Evil Dead: The Game Balances Horror-Comedy in Ambitious Multiplayer Experience

Evil Dead: The Game arrives May 13 with an unusual promise for a horror multiplayer title: the survivors can actually win. That distinction matters more than it might sound. In games like Dead by Daylight or Friday the 13th: The Game, the people being hunted are largely defenseless, running and hiding until the killer catches them. Saber Interactive, the studio behind World War Z, has built something different here—a game that captures the franchise's defining quality, which is the collision of slapstick comedy and genuine dread, and translates it into a structure where four players squad up as survivors while a fifth controls the demonic forces trying to stop them.

The Evil Dead films have always occupied strange territory in horror. Since the 1981 debut, they've mixed outlandish action-comedy with creatures and violence that genuinely unsettles. That tonal balance is rare in games, and it's what makes this adaptation ambitious. The game draws from the original trilogy and the three-season television series, both anchored by Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams. The playable survivors include familiar faces—Pablo and Kelly among them—but Ash is the draw, and the developers have given him four distinct versions based on his appearances across the series. Play as the Ash from Army of Darkness if that's your preference; each version carries different abilities.

The core structure is asymmetrical multiplayer. Survivors scavenge for supplies—rifles, chainsaws—and work through objectives while managing a resource called Fear, which makes them vulnerable to possession and more vicious attacks. The antagonist, playing from a first-person perspective like in the films themselves, moves freely across the map, setting traps, powering up roaming Deadites, and taking direct control of demons or even the survivors' own bodies. In hands-on play, the survivor experience felt like genuine action-horror, closer to Resident Evil or The Evil Within than to the pure evasion of Dead by Daylight. Clearing Deadites with finishing moves and chainsaw attacks created real momentum. But the antagonist role is where the game truly shines. One memorable sequence involved laying traps, stalking the survivors, then triggering a fear-based jump scare as they rushed toward a vehicle. While they were disoriented, possessing the car itself and ramming it into the group as more Deadites closed in was satisfying in a way that felt true to the franchise's chaos.

Tim Willits, Saber Interactive's Chief Creative Officer, framed the design philosophy around giving longtime fans what they wanted while offering genuine gameplay variety. The survivor mode plays as cooperative survival horror; the antagonist role functions more like dynamic tower defense. That combination creates depth on both sides of a match. The game also includes a bonus mission mode for solo players, recreating scenes from the films—the cabin invasion from the original, for instance—with plans to expand that content through a season pass.

The developers have already signaled openness to drawing from the 2013 Evil Dead remake, with Willits hinting at Jane Levy, who played the lead in that film, potentially appearing in future updates. For now, the game stays rooted in the original trilogy and TV series, but the foundation seems built to accommodate more. Evil Dead: The Game releases May 13 across PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X, and Nintendo Switch. For a franchise that has seen uneven game adaptations in the past, this one appears to have found the right balance between honoring what made the films work and building something that functions as a game first.