The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Game can be confusing to play if you simply jump into a match without some information about things to do, your role, how to win, and level up fast. Although the game does give the steps at the beginning via a short cutscene, there’s much more to it. In this guide, we will explain the basics of how to play the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Game so that beginners to this title (or to the asymmetrical horror genre) can enjoy playing as Victims or killers (Family).
How to Play Texas Chainsaw Massacre Game
Before starting a match, you can decide if you want to play as a Victim (Survivor) or Family member (the Killer). The game is a 3v4 asymmetrical horror game where the win condition for victims is to escape and for the killers to find every victim and kill them before they escape.
- Goal of the game for Victims: To escape using any of the 4 exit methods.
- Goal of the game for Family: To ensure victims don’t escape by killing them before they leave or to repair the changes the victims make to the escape routes before they manage to get away.
How to Play as the Victim in TCSM
When you choose the role of the victim (one of 4), your goal is to hide from the Family members, evade their attacks if they spot you, and eventually find one of the exits and escape. Every Victim has attributes for Toughness, Endurance, Strength, Proficiency, and Stealth. Plus, each victim has a special ability that you need to know before you decide to play as them. You can choose to play together with your team and communicate via voice chat, or you can even escape all by yourself.
If you are in an active hunt by the killer, use the crawl spaces to get away from them, close doors behind you, hide in containers, hide in the bushes, dark areas and even jump down the well.
Items You Need as a Victim to Win
- Unlock tool to open locked doors and obstacles.
- Bone Scraps to attack a Family member or cut down things as a knife
- Health item to heal (make sure you always have this, otherwise you will bleed out, get incapacitated, and eventually die)
- The object you need to exit the location.
How to Play the Sound/Noise Minigame
If you are not sure how to play this mini-game, what you need to do is keep tapping E on your keyboard (or the associated prompt for consoles) and keep tapping it until you are close to the speaker icon on the curved bar on the left side. If you let it reach the speaker, your action will create noise. So stop for a second or two until the noise bar goes down, and start pressing E again in order to fill up the circular yellow bar. Basically, don’t let the bar on the left turn red. The lockpicking minigame works similarly.
Here are the various game map layouts and the different methods to exit and escape the location.
Victim Characters
- Julie
- Leland
- Connie
- Sonny
- Ana
Victim Attributes
Every character has a set of attributes and you need to go through your victim’s stats before starting the match.
- Toughness: Affects your damage-taking ability, reduces recovery time and gives you more time to survive.
- Endurance: Affects Stamina regeneration helping you run faster more often.
- Strength: Affects the stun impact on Killer when you are grappling, doing sneak attacks, opening up spaces to crawl in and out of as well as turning off the generator, and more.
- Proficiency: Affects the ability of the Victim to perform tasks that require skill like lockpicking more quickly.
- Stealth: Affects the ability of the character to make lesser noise and is different from the normal stealthy activities you will perform in-game like hiding behind objects.
Here are the best hiding spots that you can try out to avoid easy detection by Family.
Special Abilities of Victims
- Connie: Focused Ability – Lets her pick locks faster by using her stamina and her Family proximity warnings, without using the unlock tool.
- Sonny: Heightened Sense – Lets Sonny get awareness about his surroundings related to noise, location and even movements.
- Julie: Ultimate Escape – Lets Julie move around without being detected by the family and also drains stamina much less while running for a short duration.
- Leland: Life Saver – The ‘tank’ of the team, he can charge into a family member to stun them. This way he can not only help himself but also his fellow victims.
- Ana: Pain is Nothing – Lets Ana take reduced damage from attacks or injuries and also has an add-on where she can be unaffected by poison gas from Sissy for a short duration.
How to Play as the Killer (Family) in TCSM
There will be 3 family members and one Grandpa who can help you spot the victims after they try to escape. Your goal is to find them and kill them before they find their way to the exit. You need to secure the property, set up traps, guard the exit points, and do everything it takes to ensure the victims don’t run away.
To make things harder for them, Family members can destroy crawl spaces, place traps, lock doors, and feed Grandpa to awaken him and level him up. Plus, if you come in contact with them, you need to attack them to injure them and hope they bleed out due to the lack of healing items.
Here’s our grandpa guide that goes into all the aspects of this Family member.
Family Characters
- The Cook
- Sissy
- The Hitchhiker
- Johnny
- Leatherface
Family Attributes
The attribute categories for the Family are Savagery, Harvesting, and Endurance.
- Savagery: Affects the melee damage dealt.
- Harvesting: Affects the amount of blood you obtain from Victims in order to feed Grandpa.
- Endurance: Affects the amount of Stamina drained and the recharge rate of Stamina.
Special Abilities of Family
- The Cook: SEEK – Lets the Cook listen to sounds while navigating the map. Once detected, he can focus on the noise and reveal the location of the Victim making the sounds.
- Sissy: BANE – Lets Sissy craft poison powders/gas from plants that she can blow into the faces of Victims to slow them and she can also poison items that victims may interact with.
- The Hitchhiker: TRAP – Lets the killer place and use Traps on the map that victims may walk right into. He will get alerted when that happens.
- Johnny: HUNT – He can detect and track the footsteps of victims leading him to reach you much faster.
- Leatherface: MAIM – The most devastating killer of the Family, he uses a Chainsaw to maim victims that end up in his clutches.
- Grandpa: The Family members must feed blood to Grandpa to increase his level. When he screams the first time, he will reveal the location of those victims who are moving at that time. But as he levels up, so does his detection ability.
Last but not least, spend some time on your build via the Skill tree that will help you level up your character and maximize the abilities for Killers/Victims. With unique perks, you will be able to end the match with a win and get max XP.
Those were all the basics of how to play Texas Chainsaw Massacre Game as Victims as well as the Family of killers. We’ve got separate guides for the best tips for victims, best perks, how to level up, and more right here on Gamer Tweak.