The idea of an "Evil Dead video game" has a distinctly mid-2000s flavor: B-movie franchises have traditionally been fresh meat for enterprising publishers and developers looking to make a quick buck. The Evil Dead is a low-culture classic, and given how brutally its contemporaries ("Ghostbusters," "Rambo," "The Sopranos") have been treated, I was prepared for another unplanned gore-fest. What I didn't expect was that "Evil Dead" would be the best multiplayer horror experience since at least "Dead By Daylight". The game is truly exhilarating, one of the true left-field sleepers of 2022, and I eagerly await this game to swallow my soul.

Sabre Interactive, the development studio behind "Evil Dead," clearly drew inspiration from "Dead by Daylight," where four players are cast as the boomstick-wielding, zombie-killing survivors in the movie, and a fifth player controls an invisible demon that zooms around the map, opening portals to hell in an attempt to exterminate all living things. The good guys must traverse a haunted forest and find a series of artifacts in order to wipe out the forces of evil within a 30-minute time limit. The dungeon master will try to incapacitate the party before then.

All of this culminates in a final endgame sequence. If the demon player has yet to defeat the protagonists, he will be given one hectic chance to destroy the unearthed Necronomicon before it is banished to the underworld. If you are a DBD veteran, you already know the core rhythm of this game. Survivors will spend much of their time looting. Survivors will spend a lot of time looting, since wielding extra ammunition, weapons, and health potions will help them defend themselves against the onslaught. The malicious player, on the other hand, will be accumulating experience points and equipping talent builds in order to break through defenses.

The difference is that "Dead By Daylight" takes the form of a simple slasher hunt, more Jason-like than Freddy-like. It uses a variety of custom-made killers to hunt down humans, tossing their battered corpses on meat hooks before hunting down more fresh blood. The only challenge is how efficiently they hunt down their victims. In "Evil Dead," on the other hand, you control an entire battalion of ghoulies. Each of the three factions included with the game contains three different units (Basic, Elite, and Boss Monster), each with different abilities. At any time, the demon player can jump behind the wheel of any of the summoned NPCs besieging Ashe and his men. The modularity of everyone's strategic approach is almost overwhelming, and the demon player can literally possess one of the survivors if certain thresholds are met, requiring a lucid understanding of the other side's mechanics at all times. "Evil Dead" is a licensed game with a very high It has a skill cap so high that it can seriously function as an ESPORT.

When it all comes down to the demon player, you will be stalking heroes throughout the atlas, planting boobs in their rooms, partitioning the cracks in reality, and slowly chipping away at their resolve. Party members are in constant danger of being possessed, and there will always be an exposed side out of sight. Team competition in "League of Legends" snowballs into a catastrophe when one side gains momentum. Experienced daemon players are more likely to understand the roles of all allied characters, allowing them to concentrate on taking down healers and supports who are falling back in the chaos. A well-trained survivor knows to drop his firearms and take valuable ammunition from the demon if he is about to be dominated. This is the same cat-and-mouse dynamic I like in other horror games, but multiplied to the pinnacle of Galaxy Brain.

"Evil Dead" can be a bit overwhelming for those who come in expecting goofiness and gory fun. I'm a Dead By Daylight Killer main, and I was completely stomped the first few rounds piloting the deadites. (I eventually turned the tide, but only after looking for metagame tips on YouTube.) As is always the case in these types of games, playing the hero is less stressful than playing the villain. The "evil dead" encourage players to stick together, and more talented party members often fill in for those unfamiliar with this particular underworld. Sabers make sure that there is always a chance for the protagonists to cut a path to victory through the back door. If someone in the party dies, they can be revived at the stone altars scattered throughout the arena. But the demons are desperate to spin the plates on their own and prevent the Ashe clan from snowballing their way to victory. With so many fast-paced decisions to make and so much strategic thinking to do, playing a single round of "Evil Dead" often leaves me feeling as exhausted as I do after a duel in "StarCraft." This is a compliment.

But there are many moments in "Evil Dead" where its wonderful cinematic presentation overwhelms the Minmax doing its thing on the stat screen. Henry the Red is alone in the woods and on the verge of full-blown panic. I set a dozen cunning traps in his path, forcing him to his knees as he wanders between them like a child in a haunted house. Henrietta, the Warlord faction's boss character and one of the greatest villains of all time, has the skill of squeezing the life out of a player's skull. This can only be stopped if she is attacked, which is a particularly satisfying coup when everyone else in the party is defeated. The demon can possess a rusty getaway vehicle in the woods, so the crash can be interrupted by a mack truck blazing toward the survivors. Multiplayer horror games need to maintain their wonderfully poor thrills as they increasingly delegate authority to humans. Because no one wants to experience the brilliantly creepy world of "Evil Dead" purely through cold, insensitive mechanics, "Saber" threads that needle, wrapping all the series' antics into the package and punching it up with competitive intrigue. It's a video game that lets you buff a horde of undead with a flute-playing skeleton. It's hilarious and often a winner.

Sabre also recreates the film's iconic '80s red, jelly-like viscera. Blood splatters and the bewitching shacks and creepy campsite details that are integral to the "Evil Dead" aesthetic are beautifully recreated. At times, in the midst of battle, when legions of gibbering Viking skeletons come rushing through the breach, it's tempting to sit back and watch the action as if it were the climax of Total War. The frame rate is fixed at a silky 60 throughout the entire match, which is impressive considering how many zombies are attacking at once. I did find a few things of concern during my exploration, such as hotkeys not working and floating animations, but overall, the Evil Dead package is tight, especially Dead By Daylight, which is still riddled with bugs that ruin rounds six years after its release.

Nevertheless, "Evil Dead" is a very multiplayer game. There are cosmetic-related solo play challenges on the home screen and a bot-only mode for zombie-slaying novices, but if you want to play this game as it should be played, you're going to be assessing other souls from across the screen. In short, "Evil Dead" is tied to a meta-progression system that incrementally awards talent points to favorite demon tribes and heroic survivors, granting them progressively superior perks. Sabre would like to make "Evil Dead" a permanent MOBA-style platform. However, the film contains a fairly small universe, and the character select screen already offers four different versions of Ash Williams to choose from. I'm no expert on Necronomicon chronology, but I don't know how much more I can squeeze out of the original source material. But I confess that after messing around with the 13 heroes and 3 eldritch forces included with the retail code, I was already looking forward to more.

This is the nature of game development in 2022. Countless great multiplayer experiences will come out of the gate in hopes of captivating audiences, and teams can simply keep working. Sometimes it works, other times you have to wait 20 minutes to get into a spell-breaking game. The Evil Dead certainly doesn't feel unfinished, but it seems like the first step toward something bigger. Sabre is preparing a great multiplayer game to be the juggernaut in this hobby.