During a scene where Bryan investigates an overturned cop car, only to find the mutated woman inside briefly gone, he eventually has to figure out how to escape her on foot in the snow. This leads to a hilarious shot of him “looping” around the cop car as she relentlessly chases him, a scene that will be extremely familiar to Dead by Daylight players.
In the popular multiplayer survival horror game, “looping” is a tactic where a Survivor repeatedly runs around a structure or obstacle to evade the Killer during a chase. It’s a go-to move for wasting the Killer’s time while avoiding being hit, often giving the Survivor’s teammates an added opportunity to “pop” a generator and increase their chances of escaping the map.
Resident Evil has become one of Dead by Daylight’s most substantial crossover partnerships in the last five years. Developer Behaviour Interactive first collaborated with the franchise back in 2021, when Leon S. Kennedy and Jill Valentine were added as Survivors, Nemesis as a Killer, and the Raccoon City Police Department became a new map. Nemesis’s zombies and the ability for Survivors to interact with typewriters were also introduced, among other Resident Evil-themed elements and perks.
The collab continued in 2022, adding Ada Wong and Rebecca Chambers as Survivors and Albert Wesker as a Killer, along with another version of the RPD map.
While it’s currently unclear if Cregger actually meant to include the “looping” moment in his reboot movie as a direct reference to Dead by Daylight (feel free to confirm or deny in the comments, Zach!), it will surely have amused those who don’t just associate Resident Evil with the mainline game series and the movie adaptations, but with the franchise’s ongoing Dead by Daylight collaboration as well.
