The Dead By Daylight Lights Out Modifier Kinda Sucks

 

Dead by Daylight introduced a new temporary mode to the game recently called Lights Out and while it's cool to see BHVR try new things with the forumla this is a lackluster addition to the game that only works to generate boredom and frustration instead of the intense scares I think they were aiming for.

The idea behind Lights Out is very simple.  It's the same thing as you're usual Dead By Daylight match but perks, add-ons, items and offerings have been disabled as well as most of the HUD elements.  On top of this survivors don't leave scratch marks when they run around and killers don't have a terror radius.  The cherry on top is that all the maps avaliable in Lights Out mode have been significantly darkened and visibility is extremely poor so ambushing people from the gloom or accidently running into the killer are pretty common occurances.  

I will admit, the first match I had with this modifier I thought it was kind of neat but it failed to hold any interest after that first game.  Things are especially boring after you kill two people and the remaining survivors start to sneak around more to hold the game hostage for significantly longer than usual.  Wandering around the dark gloom for 10s of minutes, unsurprisingly, not all that fun.  Also the lack of variation kills the mode after the first match.  There's a fun game to be played in regular DbD where you are trying to work out who has what perks and how to play around the team to avoid having your efforts thwarted by a nasty Decisive Strike or what have you.  If you catch someone, you are going to kill them, its that easy which sounds like it would be great for killer mains but when its this easy its just boring.  I'll take being teabagged at the exit gates any day over 0 effort victories like this.  Killer in Dbd is satisfying because it's extremely hard and Lights Out removes the difficulty and therefore removes the fun

The one good thing about Lights Out is it does prove to some degree just how stacked the game is towards the survivor side.  Thanks to no perks and no items, survivors don't have their arsenal of bullshit get out of murder free cards to use as crutches when they play badly.  It really does prove that playing regular DbD on survivor side is just playing the game on easy mode.  I'm sure for survivors lights out is even more miserable but I've not tried it so I wouldn't know personally.  A quick Google of the mode seems to support my idea though that this mode just isn't fun for survivor.

I think there's also some techinical fuck-ups going on too where every game I have played has been on the Yamaoka Esate despite there being 4 maps in rotation.  Also every 3rd match of Lights Out just fails to load properly and disconnects which would be a minor annoyance in most cases but queues for this mode are LONG, probably because not many people are playing it so when you're match fails like that its extremely frustrating.

I do commend BHVR for trying something new, I just wish that they had tried a mode that was actually something new and not just "Dead by Daylight but less and darker".  I personally would love to see a mode where the killer has some kind of objective to fulfill and the survivors have to stop it, could be a fun sort of reverse twist on the usual formula although I understand that would require a lot more work that what we got.  Still, I hope the modifiers are a thing that's here to stay but maybe shelf Lights Out and let it rot in the darkness where it belongs

Lights Out

So recently I saw this movie in my local cinemas so of course I have to do a little blog post about what I thought about it.  I almost completely ignored this movie because it states at the top of the poster that it's produced by James Wan of The Conjuring fame.  The Conjuring was a particularly shitty horror movie that I watched on a plane once so my expectations for Lights Out were fairly low.

The first thing that struck me when I started watching this movie was that some of the scenes early on are very reminiscent of viral video I saw on Facebook one time.  Here's the video

Well the reason is reminded me of this short so hard (which during my viewing I had forgotten the name of) is because Lights Out (the movie) is based off this short film of the same name from 2013.  So almost all the information you need to know about Lights Out is contained within this short and the movie version is just a longer a version.  One thing to mention is that they did change the ghost a bit and now its sort of a reverse Witch from Left4Dead which goes berserk in the dark instead of when you shine lights on it.

Anyway this is going to be a spoiler free short review so I'm not going to go into much more detail about the plot.  The movie relies heavily on jump scares which is a little disappointing but there are a few moments which generate some tension and some really clever stuff going on in the climax which made it considerably more entertaining than The Conjuring.   It's short of a shame that it went for so many jump scares really because there are a few good scenes where characters are walking around in the dark and your not quite sure where the creature is going to come from.  When they did have the monster attack though it was always a loud, screamy affair that just blew all the tension away and just left you feeling like you've been punched in the face.

One thing that did strike me is just the incredibly attractive cast.  The main character is played Teresa Palmer who is just crazy hot and even her boyfriend portrayed by Alexander DiPersia was giving me a bit of a man crush.  Even the ghost was played by an insanely attractive woman, Alicia Vela Baily, I mean just take a look at her.

If she wants to invade my house in the pitch black and hack me up then by all means.  I know having attractive actors and actresses in these movies isn't uncommon but for some reason in this movie it felt as if they were almost photoshopped into reality.

Anyway, Lights out won't leave you feeling upset that you spent your precious time watching it but it's nothing special and you'll probably forget about it in a few months.  If you want to save yourself the price of a ticket or a DVD then just watch the short on repeat for 2 hours, you'll basically get the same experience.