The Texas Chain Saw Hands-On Preview

After working on Friday The 13th, Gun Interactive says it understood Texas Chain Saw couldn't just be a "copy and paste."
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The number of asymmetrical horror games has risen dramatically over the last few years, with games such as Friday The 13th, Dead By Daylight, Evil Dead, and more giving players the chance to see the world through the eyes of both original monsters and licensed slashers--not to mention their hapless victims. No two of these games are the same, but Gun Interactive is one of a very small number of studios to work on a second, separate franchise within the genre. For the studio, moving from the misty Camp Crystal Lake to the oppressive Texas heat is an undertaking that goes beyond setting and scenery.

The game plays in 4v3 matches where four victims--notably not named "survivors," but instead "victims"--awaken already ensnared by the Slaughter family that consists of the hitchhiker, the cook, and, of course, Leatherface himself. In the 50 years since the original Tobe Hooper movie shocked audiences with its unflinching portrayals of violence, Leatherface has outgrown his own series in a way, partly due to marketing decisions, Keltner believes. As slashers blew up in the 1980s, Leatherface had to become the series' mascot, its face of evil who could stand tall next to Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and the rest. But the original movie was much more focused on the family as a whole, so, in being a recreation of sorts of that 1974 film, the game does this too.

Faithful video game adaptations of other visual media can uniquely immerse players who bring with them a level of familiarity, and for me today, that means an eagerness to get back into that house despite knowing the horrors that await within it.