In our first look at Meet Your Maker, the next game by the developers of Dead by Daylight, we primarily looked at the building side of the game. Placing fiendish traps and setting up guard behavior all in the pursuit of duping hapless wanderers into meeting a cruel, cruel fate.
Meet Your Maker slots neatly into the segment of the video game market with titles like osu!, Trackmania, Mario Maker, Minecraft, and other games where the user-created content can shine, but let's not forget about the players, here! What's it like on the other side of that asynchronous coin? How does it feel to be the lab human trying to puzzle your way through these deadly mazes in the pursuit of that GenMat cheese? I ventured into one of the game's player-created torture chambers to find out.
A standard Meet Your Maker raid starts out innocuously enough. The level begins with you outside, freed from the claustrophobic interior of your sanctuary. You see the benign little harvester trudging off to collect more GenMat and you follow it deeper into the Outpost. I find myself wondering how bad this could possibly be. After all, I'm a seasoned veteran of FPS games. I know how to prepare myself for death lurking around every corner. How many different ways to trick me with blocks could there possibly be?
As it turns out, quite a lot, actually. I kissed steel 7 times before I defeated the machinations of this dungeon's creators and emerged triumphant. Whoever built this thing had placed traps on sloping tiles, and had layered sections that could trigger 2 or 3 traps in the same area, some of which were hidden behind the geometry of stage... The nerve of some people! It's almost like they were intentionally trying to kill me!
Unlike Dead by Daylight, these raids can be performed until you succeed. Your only limiting factors are time and willpower. Even if you start out with a lot of failure, every death offers you the ability to learn and iterate until you turn that series of Ls into a W!
I haven't tried out a co-op Raid yet, but I'm curious to see if operating with other players makes the dungeons easier or harder.
Much like the “cozy mystery” genre, it seems like the folks at Behaviour Interactive have once again figured out how to take the dark and macabre and shape it into a good bit of lighthearted entertainment. Dead by Daylight has a surprisingly welcoming community online, despite the game being ostensibly about one person trying to murder 4 others and sacrifice their souls. Meet Your Maker feels like it’s going to be able to thread that needle in much the same way. I'm already looking forward to watching some of my favorite streamers bemoaning their fate as they botch their 32nd consecutive attempt to complete a map, maybe even one that I designed. Now if you don't mind, I've gotta get back out there and possibly steal the bit of uncorrupted genetic material that the Chimera needs to save humanity.
