ENTRY 02: THE NURSE (Sally Smithson)
"Using her Blink ability, The Nurse can teleport great distances in moments, predicting and cutting off Survivor routes. A powerful process best honed by experience, careless Blinks are punished with a wave of fatigue. The epitome of high risk, high reward, The Nurse can end chases with surgical precision."
LORE SUMMARY: she used to be nice, but then her husband died and she got a job at an old-timey asylum. After years of both enduring and witnessing countless horrible forms of abuse and suffering, she went mad with hatred, killed her own patients and subsequently vanished.
LORE SUMMARY: she used to be nice, but then her husband died and she got a job at an old-timey asylum. After years of both enduring and witnessing countless horrible forms of abuse and suffering, she went mad with hatred, killed her own patients and subsequently vanished.
So the reason Sally vanished, of course, is the same reason as most of the other killers: that the exceptionally deranged murderousness in her soul caught the attention of THE ENTITY. Unlike the Evan the Trapper however, Sally is twisted and warped by the entity's realm into something much less natural. She's still flesh and blood, but she hovers over the ground and can teleport through walls more like some kind of spookter! It's also an ability powerful enough that she's apparently held a place as one of the top two or three best killers in the game for most of its existence, whereas the Trapper sort of plummeted in popularity. Sorry, Evan!
Her default design feels like a clear nod to Silent Hill, but I don't want to presume that every grimy, faceless horror nurse is a Bubblehead wannabe. Sally is still her own thing, and she only looks faceless because her head is all wrapped up in filthy cloth. The rest of her outfit is based on nurse uniforms from roughly a century ago, though it's a little frillier and fancier than I think most of them really were.
You don't have to go completely down the rabbit hole of lore dumps to learn a lot more about Sally's story, either; every character in Dead by Daylight has a selection of perks and boosts they can collect, which take the form of various mementos from their lives before The Fog. We aren't getting into these for every single character, but I think the Nurse has some of the most thematically interesting. Her teleportation ability is called Spencer's Last Breath, and represents, somehow, the final breath taken from the asylum's cruel warden before Sally killed him too.
This ability can be augmented with "breaths" from the Nurse's other victims; some she always hated, some she had actually befriended before she snapped. Every perk has a single line or two of flavor text, so we know that the anxious gasp came from an "anxious girl" Sally bonded with. Ataxic respiration comes from a patient only referred to as "the catatonic boy." Then there's the fragile wheeze of the Asylum priest, the Heavy Panting of its orderly and the spasmodic breath of a patient called "the bad man."
Except for Spencer's, these are all actually distinct from the last breaths of each victim, and from the more physical mementos she can obtain such as the Anxious Girl's bracelet, the Catatonic Boy's "treasure" (a pinecone) and the Bad Man's "keepsake," which is a human tooth. There are plenty more, but you get the idea. Many of their descriptions also note how these objects actually react to the nurse's touch, twitching or pulsing or vibrating whenever she holds them, with the Bad Man's Keepsake becoming especially "agitated."
I know a lot of this is elaborated upon by additional, optional story material, I find these disparate fragments of information a whole lot more fun all on their own. I feel like they tell you enough already, and are a lot cooler without further explanation.
Evan made a perfect all-purpose horror villain for this game's default Murderous Madman archetype, and I think Sally makes an excellent followup to that for our reviews. She's technically fourth in the game's internal roster, originally the first killer introduced by a special story chapter, but I'm covering her second because it's just a nice contrast to kick things off with. Her brand of horror is more about chilling atmosphere and psychological dread than the cruder, blunter threat of the Trapper, with a more paranormal angle, more precise gameplay strategy and a different gender to boot. If they were the only two killers the game started with, they'd work as a perfectly balanced duo in terms of genre representation, each hitting a completely different set of equally fundamental horror notes. They weren't officially presented that way, but Nurse and Trapper stick out in my mind like they're the Chocolate and Vanilla ice cream of Dead By Daylight Killers.
BEST SKIN(S)
Poor Mister McMillen only had two skins that really stood out to me, and some killers we'll review haven't even a single one I find any more interesting than their default...but not Sally. Sally's options are almost all just alternate clothing, yes, with little in the way of more novel or gimmicky makeovers, yet every single outfit in her wardrobe is banger after banger. I could barely narrow them down into what's still going to be one of our longer skin reviews:
"THE ACCIDENT:" if you want you dive further into that Brookhaven Hospital vibe, this bloodier, more tattered outfit includes a selection of blood-caked, rusted surgical tools jammed through Sally's head and torso.
"FLASH FORWARD:" this dresses the nurse with a filthy but festive looking red robe with fluffy white trim, a gold star, bundles of green pine needles and a few string lights. Her bandaged face also seems to be oozing a lot of blood around the eye and mouth areas and her head is encircled with what seem to be dozens and dozens of nails hammered into her skull, but she also has blonde hair and a cute little golden crown! It's a holiday themed outfit with a completely original concept, representing an imaginary entity from the drawings of one of her patients. Cool!
"VENGEFUL ENCHANTRESS:" this is the Nurse's skimpiest outfit, consisting of only some torn white rags and what's left of a blue and gold toga, with a blue veil drawn over her eyes, but what's really interesting are the multiple live scorpions clinging to her face. Very bold fashion statement. This was part of a cosmetics release themed around "Greek Mythology," but it's not really clear what, if anything, it specifically references.
"LADY LUNATIC:" a blood red dress, parted down the front to reveal a pleated and layered black skirt. She wears a darker red little corset over the dress, a cute little bow around her neck, a black bonnet covered in dark brown fabric roses (I think) and the rest of her head tightly wrapped in black fabric. Badass combination. Every choice she made here was a hit. Most cosmetics in the game just sort of represent different ways the character is manifesting in the flexible dream-reality of the fog, but I choose to believe Sally is actually dressing herself out of an actual physical wardrobe between massacres, and she is an artist.
"HOPE SLAYER:" see?? Hope clearly isn't the only thing she's slaying here. Laced-up white leggings and matching sleeves with frilly red cuffs, a an asymmetrical white ballroom dress, black and white bodice with blood red embroidery, a black neck ruff and jabot (the poofy thing worn like a necktie), a head loosely but thickly wrapped in red velvet and another, entirely different style of even larger bonnet than her Lady Lunatic set, with a menacing arc of red nails impaled through its brim. Just positively sick.
"DEADLY HARVEST:" awesome. Maybe my favorite? She's dressed up as an absolutely adorable little gardener here, with a wicker summer bonnet - she really likes those bonnets - and frilly but still fairly practical white dress with a leather belt and satchels for all her gardening tools, which she definitely needs, because an assortment of fungi, moss and plant life is also erupting from her body. Instead of the usual cloth mask, her face is obscured this time entirely by a dense clump of various pink, white and lavender flowers. It's just too cool looking, and it's another than comes in a few alternate colors.
"MOTHER MERCY:" this one's based on older military nurses, with an army green uniform and a gas mask! It's unsurprisingly even filthier and more damaged than many of her other outfits; the mask looks crooked and warped with a shock of hair popping out, her legs and skirt look partially burned away, and her hands...those aren't blue gloves. That looks more like gangrene, or something.
"FLUID NIGHTINGGALE:" Dead by Daylight's Halloween season content involves a fungus-like "blight" that periodically afflicts the entity, and produces an almost luminous off-yellow ichor. Many Killers have seasonal skins erupting with Blight Ulcers dribbling the honey-like pus to varying extremes, and it gives the nurse her most explicitly Silent-Hill-esque permutation, with a bloated cyst of a head and pulsing tubular organs exposed through her warped and rotten flesh!
"HAZARDOUS MATERIAL:" this outfit is fashioned from yellow plastic medical waste bags wrapped together with tape, the biohazard symbol stylishly positioned over her chest, with the bag over her head visibly vacuum-sealed to her mouth and nose as though she's suffocating. Eerie for sure, but also kind of funny for implying a scenario in which it was concluded by the medical staff that a supernatural murder-nurse meets the criteria for biohazardous waste. Bagging her up and throwing her in the trash obviously didn't solve the problem, no, but you have to admire their devotion to procedure.
NAVIGATION:
