Evil Dead: The Game understands Evil Dead: The Movies better than I expected

I’ve spent a morning or two with Evil Dead, and from the off it’s looked the part. Sam Raimi’s horror classics have a definite visual style, and it’s all there on the screen: the cabin surrounded by grasping trees, the lights strobing through branches, a variety of Bruce Campbells to play as. My cup runneth over. Is that an Oldsmobile to pootle around in? Yes please.

Evil Dead: The GamePublisher: Saber Interactive, Boss Team GamesDeveloper: Saber InteractivePlatform: Played on Xbox and PCAvailability: Out now on PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch and PC (Epic)

And it played…well, at first it was decent multiplayer horror stuff. For a morning I played in part of a gang of survivors online, four of us against a single demon player. Your job is to collect a bunch of stuff and then nuke the big baddies at the end of it all, while a timer ticks down and every major action you attempt – grabbing a map fragment or the magical dagger you need – brings the horde.

It was fun, and it looked like Evil Dead – so many Ashes! But it didn’t always feel like Evil Dead. It felt like a multiplayer horror game, albeit a decent one, albeit a decent one without much in the way of basic accessibility features. The same is true for what I think is the single-player stuff. I headed out as Ash and quickly got into serious deadite trouble. The woods looked perfect – but it felt like a lot of other horror games.

At this point I had a spiel prepared. Evil Dead is a difficult ask for a horror game, because it’s a horror series but it’s also a comedy series. Deep down, it’s the Three Stooges. It’s a Warner Bros cartoon. And it’s both sophisticated in its staging and wonderfully handicraft in the practicality of its effects. A puppet headless body with a chainsaw! An eyeball on fishing wire while the film runs backwards! This is the kind of Little Big Planet stuff I love about these films – how do you capture that?