I Picked a Terrible Time to get into Evil Dead Again

I mean I guess technically any time is a terrible time to get into the Evil Dead game again after its delisting from every store on earth earlier this year, but I have a whole point to make here.

It all started when I got rid of my Game Pass subscription in response to the whole BDS thing, and with €20 no longer going to Microsoft every month, I thought to myself „hey, what if I messed around with GeForce Now?“ The idea being, of course, that this would save me the trouble of having to do something stupid like ‚save an extra €20 a month.‘ Also this gave me a great way to jack up all the settings in most of my games without having to sell a kidney, lung, and chunk of liver on the black market to afford a new gaming PC. Lemme just make a quick aside here, which is that GeForce Now is shockingly good and has resulted in me playing a lot of games I owned and just never got around to playing either because I didn’t have room on my hard drive for them anymore, or because I never got them running quite as nice as I’d like them, or whatever. Now I can just kinda fire them up (assuming they’re on the service of course, not all my games are but it allows me to safely just leave some stuff off my hard drive and yet still play them whenever the fuck I want! Alan Wake 2 runs very nicely on there, is what I’ll say).

Anyway, if you’re like me, you fucking hate the Epic Games Store. If you are also like me, you have some games on there which you could only get on the store to begin with, and Evil Dead was one such game (it did end up on Steam once its year of exclusivity was up, of course, but not quickly enough to save the game from being yanked). I played quite a lot of it in that first year of its existence before doing what I do with any game, which is get distracted by other stuff and put it down for years before going back to it. I would fire it up every once in a while, but eventually I needed hard drive space and Evil Dead got the axe… or perhaps the chainsaw, if we’re talking Evil Dead 2 and beyond.

The point is, as I sat going through my Steam, Epic, Microsoft, and GoG libraries on GeForce Now this past weekend, I scrolled over the Evil Dead game and thought „I wonder if people are still playing this game!“

We all remember this song of the summer, right?

There are a Surprising Amount of People Playing this Game

I should stress at this point that I did not, at this point in time, know the game had been delisted like two months ago. The one thing I did know was that as far as I knew the game was still chugging along but hadn’t become the next Dead By Daylight, evidenced by the fact that Bruce Campbell showed up in Dead By Daylight like a year ago. Imagine my surprise when I dropped into the random queue that Friday evening and got into a match almost instantly. Like, instantly. I think the longest I’ve had to wait for a match – and this is in part because a lot of people seem to drop from a match if they don’t get the person they want (or maybe if they want to be a survivor and not the demon, because this only ever happens to me when I am not the demon, but in that case get the fuck out of the quick matchmaking queue and just queue as a survivor you fucking assholes) is maybe a couple of minutes?

Once I get into a match, I reckon they last around 20-30 minutes tops. Unlike my memories of playing earlier, where the demon seemed to come out on top pretty often, the survivors generally have the upper hand. I have won far fewer matches as the demon than I have won as a survivor, is what I’ll say. Although part of that is down to me being like, not particularly good as the demon (I have started to stick to Ted Raimi-as-evil-grandma and seen success with her in a way I haven’t with the other demons. Being able to cut a rude fart and poison survivors is a real bonus).

The Game is Real Fuckin‘ Fun

Of course this would be meaningless if the game wasn’t fun, and you know what? It’s fucking fun! I like the changing objectives for the survivors – having to collect map pieces, then summon a couple of things, then banish the Dark Ones, then make a last stand while the Necronomicon does its thing means you’re constantly shifting tactics. Throughout the match, you’re also looking for bottles of Pink Fuck (a horrible alcoholic concoction from the TV show) that will upgrade your survivor so you can run farther, do more damage, get scared less, etc. At the same time the demon is constantly growing stronger and laying traps and generally just being a pain in the fuckin‘ ass. If you happen to be playing the demon, you spend most of the time in the classic EVIL VISION camera angle from the movies, complete with growling noise and destruction of small things like fence posts and bushes and whatnot. It’s great!

I mean obviously the usual risks of playing with other humans are there – namely that people on the internet love slurs, and the game has voice chat – but mute everyone because there’s a good enough ping/waypoint system that helps stay coordinated. If you are rolling with a crew, you can drop into the survivor queue and find matches easily enough – my brother and I queued as two and had a couple more people added to round the roster out thanks to the magic of matchmaking, which did take longer than just hopping in the solo queue but not terribly so. If you want to play against an AI demon, you can do that too but we did not find a game after three or four minutes of waiting so we gave up. If you have a group of four pals, though? Great news, you can do that. You can also do custom lobbies if you want to take randomness out of the equation and have a group of friends to fill things out. Which if you do, awesome! Congratulations on having friends who own Evil Dead: The Game. Please invite me to your good times.

If you don’t own Evil Dead: The Game by now, of course….

I Just Wanted to be Lucy Lawless

Now here’s the part that sucks ass. You cannot actually buy this game anymore, and the smart money is on the reason being that the license ran out and Saber didn’t see enough of an ROI to merit re-upping it. The Evil Dead films and TV show have a somewhat tangled web of rights, so it may have been that Saber did want to re-up but they couldn’t get everyone to agree. That fucking sucks! To Saber’s credit, they’ve kept the servers live, so if you do own the game, you can still play. That’s how I was able to not realize the damn thing was delisted until my love of Lucy Lawless meant I went to buy her character for the game and discovered that, well, you cannot do that. The Epic Game Store simply returns a 404 page, and if you pull up the Steam Page it has a big message saying the game’s been delisted and you can’t buy it anymore. I don’t know the story on consoles – my understanding based on very lazy googling is that you might still be able to get DLC on there but as someone who does not own the game on a console, that doesn’t help me. There is, frustratingly, no good way for someone who owns the EGS version of the game to add any DLC, which sucks because there was a shitload of cool DLC added to that game! New survivors and even a whole-ass new demon! It is something I really would love to fuck around with! Can’t do that though!

I fucking hate this shit, man! It’s awful and it sucks! Video games that just disappear, especially ones that are good-ass video games with communities of active players, should not have to disappear! I wanted to keep giving you my money, even! Being able to play as Baal seemed pretty cool (I’ve played against the dude, he’s a real motherfucker of a demon), and they’d even added Mia from the 2013 remake. Imagine if they’d put some of the characters from Evil Dead Rise in there! I would’ve fucked with that even if I still haven’t gotten around to watching Evil Dead Rise (I do not care for the 2013 remake, mostly because I tend to favor the slapstick horror of the original films and the series over the Big Gore focus of the new entries. Even the original Evil Dead, which has far less slapstick than Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, and Ash vs Evil Dead, still has its moments of levity). Mostly though I wanted to play as Lucy Lawless, because she’s great. It’s one of the great tragedies of this medium that stuff can just vanish because of rights issues – the same thing happened to the Friday the 13th game, if you’ll recall – so now my hopes of a Battlefront II-esque renaissance for Evil Dead: The Game will go unfulfilled.

Unless…

Maybe Key Resellers can be Good?

You can actually still buy the game for about €20 from various key resellers – the Game of the Year edition even, which I think includes most, if not all, of the extra characters. If you put the key into Steam (or Xbox, or PS4 but not, again to my annoyance, EGS) you’ll have a perfectly legitimate copy of the game. Well, as far as I know. Some of those sites can be kinda shady, but find one of the less-shady ones and try your luck. I’m close to doing it myself just to get those extra characters, even if it does mean I’ll lose all the progress I’ve made in the EGS version but hey, I bet I can get those levels again quickly enough.

If you own a copy of this game and still play it, let me know! I’m curious, and also, if you’re kind of interested in it, maybe roll the dice! Or write Tim Willits an email begging him to put the game back on stores so I can buy Ruby Knowby, damn it.