Dead by Daylight (Video Game)

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, 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. 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.

Spinoff Media Includes…

Deathgarden (2018-2020): An Action Spin-Off about a Sci-Fi Blood Sport that shared several similar gameplay elements. Shut down in 2020 after development ended one year prior due to low player counts.
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. Received its own expansion subtitled the Malicious Expansion in 2024.
Dead by Daylight: The Legion (2023) - A prequel comic book series published by Titan and written by Nadia Shammas, which focuses on the backstory of The Legion.
Dead by Daylight Pinball (2023) - One of the Digital Pinball Tables available in Pinball FX's own spin-off, Pinball M, as a collaboration with Zen Studios.
What the Fog (2024) - A co-op roguelike game released for Dead by Daylight's eighth anniversary.
The Casting of Frank Stone (2024) - A single-player game created by Supermassive Games in collaboration with Behaviour.
Dead by Daylight Fan Comic Anthology (2024) - A manga anthology produced by Kadokawa Corporation, released June 28th.
Project T (Cancelled) - A PVE multiplayer Dead by Daylight game that was announced to be in development from Midwinter Entertainment in collaboration with Behaviour, was cancelled in September 2024 alongside the closure of Midwinter Entertainment.
Dead By Daylight The Hillbilly (2026) - A comic book series telling the origin of the Hillbilly published by Titan

A film adaptation was announced to be in development in 2023 with noted horror producers Jason Blum and James Wan. As of 2026, the film is set to be directed by Icelandic filmmaker Thordur Palsson from a screenplay by Alexandre Aja and David Leslie Johnson-Mc Goldrick.

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.

Dead by Daylight provides examples of the following tropes:

open/close all folders

Tropes A-M

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.
  - Popularity of “Calm Spirit” peaked in patch 7.2.0, as it would counter the perk “Ultimate Weapon” from the Xenomorph when it was at its strongest, preventing the survivors from screaming and revealing their aura for 15 seconds within the terror radius, which could be triggered by the killer just searching the locker.
- "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 the 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.
- In early days, "Sprint Burst" allowed survivors to easily outrun the Wraith's and the Pig's ambush attacks. It’s not as easy to do nowadays, since those attacks have been buffed in speed and range, but the perk can still be useful with a smart cooldown management or Quentin’s “Vigil” to recover from the exhaustion faster.
- "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 used to be countered very effectively by certain items. Maps were 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, Artist's crows no longer being able to be disabled and Red Twine addon for maps reworked into Battered Tape, which lost its ability to track killer belongings.
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. Starting a performance with the music-oriented perks such as "Bardic Inspiration" or “One-Two-Three-Four!” might also increase the chances of getting spared. 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 was 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 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 uses "Jeffrey Hawk" as an alias, and had a fascination with birds in his childhood that soon turned into torture and murder. He also used to collect feathers.
- The Artist ramps up the crow theme to 11. Not only are spectral crows her power, but many of her add-ons, charms, and outfit pieces incorporate crow motifs.
- While the Huntress' base mask is a rabbit, she doesn’t really have that for a motif. She's more aligned with solitary predators — bears, lone wolves, tigers, etc.
- Less overtly, many of The Trickster's outfits incorporate feathers. Given how much blue coloration is present in many of them, it's possible they're invoking a preening peacock motif for the prettyboy K-Pop star.
- Despite the mask and her epithet, averted by The Pig. Swine are not especially noted for their stealth or devious traps.
- Survivor Nea Karlsson is given a cat motif, tied to her stealth and mischievious attitude. Her shirt from the "Black Cat White Cat" outfit features a cat from the “Spine Chill” perk logo.
- Feng Min also has a bunny/rabbit motif with many of her costumes, as well as perks themed around caution (Alert) and jumping/running (Lithe).
- Country musician Kate incorporates horses into many of her outfit pieces, as well as the icon for her perk, Boil Over. She also has a recurring songbird theme, which makes for a mirror to her associated Killer's (The Clown) less-wholesome bird-association.
- Several cosmetic lines have animal-themed motifs for multiple characters: Cursed Cats is a line of feline-themed killer costumes: Horrors from the Deep is a line of deep sea creature/monster killer costumes; Chrysalis has lepidopteran-themed costumes for both killers and survivors.
- 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. After getting three crows, the survivor also loses collision with other players for 10 seconds to prevent extreme cases of bodyblocking.
- 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 you activate Evil Incarnate mode. This mode of Evil Within only lasts for 60 seconds each time you achieve it, and the survivors are informed as soon as you have stalked enough to activate it. Differing from The Hillbilly's Chainsaw Sprint, you can do nothing to muffle the notification. Even the dying state can be skipped on survivors that have already been hooked twice, allowing the Shape to simply kill them regardless of what health state they're at.
- 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 has 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. This essentially makes her a "sniper" killer - you only have 1 ammo, but each shot is a Boom, Headshot!. The major drawback is that the add-on reduces the maximum amount of Hatchets from 7 to 1, necessitating more frequent reloads (at any Locker object scattered throughout the map). However, there are certain "Perks" the player can equip, that take advantage of the reload mechanic - Iron Maiden makes the reload 50% faster, Darkness Revealed briefly shows the location of Survivors if they're near any other Locker, and so on. Initially, another Add-On called "Infantry Belt" would override the 1-ammo cap, giving you 3 Hatchets, but this has been removed (Patch 4.7.0, released on April 13, 2021), and equipping Iridescent Head caps the ammo at 1 regardless of any other conditions or add-ons.
- 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.
- Hooking a regular survivor while having Friends 'til the End equipped, makes the Obsession suffer from Exposed status effect on top of revealing their aura to you for up to 20 seconds. Hooking the Obsession will cause another survivor to become one, while also screaming and revealing their position. Commonly used by The Ghoul players, who can maximize its efficiency with killer’s high mobility.
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.
- 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 14 seconds by default. 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 originally would destroy itself in place of the first cleansed Hex Totem; this was patched to transfer the cleansed Totem's power to the Undying Totem, with the cleansed Totem changing into a Dull (neutral) state.
  - Hex: Haunted Ground, which if destroyed makes all Survivors Exposed (able to be downed by 1 hit instead of 2) for a period of time
  - Hex: Retribution, which if destroyed causes the Survivors' auras to be revealed to the Killer.
  - Hex: Pentimento, which allows the Killer to restore cleansed or even broken Totems - with new nasty effects. (However, if the cleansed Totem is destroyed again, it's destroyed permanently).
  - Hex: The Third Seal, which notably applies to Survivors rather than Totems. Hitting a Survivor makes them unable to read auras, rendering Totem-hunting perks (such as Small Game and Counterforce) useless. For the rest of the match.
- 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, or even temporarily suppress it altogether; with any other killer those would be beneficial (since Survivors would not get the "terrified heartbeat" audio + visual clue that the Killer is coming), and with a ranged killer they'd be especially useful. However, they're rendered mostly moot by the fact that reducing their terror radius doesn't affect their vocal cues, such as the Huntress's humming or the Trickster's muttering, making them almost 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 exiting 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. Or happen to drop a Pallet on your head.
- 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.
- Invocation perks are incredibly risky to play with - the general idea being that a player has to channel a ritual inside of the basement in return for extremely powerful return on investment (such as shaving as much as 10% off a generator's total progress or an inverted Spies from the Shadows where disturbed crows out the killer's location), but the problem lies in that fact that 1: The ritual takes a full minute to complete, during which time you're neither distracting the killer or working on gens, and while other survivors helping can drastically speed it up, that just compounds the problem. 2: the basement is an extremely vulnerable place for a survivor to be and if the killer decides to check the odds of one or more people getting hooked is very high, which is compounded because the killer can see the empty ritual circle and will know an Invocation is equipped and at some point someone will go to it. 3: Only one invocation per trial is allowed, so there's a slim but real risk you and another survivor render one of your/their perks useless, and 4: completing the ritual afflicts the initiating survivor with a permanent broken status, meaning for the rest of the match you've put a target on your back, but without any benefits to make it worth being a bigger target like No Mither.
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 that it will hurt survivors if it connects.
Bait-and-Switch Compassion: Killers are able to open an Exit Gate for the Survivors once all Generators are powered on. While merciful in theory, the Killer is encouraged to do this to draw out the Survivors because it also initiates the Endgame Collapse, meaning either the Survivors all try to make it past the Killer, or all of them die to the Entity's impatience.
Because You Were Nice to Me: If a Killer is friendly with a Survivor, dropping a held item in their field of view and leaving it in the trial while you escape is considered an appropriate "thank you" in the DBD community.
Bilingual Bonus: The Trickster, The Ghoul and The Krasue speak in their native languages (Korean, Japanese and Thai respectively).
Blinded by the Light: Survivors can use several types of items to temporarily blind & stun the Killer, which also causes them to drop their victim if they're carrying a Survivor (the "flashlight save"). Flashlights can be shined into the Killer's eyes, Flashbang grenades can be dropped while running, and Blast Mines can be attached to a Generator to stun/blind the Killer if they damage it. However, the "Lightborn" Killer Perk completely negates these effects, except for a partial stun from Blast Mine.
Blood Is the New Black: Every character, whether a Survivor or a Killer, is able to unlock a blood-splattered variant of their default outfit by prestiging their level enough times, with torso/weapon, leg/body, and head pieces being granted at 4, 5, and 6, respectively.
Bonus Feature Failure:
- When it comes to the level 25/50/75/100 prestige badges, it's understandable why Pinhead, Michael Myers and Laurie Strode had to make do with touching up old art, and Freddy Krueger and Quentin Smith hadn't seen anything new since their launch, so nobody expected much on that front either... but for whatever reason, despite Behaviour and Capcom having a good enough relationship to receive two chapters and a wealth of cosmetics, the Resident Evil cast had their badges confirmed late, and when they arrived, it just used their unaltered portrait artwork, causing some serious visual dissonance with the rest of the characters.
- To a lesser extent, characters who are The Dividual in canon (the D&D troupe, The Legion) aren't given individual prestige badges for each identity, only the default skin (Aestri and Frank, respectively).
Boring, but Practical: To note:
- Freddy’s old most effective gen denial build consisted of the Swing Chains addon^note and one of his Ultra Rares that limited survivors wake up options, bundled with Ruin, Thanatophobia, Pop Goes the Weasel and/or Huntress' Lullaby (preferably a combination of 2 or more of these). This infamous playstyle was dubbed “Forever Freddy” in the community, as it would bring the game to an utter crawl for survivors, giving killer players enough time to at least whittle down their efforts. This worked even if Freddy actively ignored his primary ability for the most part, which is to teleport around generators. This build has been gone since 4.7.0 after The Nightmare’s numerous reworks and changes to his addons.
- 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.
- Set Bonus: although the core game is designed for 4 random players, it's possible to have a 2-, 3-, or 4-player squad communicating via Discord, Twitch, or other means, playing as a team. Choosing identical characters and identical cosmetics adds a headache for the Killer, since it becomes almost impossible (in the rush of the moment) to distinguish between a wounded Survivor and one of their 3 identical friends who rushed in to take a protection hit or distract you, letting the wounded one get away.
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.
- On mobile. Want to have perks that no f2p player has? Or an edge on players that are not aware of store exclusive content? Check the store for deals on items or the resident evil perks to make them generic across all your survivors or killers.
- One of the skins for The Ghoul is a skin that replaces Ken Kaneki with Rize Kamashiro. Normally, Ken is a Screaming Warrior who is constantly giving off loud roars and yells when he uses his power, which helps Survivors keep track of him using his power for mobility. By contrast, the Rize skin is mostly silent, only giving off manic laughter when she injures survivors, meaning buying and using it gives a notable edge in making The Ghoul a stealthier character than the cosmetic you get for simply purchasing the character.
The Cameo:
- Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica all appear in person in the Freddy Fazbears Pizza map added alongside Springtrap. They even briefly move when the generator next to them is powered on before short circuiting.
Casting Gag:
- The Lich/Vecna is voiced by Matthew Mercer, host and dungeon master of the popular Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role, wherein Vecna was the Greater-Scope Villain of the "Vox Machina" campaign.
- The Dark Lord/Dracula is voiced by Crispin Freeman, who previously voiced another famous vampire in the anime series Hellsing. In the manga and Unlimited OVA series, it's also revealed that said vampire is also secretly Dracula.
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 saw 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 considered nigh impossible.
- The Entity enforces game balance In-Universe by empowering or weakening Survivors and Killers, as without a (somewhat) fair game either side is liable to just give up and deny it the emotions it feeds on.
Continuity Nod: The bathroom from the original Saw I 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. It also creates a Stand-In Portrait opportunity - a Survivor with the Perk "Plot Twist" equipped can pretend to be dead, and lay down next to the corpses, tricking a Killer checking the room, or even if the Killer notices them, they may spare them simply because of the comedic value.
Cosmetic Award: The February 24, 2026 Public Test Build saw the announcement of prestige profile badges for any characters who players ranked up to levels 25, 50, 75, and 100. They consist of an illustration of the character^* gradually being surrounded by the Entity's animate limbs as their rank goes higher.
Covered in Gunge: Most of the Killers (including quite a few licensed ones) have access to "Blighted" cosmetics, which saw Talbot Grimes use them as his personal guinea pig using serums derived from Visceral Cankers and Pustula flowers. It covers them in the same glowing gunk the Blight himself has via his injections.
Creepy Basement: On every map, there is a Killer Shack and a Main Building. The Basement may spawn in either one of these, and this chance may be influenced by items the players bring. The Basement has only 1 way out, and hooks that can't be Sabotaged (by either the Toolbox or the Sabotage perk). Being hooked in the basement makes rescue far more problematic. Especially if the Killer is The Trapper or The Hag, who can carpet the area with traps. However, there are Perks such as Sable Ward's "Wicked", that let you always self-unhook in the basement (only the 1st time, doesn't work if you get caught again), and "Deliverance", which lets you self-unhook anywhere IF you have previously rescued another Survivor from a hook.
Creepy Circus Music: The Clown's theme, naturally.
Creepy Crows: Crows are common wildlife in the maps that aid killers in finding survivors.
- Crows are normally found perched throughout the map, and 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) or walking slowly, or by equipping a Perk such as "Calm Spirit" or "Covert". Killers, on the other hand, *always* startle them (unless they're crouching as the Pig or Ghostface).
- Anti-Idling mechanic: If a Survivor hides in a locker for over 1 minute, crows will perch on it and make noise, giving away their location. Also, if a Survivor stands still for over 1 minute, crows will show up and start to circle above them, with the same effect.
- On the Pale Rose map, there are crows 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.
Critical Failure: Die rolls with the D&D characters use franchise standard d20s, and true to form, rolling a 1 is bad for you. For Aestri/Baermar, rolling a 1 with Bardic Inspiration causes the character to scream out instead, nullifying its potential bonuses; for Vecna, the treasure chests that spawn in his trials will change into Mimics if a 1 is rolled.
The Croc Is Ticking: Most of the Killers have a distinctive sound that can be used to discern which Killer is being played (it resonates across the map), such as the Wraith's bell, the Nurse's scream, or the Deathslinger's gun firing. Additionally, some Killers spawn specific items throughout the map, informing the Survivors what kind of Eldritch Abomination they're facing:
- The Onryo has televisions with VHS tapes on top.
- The Pig has Jigsaw Boxes.
- The Xenomorph has Flame Turret cases.
- The Nightmare has credenzas with alarm clocks.
- The Nemesis has Supply Cases with Vaccine syringes. And a couple of Zombies wandering around.
- The Mastermind has Supply Cases with First Aid Spray canisters.
- The Singularity has futuristic Supply Cases that 3D-print EMP Grenades.
- The Plague has Pools of Devotion.
- The Cenobite has Lament Configuration ("The Cube"), which appears in only 1 location on the map, but its aura is shown to all Survivors.
- The Lich has treasure chests.
- The Animatronic has Security Doors.
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 certain perks (for example, Cheryl Mason's Repressed Alliance, Taurie Cain's Shoulder the Burden and all Invocations), are anything to go by, any survivor willing to learn these skills 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, and it always has disadvantages (blocked generators, one less hook before death, and permanent injury respectively). The lore states that the Entity feeds on hope, so it doesn't want to make the Trials *too* difficult. 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.
Developer's Foresight: Sadako has a unique Jump Scare that randomly occurs when she's idle in the lobby. If you rotate her so that she doesn't face the camera in the hopes of avoiding it, she will eventually turn to face the camera before jumpscaring you as normal, before returning back to whichever direction you rotated her in.
Dialog During Gameplay: Over the years that the game has received updates and support, later-released characters have been encouraged to speak more often, not to mention in actual coherent sentences and not just Voice Grunting. Nicolas Cage is probably the foremost example of this, having lines for a variety of situations.
Difficult, but Awesome:
- The Nurse in general. She's a teleporting Killer but you can't see (except for 1 specific Add-On) WHERE you're teleporting. So you will be getting curbstomped every match until you learn how to effectively use her power. Once you get the timing and muscle memory down, though, she easily becomes one of the best killers in the game, by the 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 leaving Stalker mode. This means he is stuck with a below-average speed and is forced to make do with the default break speeds. However, he gains the ability to read survivor auras in a 32m radius around him, with no restrictions. This, paired with the fact that Stalker mode 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, this is only at its most effective on indoor maps, knee-capping this playstyle if the Shape gets sent to an outdoor map.
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 and/or other characters' perks and knowledge that a new player doesn't have (Trapper, Wraith), and one is a projectile fighter without an aiming reticle (Huntress). (However, a gaming monitor with a built-in crosshair / reticle makes the Huntress (and later on, Trickster) MUCH easier to play.) None of these characters has much gameplay in common with the other four.
Early-Installment Weirdness: Within the same installment, to boot. Considering the game has seen ten years' worth of content and updates, and it's still going strong, looking at gameplay of its first years compared to what it is now can be very strange experiences as Behaviour has struggled to balance the game between the Survivors and Killers. To name just one example, when the Brand New Part was introduced as an add-on for toolboxes, activating it instantly completed the generator. Period, dot. This was a problem; its first nerf granted pretty speedy hefty bonuses to ongoing skill checks. This was still seen as too strong, so its next nerf reduced said ongoing checks to only two. Its current iteration makes the generator's total repair requirement take a permanent reduction for the rest of the trial.
Easter Egg:
- There's a golden toolbox hidden in almost every map.
- Inputting the Konami Code^* 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.
- On the Ormond Lake Mine map, there's an open elevator shaft with frozen corpses piled inside. Coming close to it will cause it to shudder and make a loud noise, startling new players. And 2 seconds later, it will completely drop, sending the corpses to the icy fog below.
- On the Lampkin Lane (Haddonfield) map, there are artworks referencing game concepts and early character art.
- 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: Prior to its retirement in January 2024, The 80's Suitcase DLC gave the survivors a bunch of 80s themed cosmetics to die fabulously in. It is still available as a Special Bundle in the in-game store, though.
Expy Coexistence: The Trapper, The Hillbilly, The Legion and The Spirit are expies of Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Ghost Face and Sadako respectively; all characters would later join the roster themselves, though Ghost Face fudges with the specific licensing. Amusing inverted with the two Vecnas, since the D&D original came into the game before his Stranger Things counterpart.
Fair-Play Villain: Actually happens to an extent by the Entity, which forces the Killers to sacrifice survivors to it via meat hooks instead of just smiting them on the spot (most of the time; see Finishing Move below) and even Nerfs the most egregiously powerful of them, such as Vecna, so that they can't effortlessly curbstomp whatever survivors are stuck dealing with them. It's also inverted in that the Entity takes measures to prevent battle-hardened survivors like Ash Williams or Trevor Belmont from turning the tables on the killers.
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: Each Killer possesses the ability to "kill Survivors by their hands", allowing them to personally finish off a downed victim at their leisure. By default, Killers can only perform one on the last Survivor remaining in the Trial. However...
- The Memento Mori series of offerings grant Killers a wider range of options to directly kill Survivors, beyond the "last Survivor remaining" option. The retired Cypress Memento Mori formerly allowed for killing the last survivor who hadn't escaped yet, before patch 8.3.0 made it basekit. There are currently two variations of this offering in the game:
  - 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.
- Some Killers have built-in ways to directly finish off Survivors via their Powers and/or addons. These often lack the restrictions imposed on kills provided by Memento Mori offerings, such as requiring two Hooks beforehand.
  - Michael Myers can bypass health states entirely by killing a Survivor that has been hooked twice instantly while he's in Evil Incarnate mode. Uniquely, this variation can be performed on Survivors even if they're not downed.
  - 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.
  - Vecna has a simpler approach to this- Survivors that have used his unique items (Hand of Vecna and Eye of Vecna) can be killed by him, provided they have been hooked twice already.
  - The other Vecna can attack Survivors with his Vines to enable Worldbreaker mode while also building up charges of Mindbreaker in the affected Survivor. When it's maxed out, he gains an alternate, quicker means of killing the target when they reach death-hook.
Fire of Comfort: The Campfire is a sub-area within the Entity's Realm where the Survivors are taken whenever a trial ends, whether it's with their escape or their death. It helps them get their spirits back up and regroup, making it that much more nourishing for the Entity when it bleeds their hope and despair away in the trials.
First-Person Ghost: Averted. While playing as any killer, looking down will reveal your feet. ^Exception
Fluorescent Footprints: Of a sort. By running instead of walking or sneaking, Survivors automatically leave behind "scratch marks", glowing red scratches on the ground and other nearby surfaces which betray their current heading. Various perks for both sides allow the exact mechanics of scratch marks to be adjusted, but by default, they light up in a Survivor's wake, stay lit for eight seconds, and then fade back into nothingness.
Game-Breaking Bug:
- A fairly common bug makes it possible to fall out of bounds, both as killer and survivor. It often occurs whenever a new map gets added or an old one reworked. The game will try to teleport you back into the playable space if that happens, though.
- 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 systems were made public. 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 in regular matches, some players brought intentionally broken combinations into public games 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 the 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. This loss of bloodpoints can be mitigated by an experienced Survivor squad recognizing that you're "memeing around" and actively let you "farm" points, such as chasing or hitting them and letting their teammates heal them, or drop pallets and let you destroy them, etc.
- 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.
- Some players bank on the sense of humor or empathy of some Killer players, by having usernames such as "Wesker's Wife" or "Huntress Kisser", indicating their fandom; it's considered good form to let those Survivors live if you happen to be playing the "usernamed" killer.
Gender-Equal Ensemble:
- The Legion is composed of two males — Frank and Joey — and two females — Julie and Susie.
- Between both Resident Evil chapters, if you include both Survivors and Killers, they have three male characters — Leon, the Nemesis and Wesker — and three females — Jill, Ada and Rebecca.
- Between both Stranger Things chapters, they added two male survivors — Steve and Dustin — and two females — Nancy and Eleven.
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. It takes 20 seconds to open the gates, and that time can be *significantly* increased by Killer powers or Hex totems.
Go Through Me: As a last-ditch method, Survivors can attempt to stand between the Killer and an injured survivor, taking the hit so that the other survivor can escape. The game recognizes these as "Protection Hits", and awards extra points.
"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.
Haplessly Hiding:
- Survivors are able to hide in lockers. However, killers have the option to search said lockers, and if they search one in which a survivor is hiding, they will instantly grab them. They also have the ability to grab a survivor who is in the middle of the locker exit animation.
- Additionally, the Dredge has the ability to teleport into lockers. If a survivor tries entering a locker the Dredge is inside, they will be grabbed.
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. The horse's name is Maurice. One of the cosmetics for the Huntress features a suspiciously Maurice-shaped skull helmet. There's a story there, but since the Huntress doesn't talk, we'll never know.
- Averted in the Tome/Archive lore - Despite his strange appearance, Maurice seems like a pretty pleasant fellow. He communicates telepathically with Saku Nanako, The Redcrane, and is an ally of hers in many stories.
Hero Shooter: Has elements of one, particularly in regards to Killers. Each Killer is a unique playable character with their own distinct Powers, giving each of them a differing playstyle despite sharing a set of basic actions (such as attacking Survivors). Not so much for Survivors, whose primary abilties come from Items and Perks beyond basic actions (such as repairing Generators), effectively making choosing between them purely cosmetic. The asymmetry and hidden choice of Killer put a twist on the formula, giving the killer player power to determine most of the rules of engagement and the survivors the task of trying to piece together a functional counter to that choice after choosing their characters.
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.
- Besides the Killers that have Terror Radius suppression "built-in", there are certain Perks that other Killers can bring to the same effect. For example, the Huntress' "Wooden Fox" Add-On makes her "Undetectable" (suppressed) for 30 seconds after reloading. The Perk "Insidious" allows ANY killer to become Undetectable by standing still for 2 seconds (the illusion is broken once they move or wind up their weapon).
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. The Nurse has an entire Perk titled "Nurse's Calling", which lets a Killer detect the Survivors who are healing or mending, even through walls.
Hope Springs Eternal: In the 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. A recent accessibility update added a visual "beating heart" in the center of the screen, giving deaf or hard-of-hearing players a much-needed visual cue. The Killers also have a "Red Stain", which illuminates the environment nearby (and in the direction they're looking), so if there's a red light behind you, 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.
Injured Self-Drag: Survivors knocked down by the killer can attempt to crawl away. It usually won't stop the killer from just picking them up, but it's something.
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, in Stalker mode of his Evil Within ability, has practically no heartbeat. Meaning he can get real close to you without you knowing until you turn around. Combining this with the add-on that prevents him from leaving Stalker mode but lets him see survivor auras when stalking....
- 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.
- Springtrap is naturally all about this, with him being given Undetectable whenever he leaves the security doors, and shots of him screaming in the survivor's face are built into his Mori and his axe-driven automatic pickup.
Kidnapped from Behind: If the Killer finds a Survivor in the middle of an activity, they can instantly haul them up onto a capture, skipping the need to damage them entirely. Naturally, the stealthy killers like Michael, Amanda and Ghost Face have an easier time of this.
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. This is balanced by the fact that fixing the generators together is faster: approximately 90 seconds solo, 50 seconds with 2 people, 30 seconds with 3, and 25 seconds with all 4. So it's generally best to split into pairs to get the 40% speed boost on each generator, but get 2 done at the same time.
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.
Meeting Your Reincarnation: Dracula from Castlevania is a playable Killer, and his Heel–Face Reincarnation Soma Cruz is on the side of the Survivors as a legendary skin for Trevor Belmont. Should Dracula and Soma be in the same lobby, the former quickly makes his disdain for the latter clear.
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.
Murder by Arson: The Trickster's backstory combines this with Murder by Inaction. When he was in a band, an accidental fire broke out in the recording studio. The Trickster heard their screams and realized that he Loves the Sound of Screaming, so he decided to intentionally let them die. This has the benefit of getting rid of them in a was that looks accidental, as the Trickster had grown jealous of his bandmates drawing the spotlight away from him and he viewed this as an opportunity to reclaim his place in the spotlight.
Mythology Gag: With all the crossovers in the game, they got their own page.

Tropes N-Z

Neck Lift: The Shape's Finishing Move begins with this, and several later Killers carry Survivors to hooks this way.
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 (that we know of).
Not Completely Useless: Ever since it was added, the Broken Key has been seen as a Joke Item, since it can literally only be useful if given add-ons which would be better served on the other varieties of key. With Trevor Belmont's perk Exultation, though, the potential exists to boost the Broken Key into one capable of opening the hatch.
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 it also speeds up the Locker animation by 50%, so Huntress and Trickster, who use the Lockers as ammo caches, can equip it to reload 50% faster.
- The Dredge's "Darkness Revealed" perk briefly shows the auras of Survivors near any other Locker on the map. Combining this with "Iron Maiden" gives Huntress and Trickster another advantage - every time they reload, they also get a "free aura reading".
- 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 so 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 routing 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.
Oculothorax: Going down into the dungeons of the Forgotten Ruins map might bring you face-to-face with a beholder. Thankfully it's trapped behind cell bars and can't attack you. It's still one hell of a Jump Scare if you're not prepared.
Old Save Bonus:
- Steam players who also own Left 4 Dead or Left 4 Dead 2 unlock some additional shirts for early survivors.
- Owners of Deathgarden unlocked a mask for Meg and the Trapper.
- Owners of Hooked on You get an exclusive outfit for Jake and a trapped heart charm.
One-Hit Kill: Perhaps the most straight example is provided by Michael Myers. Once a survivor has been hooked twice, Myers gains the ability to kill them at will, with the only caveats being that he must be in his Evil Incarnate mode, with its activation causing a map wide sound cue alerting survivors, and that he must be right next to the survivor, upon which a prompt to kill will appear. Pressing it will cause his mori animation to activate instantly, grabbing the unlucky survivor and killing them on the spot. This specific method of killing is unique in that Myers doesn't need the survivor to be in the dying state to do this, he can kill them as long as the above two conditions are fulfilled,
- David King's perk 'No Mither' 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 from the Dying State.
One-Steve Limit: Averted. There are two survivors named David: David King and Detective David Tapp. However, in that Tapp is referred to by "Detective" in menus/UI, with no mention of his given name.
Overheating: The removed Overheat mechanic for Hillbilly's Chainsaw served as an example. Added in Patch 4.1.0, the overheat bar would fill up with repeated use of the chainsaw. If the overheat bar was full, the chainsaw would malfunction and be unusable for about 10-15 seconds, depending on addons. This would be removed in Patch 7.5.0 and replaced with Overdrive, which instead would boost his Chainsaw when the meter was full for a duration.
- 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.
Over-the-Shoulder Carry: The most common way Killers carry Survivors around, even if they have to struggle to get them up there.
Palette Swap: Survivors and Killers alike have had "Legendary" cosmetic sets released which give them an entirely new identity with new voice actors and profile graphics to match. They're a way to introduce even more (usually licensed) characters to the game without also creating new chapter lore, gameplay or perks for them, and none of them have actually factored into the running plot.
- All-Kill: Comeback chapter changes this by introducing MiNA, a female virtual K-Pop idol, who’s modelled in-universe after The Trickster himself and present as his “Legendary Outfit” in-game. Her creation, rebellion and descent into villainy is the main focus of the chapter’s lore.
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 completes the sacrifice and the other survivors have no way to bail out the victim, that player is out of the game.
Play Every Day: With the mission revamp from the Tome challenges to the Quest system, there are daily quests to complete which award bloodpoints (and Rift fragments when applicable).
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 either letting them earn more Bloodpoints (in-game currency) during the match or improving their power in a different way. Notable examples include the Trapper's padded jaws (traps do no damage, but still prevent survivors from moving), the Hillbilly'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), the Wraith's "The Beast" sigil (his invisibility no longer hides his heartbeat) and Leatherface's Cracked Primer Bulb (reduces Chainsaw damage and increases charge rate of his Power).
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.
Premium Currency: There are three main currencies in the game: Bloodpoints, Iridescent Shards and Auric Cells. The former two are considered the regular currencies, while the latter is the premium currency.
- Bloodpoints are mainly earned through completing score events during Trials and given as as a reward afterwards, and are spent solely on progressing through the Bloodweb to gain Perks or consumables.
- Iridescent Shards are primarily earned by leveling up your Player Account Level, and can be spent on non-licensed Survivors and Killers, some cosmetics and Perks from the Shrine of Secrets.
- Auric Cells are exclusively obtained by purchasing them from the in-game store with real money^note, and can be spent to buy any Survivor and Killer (including licensed ones) in the in-game store, to buy a broader range of cosmetic items and to unlock the premium Rift track.
Press X to Not Die:
- While a killer is carrying them, a survivor has a chance to struggle free by hitting the skill check multiple times (about 18, good luck). You can also escape from a meat hook by attempting to wriggle free (with a 4% base chance, Dice Roll Death, haha). After reaching the 2nd hook stage, the Entity has been summoned and the player has to pass regular skill checks - if they fail 2 of them, they're gone.
- 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 power is Jigsaw's Baptism, which allows her to place 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: When 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: After the changes to Archives in 2025, the game gives you a maximum of four Daily Quests which award Bloodpoints, the currency used to level up characters, and Rift fragments to progress Rift track. The quests will typically consist of performing tasks as either Survivor or Killer, such as hooking survivors as Killer or repairing a set amount of generators as 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.
Suburban Gothic: Lampkin Lane, formerly an idyllic slice of suburbia, is now tainted by Micheal Myers' killing spree. As a Map in Dead by Daylight, Survivors flee from the Killer as the neighborhood and once inhabited homes are turned into stalking grounds.
Suck E. Cheese's: Freddy Fazbear's Pizza is a much darker, twisted version of a typical children's pizzeria. It has all the features of a family restaurant—malfunctioning animatronics, an arcade room, and overpriced pizza. However, it was also once the hunting ground for William Afton’s gruesome murder spree against innocent children. In Dead by Daylight, the pizzeria is depicted as an abandoned, decaying shell, with remnants of a birthday party still scattered about. Blood stains the floors, and eerie, disembodied giggling from unseen children fills the air.
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 Trial Grounds.
- Other killers with voicelines include Chucky and Springtrap.
Supernatural Floating Hair: Spirit and Oni.
Temporary Online Content: The game itself cannot be played as intended offline^note, 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 2026, Hellraiser and Halloween chapters and their content have been delisted from digital storefronts. The first Stranger Things chapter was this for a time, but eventually returned.
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.
Ugly Baby: When The Twins were born conjoined to each other and with Victor growing out of Charlotte's body, the midwife attending their birth ran out the door screaming that they were demons and their mother was a witch. The persecution would follow them for their entire lives.
Unexplained Recovery: Getting unhooked or wiggling yourself out of the Killer's grab will put you from the Dying state to the Injured state for no canonical reason. Inversely, getting grabbed while healthy and wiggling will inexplicably damage you.
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 fail to rank up. 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: A common issue for some crossover characters originating from movies and TV series, due to Behaviour often failing to secure the rights to use their actors' likeness in the game. This is the case with Laurie, Quentin, Freddy, Detective Tapp and Ripley. Masked killers, characters from videogames and more recent media coming into the game usually do not suffer from this trope.
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.
- Dracula's "Human Greed" perk allows Killers to close opened chests, which they cannot normally do.
- On the survivors' side, the same principle applies to Throwing the Distraction (an Adam Francis perk), and resetting dropped pallets (a Yui Kimura perk).

Dead by Daylight

32 Following

Dead by Daylight provides examples of the following tropes:

Video Example(s):

The Executioner
Share Video Copied!

Previous

Index

Next

Video Game / Dead by Daylight 32 Following

Dead by Daylight provides examples of the following tropes:

Video Example(s):

The Executioner Share Video Copied!

Previous

Index

Next

The Executioner

Dead by Daylight

32 Following

The Executioner
Share Video Copied!