The asymmetrical horror genre has exploded in recent years. Formerly a space inhabited by Dead By Daylight (DBD) almost exclusively, it now includes several major counterparts, such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and Hunt: Showdown. Go a level deeper, and many horror-adjacent games, like Predator: Hunting Grounds and Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, capture similar gameplay mechanics in less spooky settings. The genre is old enough now that a number of competitors have come and gone already, such as Friday The 13th and Evil Dead.
One name dedicated players may recall is Last Year: The Nightmare. Originally, the 5v1 horror game was developed around the same time as Dead By Daylight, with crowdfunding kicking off way back in 2014. In some alternate universe, it might today be DBD’s biggest competitor. But a slew of unfortunate circumstances led to the game never quite establishing a solid foundation.
Launching in 2018 exclusively on Discord during the brief period in which the messaging app tried (and failed) to take on Steam as a PC gaming marketplace made community-building highly improbable. Players rejected the Steam alternative, as they tend to with seemingly all others, which, for a multiplayer game like Last Year: The Nightmare, was a death knell. In 2019, a move to reinvent the game for Steam with a new name, Last Year: Afterdark, also wasn’t able to capture the attention of more than a small, albeit passionate, group of players. In 2020, the pandemic led to a prospective publishing deal collapsing at the eleventh hour, which tore up the game’s content roadmap. Combined, these unfortunate missteps ultimately killed the studio, Elastic Games.