The developers behind Dead By Daylight, Behaviour Interactive, have given a gift to their community in the form of a new game that is lighter than its flagship and answers the question, “What if you and a friend got sucked into a cursed board game?” That game is What the Fog, and it’s a fun little romp for one or two players. What’s more about this game? It exists within Dead By Daylight.
What The Fog is a roguelike game that is an expansion of the Dead By Daylight Universe, where popular survivors Dwight Fairfield, Claudette Morel and Feng Min have been sucked into a board game and have to clear each room by collecting blood points, some around the board and the rest you get from defeating automatically generated enemies, and using them to fix the generators that will open the door, allowing you to escape.
Throughout What The Fog, you will get power-ups, such as double jump, slow fall, increased vitality, and so many more, as you fix the generators, with special boosts that you pick between levels, which range from decreasing the damage done by enemies to lengthening the life of your doppelganger (that’s right, you can project a duplicate of yourself to distract the baddies) to making your enemies explode upon defeat, doing damage to any other enemies in the affected area.
“I can tell you that the game is a more fun experience with a friend, with the ability to strategize and scout out the board as a pair.”
What The Fog can be played as a single-player or two-player, with the objective staying the same, but the ability to split up the work changes up the challenge for you. I can tell you that the game is a more fun experience with a friend, with the ability to strategize and scout out the board as a pair, plus the ability to enter a support mode should one of you die, which lets you cast spells from an overhead view until such time as your partner can revive you so you can escape together. Alone, the game feels basic with its repetitive structure, being limited to one character and just overall simplicity.
The game itself, while simple in nature, can be a challenge as you increase the difficulty. Even on Very Easy, the amount of bad guys to take on can feel overwhelming (although at that difficulty, you’ll notice you’re not taking a ton of damage). Be prepared to be on the move, however, as you are swarmed by dozens of varying enemies at any given time, ready to blow you out of the air when trying to jump across a big gap, and don’t think you are safe when you have the high ground. They’ll just jump up to join you.
The animation in What the Fog is really smooth, with decent transitions between gameplay and cutscenes (really, there are just some nonplayer animations at the beginning and end of a level). The overall environments, while all similar, just procedurally generated, had a lot of little detail to it that allowed you to both navigate it well and use it to protect yourself from the baddies.
“What the Fog is a free gift for the first two million Behaviour Interactive members and costs $4.99 USD for non-members.”
The sound, however, left something to be desired. The rock music soundtrack sounds like it was just pulled from a stock music site with no real connection to the theme of the game. The sound effects were generally understated with no real ‘umph’ to them. That being said, that may be more of a blessing than a curse because once that board starts to fill up with creatures, the cacophony of sounds may have been too much to bear otherwise.
What the Fog is a free gift for the first two million Behaviour Interactive members and costs $4.99 USD for non-members. The developers have said that no extra content can be expected for the game, which seems fine given the fact that it is a free game and a driver to get people to create a Behaviour Interactive account if they don’t already have one. It’s a shame, though, because there is a lot of potential to turn this game into something more.
I foresaw new characters being introduced to change up the game, some new power-ups, online play and perhaps a release on platforms other than Steam. That last one is more than a little upsetting because this game would have a fun life as a two-player game on console, but for a game that doesn’t appear to have been released to make any money, we’ll have to accept what we’ve been given.
The game is fun for what it is, but it isn’t a game you will want to strap in and play for a couple of hours. As a pair, you’ll probably be done by the time you complete a run. Alone, I’ve barely made it 20 minutes. It’s a good time killer but not something in which you’ll immerse yourself.
