Hellraiser Arrives In Dead By Daylight Today

Is your soul prepared? Hellraiser, one of the ancient and revered horror movie franchises, has finally come to the asymmetric horror survival game Dead by Daylight. As the Cenobite, killer players can now chase down survivors with hooks. Of course, the iconic Hellraiser puzzle box also makes an appearance, tied to gameplay mechanics as well as both the survivors and killer try to find it inside a match. Here’s a trailer of Dwight messing around and finding out, much as many have throughout the Hellraiser series.

The core DLC gets you the standard Cenobite character, which is the popular face of the franchise, Pinhead. Sadly, it looks like the voice lines that were in for the character during the testing period have been removed for release. You can also purchase additional skins that allow you to play as one of the other core Cenobites from the original film, the Chatterer. An additional skin available for Pinhead decks him out with some torturous style and flair. The Cenobite comes with some perks that are going to require considerable testing before we learn where they rank in the meta, but at the very least, they are interesting, mostly focusing on slowdown tools to keep a match going. These perks combined with other killer staples like Hex: Ruin can keep generators safe and give the puzzle box time to work its dire magic, issuing chain hunts on the survivors to slow them down and make them easy prey. 

As the Cenobite, you can also summon forth chains to slow and disable survivors, but they definitely take some skill to aim and connect with, and can seem like a huge waste of time even if they land – timing them with chain hunts, planning for environmental obstacles, mind gaming survivors, and combining chains with addons is essential to get any value out of them. It will be a bit before we know if the Cenobite is overpowered, underpowered, or just right, but we do know that Hellraiser is freaking awesome.  If you haven’t seen the original films, now is probably a good time to do so.  Some of the later direct-to-video options are fairly terrible, but I do harbor some love for the admittedly bad Hellworld (2005).

In addition to the big licensed killer’s debut, this patch brings skill-based matchmaking to DBD, which is also probably going to be a big talker once things shake out. Will it improve matches? Are matches going to take longer than ever to get going? Is every game going to be “sweaty” and full of massive tryharding with only the most powerful meta-perks? Time will tell. But for now, go dodge some chains!