can also catch survivors going over a window sill or barricade if they're close enough, yanking the poor fool back and being able to carry them off.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Time seems no object for The Entity, as its killers seem plucked from various time periods (while most of the people come from the modern day or at least the 20th century, the Plague comes from ancient Babylon; meanwhile HUX-A7-13, Gabriel Soma, the Xenomorph and Ellen all come from the future.).
• Trail of Blood: After harming a survivor, the killers will be able to see faintly luminous red streaks left in the wake of whomever he's hit. This trail of blood can be both brightened and leave more blood with the use of the Bloodhound and Sloppy Butcher perks respectively.
  • Exaggerated with the Oni, whose power relies on collecting blood orbs. If a Survivor doesn't heal quickly, they'll leave a trail of floating red orbs that the Oni can easily follow; these aren't affected by a Survivor's movement speed, so the orbs can lead the Oni straight to a hiding Survivor where the blood trail would not appear.
• Unfinished Business: The bio stories for Quentin Smith and the Spirit suggests that the Entity finds and captures souls who die with a desperately-desired goal just out of reach.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: The Huntress can restock her throwing hatchets at any locker, and the same goes for the Trickster and his throwing knives. There's no explanation why the survivors can't steal these hatchets or knives for themselves.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Due to the fact that there is no way to communicate between survivors (beyond a pair of vague gestures added in a later update), the current "meta" for the game involves using various in-game actions to signal things to other players— for instance, wiggling on the hook a certain way signals that the killer is camping nearby. Needless to say, if you don't know this going into the game, you're going to have a bad time.
• Violation of Common Sense: A survivor can get two generators, save all their teammates, escape and still lose a rank. It takes running around the killer getting points for boldness and other dangerous things to get enough points to level up their rank. An example is getting points for going into the basement of a map; there is usually a chest in them, but it's also a really bad idea to be down there, as there's only one way out and there are unbreakable hooks there.
• Visual Pun: Look at the logo. There are four tally marks for the four survivors, and the traditional fifth is a slash, as in "slasher".
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The Plague liberally vomits into anything she can see as a form of spreading her disease. A fully infected survivor will also puke all around at regular intervals in addition to becoming Broken, the implication being that they become an open bile faucet that pukes on anyone and anything that comes in contact with them.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: A number of the killers committed their initial murders either due to being in a desperate situation or simply because they finally snapped under the Trauma Conga Line that was their life. The Hillbilly and The Hag are standout examples.
• You Don't Look Like You: The many crossover characters tend to run afoul of this trope, due to Behaviour often failing to secure the rights to use their movie actors' likeness in the game. Averted in the case of Bill, Ash, Steve, Nancy, Nicolas and Alan. Though Bill seems to have aged quite a bit since we last saw him in his home series.^note He got a face rework in Patch 3.7.0 to have him more consistent with his Left 4 Dead appearance.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Survivors don't drop their items, regardless of how brutalized or maimed they are. Killers actually have to unlock a perk so they can make survivors drop their items when their weapon hits them. Only Leatherface starts with said perk by default, and the rest have to learn it from him. Furthermore, just unlocking the perk lets you only make them drop the item. You have to upgrade the perk if you want the item to also get damaged after being dropped.
  • On the survivors' side, the same principle applies to Throwing the Distraction (an Adam Francis perk), and resetting dropped pallets (a Yui Kimura perk).

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