Dead by Daylight: Chapter XXI: Hellraiser Review (DLC, 2021)
Last week, 7 September, Behaviour Interactive made my horror fan dreams come true by introducing Clive Barker’s Hellraiser into Dead by Daylight. My favorite multiplayer game now hosts one of my favorite horror franchises. I've said for years that I’m not picky when it comes to getting a Clive Barker property into Dead by Daylight; I am very happy that they went with The Cenobite.
The lore is short for The Cenobite, but the character doesn’t need a lot of justification for appearing in this universe. Per the game and the Hellraiser series, when the Lament Configuration—the iconic gold puzzle box—is solved, The Cenobite appears. The Cenobites are otherworldly beings—once human, now something much more—who are driven by sensation. Pleasure and pain feel the same, so they gladly torment anyone who summons them with the box for the ultimate sensory experience. They even use hooks and chains as their primary weapons and hang victims from sacrificial structures. Sound familiar?
The default Cenobite character is Pinhead, though a legendary cosmetic lets you change into The Chatterer. I can only hope the Hell Priestess and Butterball follow eventually. I’ll collect the whole set.
The Cenobite’s power is complicated. His passive ability is all about the Lament Configuration. At the start of the match, you see The Cenobite lock up the puzzle box and send it into the map. Survivors have a limited amount of time to find the box before a Chain Hunt begins. While active, the Chain Hunt will randomly spawn chains that grab and slow down survivors throughout the map. They can stop them from working on gens, healing, or cleansing totems. The only way to stop the Chain Hunt is to solve the puzzle, but solving the puzzle alerts The Cenobite to your location and lets him teleport to you.
Oh, and if The Cenobite finds the Lament Configuration first, you’re going into a Chain Hunt. Good luck.
The Cenobite’s active ability is Summons of Pain. When activated, he releases a blue light straight into the map. That light activates a gateway that lets you see into another part of the map. From there, it releases a chain that can Incapacitate survivors—make them incapable of repairing gens, sabotaging hooks, using items, interacting with other survivors, or cleansing totems—and slows them to a crawl. They have to actively break free of the chains using a button or the environment around them to regain their typical abilities. When you hit a survivor or the chain runs out, you go back to where you initially summoned the gateway.
Summons of Pain is designed to use in loops and smaller structures. If you use the power from too far away, survivors will break free before you catch up. I do use it for tracking on larger maps, checking a far corner that only has one gen before committing to a chase. My favorite strategy is to use it at a strong pallet loop. Bait the survivor into dropping the pallet, trap them on the hook, and you either get to break the pallet without punishment, get to the other side of the loop to hit them, or grab them when they accidentally crawl in slow motion over the downed pallet. That last one works on strong windows, too, like shack or the Coldwind Farm buildings.
The big hit for me is the Chain Hunt. This is the most powerful passive ability in the entire game. Survivors have the choice of fighting through the Chain Hunt, where they will become Incapacitated and slow down just for being on the map, or hunting for the box that is small and easy to miss. Survivors do get a visual indicator of where the Lament Configuration is, but it’s not a dead giveaway. Braver survivors may try to hold onto the box the entire match, but holding the box causes a Chain Hunt that only exists for your character. I like it when there’s a brave survivor. It makes for an easy kill early in the game.
The three new perks are all great. They all slow down the match without having to rely on Hex: Ruin.
First up is Deadlock, a new passive generator perk. When survivors complete a generator, the Entity blocks the next generator with the most progression for 20/25/30 seconds. You can also see the white aura of the blocked generator. This perk has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, my eyes are not responding well to one bright spot on the map, so I had to take it off my build. If you don’t have problems with the aura-based perks in Dead by Daylight, give this one a try.
Next is Hex: Plaything. This builds on a mechanic added to the game with Hex: Undying. When a survivor is hooked for the first time, they suffer from the Oblivious status effect. A dull totem becomes cursed and only accessible to that hooked player for the first 90 seconds after they’re effected. The survivor has to break that totem to stop the Oblivious effect. Each player can be hit with the hex once and the only way to stop it is to break the original hex totem. 10/10, would stop survivors from hearing the terror radius again and again.
Finally, we have a brand new kind of perk to the game. Scourge Hook: Gift of Pain is a hook perk. At the start of the match, four random hooks are marked as Scourge Hooks. They have white auras even when you’re right in front of them. When you hook a survivor on a Scourge Hook, they suffer from the Hemorrhage and Mangled status effects (meaning they’re bleeding a lot and harder to heal). Furthermore, after an effected survivor is healed, they have a 7/8/9% healing and repair speed penalty until they become injured again. The only downside to this perk is the random generation of hooks. If you get lucky, this perk stops a match dead in its tracks real quick.
My Cenobite build is all about restricting what survivors can do. I run the new perks Hex: Plaything and Scourge Hook: Gift of Pain. These slow down survivors once I get my first hook, which should be around the time the first Chain Hunt activates. I match this up with Monitor & Abuse—reducing my terror radius by eight meters until I’m in chase—and Hysteria—making all injured survivors Oblivious for 30 seconds every time I injure someone else—for extra spook factor. Monitor really puts in work, as I’m practiced enough with controlling the chain to snipe survivors from right outside of my terror radius.
Chapter XXI: Hellraiser did launch with major bugs. The game was crashing more matches than not from The Cenobite’s powers. Behaviour fixed most of those issues in the first two days. The character still isn’t entirely working as intended. His iconic voice line featured in the PTB, “The Box. You opened it. I came,” is no longer in the game. We have no official confirmation if it will return, but it’s not looking likely. There are also other sound bugs, like the hook hitting the ground making the same sound as the hook hitting a survivor. Laying down a bear trap as Trapper also has the same sound effect as a survivor picking up an item now. It’s…maddening.
The update also broke the extended field of view effect for Shadowborn and Monitor & Abuse. With Shadowborn, especially, it’s making the game less accessible to players. There are killers who need to use Shadowborn so their eyes can actually focus on the screen without becoming strained from the camera movement and HUD effects. There is no setting to adjust FOV in Dead by Daylight, so your only choice to control that is running Shadowborn, and that feature is currently broken.
The Hellraiser chapter is one of the most useful DLCs to pick up in Dead by Daylight. All three perks have huge potential to help your killer builds across the board. I’m excited to see what I can do with Hex: Plaything on faster killers.
Chapter XXI: Hellraiser is available on PC, Xbox One/Series S/X, PS4/5, and Nintendo Switch now.