Evil Dead: The Game - What is the Premise?

Similar to games like Dead by Daylight or Friday the 13th: The Game, Evil Dead: The Game is what’s known as an asynchronous horror survival game. Basically, four players will act as a small group of Survivors attempting to survive an onslaught of horrors and deadites — the classic possessed monster of the franchise — as they run around a small Michigan town looking for a way to use the Necronomicon to seal away a Demon. However, those obstacles the Survivors must face are in fact controlled by a fifth player. Acting as the Kandarian Demon, this player must set traps; summon deadites; and possess trees, deadites, cars, and even the Survivors in order to keep the other players from completing their goals. This can be accomplished either by completing a specific objective in the first and last portions of each match or by killing all four Survivors. 

Each round starts with finding a group of five people, with four players choosing to be Survivors and one choosing to be the Demon. The Demon can pick between their three options while the Survivors pick among their 12. Be quick when choosing your favourite Survivor though, as no two players can act as the same character!

Once you’ve selected your characters, the match properly begins with the Survivors spawning in relatively close proximity to each other and a building that contains a small amount of equipment and weapons for them to pick up. The Demon spawns elsewhere, unaware of where the Survivors are located. The Survivors are soon told where to look for three pieces of a map that will lead them to the Necronomicon. As they run around town, slowly collecting upgrades and better weapons, the Demon will be on the lookout for them. However, the Demon is not strong enough to do much to the Survivors at first. While hunting them, the Demon will also lay traps and collect demonic energy to gradually upgrade their powers as well, eventually unlocking various powerful abilities. In this stage of the game, the Survivors only have 30 minutes to collect the three pieces of the map or else the Demon will automatically win.

From there, the Survivors next need to head towards the Kandarian Dagger and Necronomicon, holding off the Demon’s forces long enough to collect both items. Once the Survivors have begun their attempts, they have to stay within a given area around the items. Their progress in this regard is represented by a slowly filling bar. At this stage of the game, the Demon’s only recourse is to find and kill the Survivors. Thankfully, the Demon always knows where the Dagger and Necronomicon are before they are collected and will also know when the Survivors have begun their attempts. This way, the Demon can focus on laying traps around these two locations while the first part of the match is still ongoing and can focus all of their efforts on fighting the Survivors when they go to complete these tasks. 

If the Survivors manage to succeed here, everyone is told to move to a place where the Survivors can use the Necronomicon to banish the Demon. It will be the Survivors’ job to defeat a group of spirits defending the book by blasting energy beams at them. Once that’s done, they then need to protect the book from the Demon for a handful of minutes. At the same time, it’s the Demon’s job to destroy the Necronomicon in a last ditch effort to stay in this realm. Much like the Survivors and deadites, the book will have its own health bar for the Demon’s forces to deplete. But don’t forget! The Demon can still win if they murderise all four Survivors.

Once either side wins and the match is over, experience points are dealt out, with more points being awarded to the winning side and for more actions being taken. Even if you don’t win, you can still earn a hefty amount of points if you killed a lot of deadites or levelled up a lot. Points will go to two different experience bars; one for the character used by a given player and one for that player overall. The points earned by each character goes towards a series of skill points that they can put into a variety of abilities that will aid them in all of their future games. That’s a very big reason why you might want to stick to a favourite character! However, all hope is not lost if you’re forced to play a match with a character you don’t use much. Any general experience points held by a given player can be expended to boost any character that they have unlocked, meaning that they can upgrade whatever Survivor or Demon they wish to after a game, no matter who they were playing as.