Editorials
How Asymmetrical Multiplayer Flop ‘Evolve’ Paved the Way For ‘Dead By Daylight’ and ‘Friday the 13th’
Evolve is a game with a very strange critical history. When it was first introduced by Turtle Rock Studios, the creators of the much-loved Left 4 Dead series, everyone was impressed with its new take on the multiplayer shooter. Having four players team up and hunt another playing as a giant monster was a novel extension of the co-op multiplayer they perfected in their signature game. In the year leading up to its release, it won awards at industry events, including E3 and Gamescom. However, upon release, the reception was a bit more tepid. While there were some outlets that gave it high scores (BD gave it a 9/10 at the time), but most scores ranged between six and eight.
Now, five years later, Evolve has been shut down for over a year, but other games have picked up the 4v1 asymmetrical multiplayer concept and run with it. Dead by Daylight, Friday the 13th and the upcoming Predator: Hunting Grounds are all games where one player is a powerful evil creature while the others are trying to cooperate against them. Dead by Daylight came out only about a year and a half after Evolve, and that game is still receiving updates while Evolve’s servers have been shut down for over a year. What is it about Evolve that didn’t work out?
Right before release, Evolve showed its DLC strategy, and it made fans feel like content was being held back from them for no reason. The game was a full price $60 title with 12 hunters and three monsters, but also had a $25 Hunting Season pass that would include four more hunters and a $15 DLC that provided an additional monster. About six months later there was another Hunting Season pass with an additional four hunters and a monster for another $25.
While having this much post-launch content is always a great thing, the pricing structure of it was distinctly not. That first wave of content felt like it should have just been included in a game, so charging an additional $40 to include it all, bringing the total up to $100, seemed a bit too much. Since the game is so cooperative, it really is best played with friends, so asking four friends to each pay $100 to be able to have the full experience is a tough sell. The price of that went down by the time Hunting Season 2 rolled out, but the damage to the game’s image had already been done. Nothing kills a big multiplayer game faster than lack of community, and the initial bad publicity for Evolve did just that.
It’s a real shame that they had this pricing structure for the characters because that was one of the strongest points of the game. There were four different classes (assault, medic, support, and trapper) that all played completely differently and each had a specific role to fulfill on an effective team. Not only that, but each character within the class had abilities that made playing them a distinct experience from others. It may seem like a subtle difference, but having a medic with a medgun that can heal at a distance and a medic with a revive power that can bring back a dead hunter is significant. The same goes for the monsters, who all require different playstyles to play as and different techniques to hunt down and kill.
The visual design of the characters and monsters all did an excellent job of giving them personality without having to have extensive backstory cutscenes. Much like an Overwatch character, you can tell a lot about a hunter based on their visual design, whether you’re looking at the twitchy medic robot or the elderly lady in a big mech suit. Even the creatures that populate the levels are well designed, all conveying an untamed world ready to push back against the humans trying to make a life there.
One issue with the gameplay may have been the unconventional pacing of the game. During a standard “Hunt” match, the Monster spent time trying to sneak around and avoid the hunters while eating wildlife in order to power up to their strongest form, and the hunters were trying to use various methods to track the monster, like footprints or scared birds, in order to trap it in a deployable dome to get a chance to kill it. In a time before PUBG and Fortnite, games where the player is used to long stretches of time without running into an enemy, the pace was shockingly different from something like Call of Duty where players are in constant conflict with enemies.
Since all roles on the team have to work together in order to be effective against the monster, it was really hard to try out the game with a group of strangers. If the trapper is ineffective in using their skills to track the monster, it can be very frustrating looking while the monster just gets stronger and stronger, with nothing like PUBG‘s circle to force everyone into the same area. Even in a game like Dead by Daylight, the players have a specific goal to repair generators, giving them a goal that may spread them out so the killer has a better chance of finding one of them. While Evolve‘s design decision pay off when everyone is playing their role well, it’s easy to become irritated with a bad team.
Evolve was rebranded and relaunched as a free-to-play “Stage 2” version of the game mid-2016, but by then it was too late to save the game, which shut down its servers in September 2018.
What would happen if Evolve was launched today? Given the success of so many free-to-play titles through many genres, that likely would have been the structure of the game from the jump, giving away a basic version at no charge and asking players to purchase either more characters or new skins for existing ones. The content roadmap could have been spread out a little bit more, with big “events” surrounding updates to make them feel important. Free-to-play also makes it easy for you to get a group of people together so it can be played the way it was intended to be played, something that really made Fortnite an accessible game to start, allowing people to try out the unique characters and the cleverly designed gameplay.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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