Asymmetrical horror game Dead By Daylight has had crossovers with Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now the tooth-flower-headed Demogorgon from Stranger Things has joined its cast of killers in a new DLC that's available today.

The Demogorgon can use portals to the Upside-Down to teleport around and has a suite of perks relating to the generators survivors need to repair to escape. When a survivor is downed by the Demogorgon a generator explodes, survivors repairing them suffer from exhaustion, and when one is repaired nearby windows become overgrown with Upside-Down goo and can't be climbed through.

There's also a new map, the Hawkins National Laboratory Underground Complex, and two new survivors: Nancy Wheeler and Steve Harrington. Nancy's trail of "scratch marks" are invisible when she's at full health, she can heal by climbing into a locker after cleansing a totem, and any generator she's repairing is visible to other survivors. If Steve unhooks another survivor they don't leave a blood trail, and if someone attempts to unhook him the struggle timer pauses for a moment. He also has the ability to self-heal after being unhooked. Oddly his amazing hair does not have any game-affecting power.

Dead By Daylight — Stranger Things Chapter is available now.

Rémi Racine, CEO and executive producer at Behaviour Interactive, creators of games like Dead by Daylight, recently published a blog post with the title "Why I Abolished Crunch Time and Never Looked Back". In it he explains the 10-year journey that changed Behaviour from a company where "dishevelled employees groggy from another all-nighter" were a common sight to one where "crunch time is but a vague memory, where employees can always pick up their kids at school or daycare."

Racine explains that step one was to ban employees staying overnight and sleeping in the office, followed by no longer encouraging them to work on weekends. The end result, he explains was this: "In 2018, 0.25% of all hours worked at Behaviour were in overtime; that is not even enough hours to warrant a full-time position. That same year we launched 100 updates, collaborated to the creation of 15 new games, and gained 20,763,454 new players worldwide."

The results seem to speak for themselves. Though nobody's forced to work longer than their allotted hours, the company's seen no ill effects. "Since I enforced the no crunch time policy," Racine writes, "I’ve never lost a contract or a client; never missed a deadline; never gone over budget and, most importantly, never stopped growing."

The masked killer from the Scream movie series is set to join the ranks of murderous psychopaths in Dead by Daylight, according to leaks based on a developer build of the game inadvertently pushed out during this week’s Mid-Chapter Update.

Dubbed “The Ghost” (or possibly Ghostface) in the game, the Scream killer wears a black hood and belted robe, along with the iconic wailing ghost mask made famous by the film. He carries a stabby kitchen knife, and apparently a mobile phone as well.

While Dead By Daylight has its own rogues gallery of murderers, the game has added several iconic horror villains over time, including Halloween’s Michael Myers, Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. 

Dataminers have unearthed the Ghost’s animation set, which includes some menacing knife-waving, and a “memento mori” that allows the Ghost to kill a survivor while taking a selfie. Funny murderers are just the worst.

You can check out the animations over on the Leaks by Daylight subreddit.

Leaks and datamining can be sketchy, but this one is legit: Behaviour tweeted an acknowledgement once word started getting around that Ghostface was coming to the game.

“Some lucky players got a glimpse of our upcoming chapter release content in today’s mid-chapter update,” they tweeted from the official Dead by Daylight account. That update has been corrected, but “in the meantime, enjoy the early hype on the next chapter.”

The next Dead by Daylight chapter update is due out in June.

Last month I visited Behaviour Interactive in Montreal for an early look at Deathgarden, an asymmetrical multiplayer game that builds on the ideas Behaviour struck gold with in Dead By Daylight. No one—not even the developers—expected Dead By Daylight to do this well. Since its release in 2016, the horror game of hide-n-seek, one powerful killer pitted against a group of weak survivors, has sold more than four million copies.

I talked with game director Mathieu Côté about Dead By Daylight's growth, developing a game alongside a passionate community, the challenges of asymmetrical multiplayer, loot boxes, and more.

Wes Fenlon, PC Gamer: I pictured the Dead By Daylight team moved on to the next game and you had a small group maintaining it. But the team has actually grown.

Mathieu Côté: We had planned for a team that launches a game and we maintain it so people are happy, and some people are going to go work on something else. That did not happen. We had a few firms estimate how many sales we were going to do, and we were told something like 400,000 lifetime units sold. We said, 'you know what, if we do that, we can pat ourselves on the back.' That was the first two weeks, I think. It really took off fast.

It was mostly due to the fact that [streamers] quickly discovered it makes for a great show. Viewership of streamers and Youtubers who would showcase themselves playing and mostly reacting to Dead By Daylight made for a great show and the viewership picked up and people enjoyed watching it, and it grew from that. We were also very very close to the community and influencers. Because we were so small—it was me and the programmer next to me, it was us talking to them—I think that set the tone for us as a publisher and developer. There was an openness and dialogue there that was really well received, and it lead to what we have now.

We just grew and grew the team. One person from the team, Ash Pannell, the creative director, left to start a new project [Deathgarden]. The rest of the team stayed and essentially just grew. So the lead designer on Dead By Daylight became the creative director, and we grew the design team around him, and that's what we have today. We went from about 30 people to about 100, now.

Every day, now, we look at it, and there's more people playing Dead By Daylight at any given moment than there ever was in its history. It just keeps growing. We have some good peaks, but the plateau, the average of players every day, is getting higher, especially since the anniversary.

The anniversary this year in June, we released Dead By Daylight 2.0, which was a lot of big changes to the infrastructure of the game and the way the game works, and also a new chapter and store where you can buy cosmetics. That's it, it's just cosmetics. We didn't want to have pay-to-win. We've famously done pay-to-lose a few times. You can buy some really funky outfits. The first one we ever did was the 80s suitcase so it's full of neon, really shiny colors. Very bad in Dead By Daylight.

Then the really good players can flaunt it.

It's bragging rights, exactly that. If you can run around the map with the rainbow colored jacket and still make it out alive, that's fine. You can pay for that right. I think we've created a fiction, a lore, a story and some characters that people want to hear more about, so for us it was a great opportunity to tell more of that story by creating costumes.

After your big 2.0 update, what's the plan now?

That's one of the big things we did at that time: we published our timeline, the plan forward, which we'd never done in the past. We're going to do a chapter every three months and then in the six weeks in the middle we're going to release a big mid-chapter patch with bugfixes, balancing, and we made it very public. It was our way to tell people that this game is alive, we're still working on it, we're committed, and that they are going to get all of that content in the coming months.

I think that was well received, because a lot of our fans feel that they are part of this. Our creative director did a talk at GDC last year, and one of the points he was making is that making a game is a labor of love, it's passion, you put everything you have in there, and then once it's out, you have to sort of accept that it's not just yours anymore. It's not just our game.

The people that spend 6000 hours playing the game, the people that play and comment and make wiki pages and and cosplay, these people sort of have a stake in it. It's as much theirs as it's ours. When we published our timeline and showed commitment, people really got in on that and the conversation kept going from there. It was really good. So now we've done our first chapter since then.

The image that we have internally here is that essentially we built one of those cuckoo little biplanes, and we're trying to turn it onto a spaceship as it's flying. We're replacing the motor, and then changing the wing shape, but we can never stop because people are playing day in and day out.

Improvements to the infrastructure and backend, all of these things are super stressful when we flip the switch and go 'nothing exploded? We're good? Okay, good.' and then we keep going. Or we have a little hiccup and people can't play for five hours and it's the end of the world, and we have to remember it's good that it's the end of the world that they can't play for five hours, because they want to.

I know it can be tough trying to balance your vision for the game with thousands of very vocal fans. Tell me about feedback you got that was very good and you said 'You're right, X ability is totally overpowered,' versus something that people are yelling about that you have to stick to your guns and go 'I think you're wrong, even though you've played a lot.'

It's more a matter of timing. We learned our lessons on how fast we can react to comments, especially when we make a change or release a new killer. That's usually the big thing. We release a new killer and within five minutes, there's going to be a bunch of all-caps threads saying 'this killer is unplayable, it's garbage, you can't win with it' and then there's another one right underneath saying 'this killer is OP, there's no way to survive.' When we create these things we need to make them different enough and new enough that it forces people to relearn strategies that work in that context.

The idea from the very beginning of Dead By Daylight was that when you go into a match you're not exactly sure what you're going to face, what power they're going to bring and loadout they're going to have, and it brings an uncertainty that keeps the stress level true. We kept saying, we don't want a meter to tell you you're scared now. We want you to be stressed while you're playing and scream in surprise that something happened you didn't expect.

So it forced us to bring in those brand new game-breaking mechanics and new killers that do things that make all of your previous tactics and strategies invalid. We did that when we released Freddy Krueger. We released Freddy and within two days we patched it. We were like, 'okay, you're right, completely unbalanced, we're making changes.' That was a too-fast reaction.

It was a knee-jerk reaction, and we learned from that. Whether our changes were good or bad, it doesn't even matter so much, because two days is not enough for people to test this and know if they like it or not. It's just an intense reaction: "I faced a killer I don't understand right now and it scares me and it frustrates me. I like playing a certain way and now I can't do that anymore.'

Now when we do that, internally we say, we're not going to do anything about balance for a week or two at least. We'll fix glaring bugs and issues, obviously. But anything about 'he's a little too strong' or 'this perk is a little overpowered' we're just not reacting until at least two weeks later. It just makes more sense. 

Are there any other games you've taken your cues from in how you handle continuous support, cosmetics, those kinds of systems for a living game?

I guess like any developer we do spend a lot of our time playing games. As far as ongoing games that are working very well, there are not that many examples out there. Rainbow Six: Siege, Warframe, King of the Kill for awhile there. PUBG and Fortnite are really big and have done things that work for them but wouldn't work for us.

For us there were a few tenets we kept from the beginning. We didn't want to have pay-to-win. All the microtransactions, even the DLC: they're not stronger [abilities]. They're new powers, and people spend a lot of time arguing about the tiers of the killers and which ones are top-tier killers, but in the end it's mostly skill and preference. That's how we're trying to do it. It'd be easy to say 'if you want the killer where you'll kill everyone, just buy it, $12,' but that's never been our interest.

There's a longer life, a lot more success, by having people pay money because of commitment, because of enthusiasm, because they love the game. Removing any barriers of entry so more people can play and enjoy means there will be more people who feel compelled to show their colors and commitment, like buying a new jacket. That's how we see it. Also, it allows us to put out some crazy outfits. And if you don't want to buy it, you're not going to be penalized.

Wes: Buying cosmetics in the store is simply picking the one you want, right?

Yes. There was a lot of conversation about loot boxes, which is a dirty word, obviously. For us it feels more fair: if that's what you want, get that. I think about 80% [of the cosmetics] can be obtained by grinding. You can accumulate iridescent shards and get the outfits, that's it. All the unlicensed characters that are in DLC you can buy, now you can grind them in-game. It's many hours of playtime, but you can get all the characters, access to everything, and 80% of the cosmetics, by playtime.

There are a few we keep as exclusively [paid for with real] money. The licensed ones we don't have a choice, because that was the agreement. We're right now discussing with our licensors, hey, would you be interested in if we changed the model? But those conversations take awhile, and we'd need to be able to show them that this would be beneficial. Some are all about money, some are more about exposure.

The decision to not do a loot box system, was that based on the really negative reaction last year people had to Battlefront and other games?

It obviously didn't help. We looked at it and we went, is it worth the backlash? There's going to be some. But in a sense we knew that putting in a store would have a backlash too. As soon as you ask people for a dollar, people have expectations and tell you 'it's not fair, I should get it for free.' So we knew there was going to be a backlash when we introduced microtransactions. We wanted to do it in a way that felt fair and driven by commitment and engagement with the game.

So the loot box is a great model that I think it works well for mobile games a lot. The appeal of a lottery or something like that scratches an itch for a lot of people. But we wanted to present [our cosmetics] as options for people to pick and choose whatever they want. It felt better. In the end, that's it. It just felt better.

The motto of Behaviour Digital is 'remarkable games we would play our way.' We want to make games that we want to play, as gamers. I guess that's the goal for any passionate game developer. We want to make them our way. Right now we've been able to do so, and it's great to be in a context where we're not only allowed to do it, but rewarded for doing so. So far, we're given a lot of leeway, and it's amazing.

Dead By Daylight has proven that it's here to stay. It's just starting. Our fans are spread across the globe pretty much everywhere. [PlayStation 4] now, in Japan, is so huge. We were already huge on PC in Japan. Who knew Japanese players had PCs? Right now it's one of our biggest playerbases on PC, in Japan.

What's the most remote or surprising country you've seen someone play from? Like, The Vatican?

In Steam you can see the copies sold per country, and literally like, Nepal, we sold two copies there. It's probably people with a VPN or something, but it's still funny to look at the map.

Mostly it's Thailand, it's really really big, they're avid players and they make a lot of really crazy videos online of dancing around Dead By Daylight stuff. China, Russia, are really big. We're not even technically distributed in China.

I was having breakfast before the first day of a convention in Shanghai, and I don't speak Chinese, just eating my breakfast, and two guys walk into the restaurant fully decked out in Dead By Daylight sweatshirts and sweatpants. They're obviously knocks-offs, because we don't have that in the store. They had Dead By Daylight shoes, everything. They were superfans and saw me eating there, the one white guy in the corner, and were like 'you're that guy!" and freaked out.

It's so surreal to me, but we see that a lot. It makes me happy, because a lot of the cosplay that we get is from our own original content. Obviously there's some Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, but the ones we created, the Doctor and the Huntress and the Trapper, I think they're really iconic and people caught on. The survivors are easier to cosplay. But we see a lot of really cool stuff.

For someone who played Dead By Daylight in the first month or two and then moved on, how would you sum up the most significant changes to say 'hey, if you want to come back and try it out, this is what you're going to come back to?'

First of all, it's a much more solid experience. Everything was streamlined, shored up. The flow of the game, the experience, it's much more solid and complete. The options that were missing are there. But the most important thing is, if you played at the launch and start playing now, there are going to be a lot of surprises before you get to the bottom of all the content we've released in the last two years. There are so many new killers, new survivors, new perks, new gameplay mechanics that we came up with. 

You're going to have a lot of games where you go 'what the hell is that?' where you have no idea what's coming. There's going to be a lot of that before you've seen everything. We've churned out a lot of content. This last chapter we released was chapter nine. Nine in two years. Each chapter has a new killer, survivor, and a new map. In the meantime we also released a couple other maps, a few single survivors, like Bill from Left4Dead. That was just a free thing we were able to do because Valve said "yeah, sure."

I think one of the challenges of these types of games as their lives go on, is they keep adding complexity and new systems and stuff to do to appease the players who've been playing for years. How do you design for someone picking up the game two years in, and not wanting them to feel overwhelmed by those two years of accumulated features?

That's the edge that we have. Let's say WoW, when they come out with a new expansion. They just deal with the endgame. They're not going to make new beginner zones. It's irrelevant. For us there's no real endgame.

The novelty, the fact that you're going to be facing unknown quantities for awhile before you feel comfortable, is actually a benefit. That's the core of the design of Dead By Daylight, not knowing what you're going to face, where you're going. It's actually a great thing.

If you haven't played for awhile and you come back, you're going to get a huge dose of that uncertainty, the stress and fear of not knowing what's going to happen. You're going to face killers you've never faced. You're not going to know what to expect. You're going to be using powers you have no idea how to counter or play against. If you manage to survive, you're going to feel so clever. That's the whole experience of the game. It's going to be a better experience for people coming back. The basic loop of the game is hide-n-seek. Every kid has played hide-n-seek. And that has not changed. It's still the core loop of the experience.

Did you get an influx of players when Friday the 13th, they had to stop development? Lost their license?

At that time, it didn't matter, really. They sold a lot of copies, but as far as I can tell… they didn't have a lot of active players. They just sold a lot of copies. So for us it didn't really matter, didn't really have an impact. It was irrelevant at the time.

To be fair, Dead By Daylight is one of the first asymmetrical multiplayer games that really caught. There are others that tried, to a certain amount of success. Evolve and a few others that tried to do it, successfully or not. But Dead By Daylight really, really worked. I'm not saying we did everything right, but it's a new type of gameplay that hasn't been established, and we're just starting to essentially break ground on it. There's going to be room for a lot of other games, and it's not going to be threatening to see others try different things in that type of gameplay and do things we haven't done, or do things we've done but better.

That's going to be fine, because it's going to make the whole asymmetrical multiplayer experience better in the future. There's room enough for everybody, I think. It's not like we're trying to do another WW2 first-person shooter. Breaking into that is harsh. We're not doing a MOBA. We're doing our own thing, and we've been able to do it in a way that is successful.

There's things that, I'm sure, in 20 years, the asymmetrical multiplayer games that come out will never do it like 'heh, psh, remember [Dead By Daylight]?' and that's fine. We had to do it now, and we're still learning as we're doing it. The others that come up, good luck. It's tough, seriously. Balancing that is an everyday beautiful nightmare. By design you cannot design a game that's asymmetrical, so it's always going to be, is it still fun? Then it's fine.

Halloween is almost here, right? No? Well, whatever. The Humble Bundlers may have jumped the gun a bit with the Humble Spooky Horror Bundle 2018, but it's still a very solid collection of horror games, especially if you (for some reason) still haven't played BioShock. 

First things first, though: The $1 will get you White Noise 2, Layers of Fear, How to Survive, and How to Survive 2. Beating the average gets you to BioShock territory—specifically the outstanding BioShock Remastered, plus Detention and Yomawari: Night Alone. I'm not familiar with either of those, sorry to say, but they certainly look interesting.   

Top your payment out at $15 or more and you'll also score Friday the 13th: The Game, which unfortunately is kind of a dead issue these days, and Dead by Daylight, which is most definitely not—in fact, it's in the midst of the Scorching Summer BBQ event. 

The bundle also includes free bonus content for Star Trek Online and the White Noise 2 soundtrack. It will be available for purchase until 11 am PT/2 pm ET on September 4. 

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

A piece of software called Red Shell that's used by game developers for marketing analysis has caused an uproar among gamers who are concerned by its ability to generate detailed "fingerprints" of users—in many cases without them knowing about it. 

"Imagine a game developer is running an ad on Facebook and working with a popular Twitch channel," the Red Shell website explains. "The developer wants to know which of those ads is doing a better job of showcasing the game. Red Shell is the tool they use to measure the effectiveness of each of those activities so they can continue to invest in the ones that are working and cut resources from the ones that aren't."

In other words, if you click a Red Shell tracking link and then launch the releated game, the developer is able to determine that the link led to a sale. The site states that Red Shell does not collect personal information about users, such as names, addresses, or emails. It doesn't track users across games, and the data it collects is not used for targeted ads. "Red Shell tracks information about devices. We collect information including operating system, browser version number, IP address (anonymized through one-way hashing), screen resolution, in-game user id, and font profiles," it says.   

"We have no interest in tracking people, just computers for the purposes of attribution. All of the data we do collect is hashed for an additional layer of protection." 

Those reassurances don't carry much weight in this Reddit thread, however, which begins by pointing out that users typically don't have a say in whether or not Red Shell is installed in the first place. Games using the software "may offer an opt-out for any type of data/analytics services they use," Red Shell says, but that places the responsibility for declining the software entirely on the user, and could be in violation of opt-in privacy laws—and that's assuming the developer makes the option available at all. 

The list of games found to be running Red Shell is surprisingly broad, and includes everything from indies like Holy Potatoes! We're In Space? and My Time At Portia to high-profile hits including Civilization 6, Kerbal Space Program, The Elder Scrolls Online, and Vermintide 2. Some developers have promised to remove the software, but there's also widespread insistence that there is nothing sinister or spyware-like about it. 

Vermintide developer Fatshark, for instance, described it as "no more than a tool we can use to improve our marketing campaigns in the same way a browser cookie might," while Total War studio Creative Assembly stated that it's ditching the software only because "it will be difficult" to reassure players that it's not being used for nefarious purposes. 

And some studios have said that they will continue to use the software despite the furor. ZeniMax Online, maker of The Elder Scrolls Online, said in a Reddit post that Red Shell was mistakenly added to a live build while it was still being tested. ZeniMax said it would remove the program, but added: "We are still investigating how to use this technology in the future to grow and sustain ESO more effectively. When/if we do so, we will give everyone a heads up with clear instructions as to what it is doing, how it is doing it, and how to opt-out should you so desire." 

Dire Wolf Digital, formerly of The Elder Scrolls: Legends, said something similar about the presence of Red Shell in its new project, Eternal: "Red Shell is not 'spyware'; that’s a scary-'Let’s-burn-the-witch!'-word that’s getting thrown around without a lot of information behind. No personally identifying information is collected anywhere in this process," it wrote. "That’s basically it; there’s nothing nefarious going on here, just some under-the-hood analytics that help us understand how our advertisements perform." 

Reddit's rundown games containing Red Shell as of June 18 is below, although I wouldn't be surprised to see more games added to it as people become aware of them—you'll probably want to check the thread if you want to be sure you're up to date. There's also a publicly-available Google spreadsheet that contains more detailed information on how each one was identified. For games that don't offer one, Red Shell maintains its own per-game opt-out option here.   

Update: Team17 contacted us on June 19, 2018, to say that Red Shell integration in My Time at Portia, The Escapists 2, Yoku’s Island Express and Raging Justice has been fully removed.

Update 2: On June 21, 2018, HypeTrain Digital contacted us to say that Red Shell has been removed from The Wild Eight and Desolate; CI Games informed us that Red Shell was no longer present in Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3; and Gavra Games said that it had been removed from Warriors: Rise to Glory.

Games which used Redshell which removed or pledged to remove it (as of June 18, 2018):

• Elder Scrolls Online (Pledged to remove it )
• Conan Exiles (Pledged to remove it )
• Ylands (Removed it )
• Holy Potatoes! We’re in Space?! (Removed it )
• All Total War games (Pledged to remove it )
• Warhammer: Vermintide II (Pledged to remove it )
• Dead by Daylight (Pledged to remove it )
• Battlerite (Pledged to remove it )
• AER Memories of Old (Pledged to remove it )
• Magic the Gathering Arena (closed beta, not on Steam) (Pledged to remove it for now )
• Secret World Legends (Pledged to remove remains of it )
• Hunt: Showdown (Pledged to remove it )
• Omensight (Pledged to remove it )
• Ballistic Overkill (Pledged to remove it )

Games still using Redshell according to community reports (as of June 18, 2018): 

• Civilization VI
• Kerbal Space Program
• Guardians of Ember
• The Onion Knights
• Realm Grinder
• Heroine Anthem Zero
• Warhammer 40k Eternal Crusade
• Krosmaga
• Eternal Card Game
• Astro Boy: Edge of Time
• Cabals: Card Blitz
• CityBattle | Virtual Earth
• Doodle God
• Doodle God Blitz
• Dungeon Rushers
• Labyrinth
• My Free Farm 2
• NosTale
• RockShot
• Shadowverse
• SOS & SOS Classic
• SoulWorker
• Stonies
• Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation
• War Robots
• Survived By
• Injustice 2
• Trailmakers
• Clone Drone in the Danger Zone
• Vaporum
• Robothorium
• League of Pirates
• Doodle God: Genesis Secrets
• Archangel: Hellfire
• Skyworld

Having previously slashed its way through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street, the multiplayer horror-survival game Dead By Daylight is now headed to a new playground:  The sticky slaughterhouse mess of Saw. 

The Saw Chapter will add a new survivor to the game, David Tapp, and a new killer, The Pig, each with three unique perks. Tapp gets Tenacity, Detective's Hunch, and Stakeout, enhancing his survivability under pressure, while The Pig's abilities—Hangman's Trick, Surveillance, and Make Your Choice—are (what a surprise) more about inflicting pain and misery on helpless victims.   

The update also includes a new map, Gideon Meat Plant, which sounds like a lovely spot to visit: "A place of death. Not death in the sense that I am accustomed to, but a place designed for death. A place where living things are meant to go to slaughter: an abattoir." 

Speaking of sounds, that reverse bear trap scream-and-squish in the trailer really sells it, eh? Yeesh. Dead By Daylight: Saw is slated to go live today but it doesn't appear to be available on Steam just yet, nor is there any pricing information. The Nightmare on Elm Street chapter goes for $7/£5/€7, so I'd expect something in that neighborhood.

Every day is Halloween in Dead by Daylight, as monsters and serial killers hunt down victims to sacrifice to a dark god, but it looks like the asymmetrical multiplayer game is still getting into the spookiest time of year by introducing a new killer. Don’t fall asleep, Freddy’s coming.

Behaviour Digital have released a teaser trailer that doesn’t actually show the classic movie monster, but makes it clear that he’s coming. Presumably before Halloween. He’ll join the likes of Leatherface and Michael Myers, both of whom have been slaughtering their way through the game for a little while. 

Judging by previous killer updates, Freddy won’t be a free addition. He’ll also come with three new perks to make it easier for him to hunt down his victims. Sometimes new killers are joined by a new survivor with their own accompanying perks, as well. Michael, for instance, came with Laurie Strode. It's not clear if Freddy will be on his own.  

Details are slim at the moment, but expect more information as Halloween gets closer. 

Leatherface joined the cast of Dead by Daylight yesterday with a bit of $4 DLC that adds the "skin clad maniac," who the devs also note just wants to be accepted, to the asymmetrical survival horror game.

Leatherface will kill with "devastating sweeping attacks" from his chainsaw, of course, and his perks include Knockout, which hides dying survivor's auras; Barbecue & Chili, which reveals distant survivor's auras after you hook one of them; and Franklin's Demise which forces survivors to drop and damage their items. Poor Franklin.

Along with several original murderers, Leatherface joins fellow horror star Michael Myers, who was released with the Halloween DLC last year. On top of the new murderer, Dead by Daylight is currently discounted to $10, and is free-to-play this weekend.

If you’re the sort of sadist or masochist who quite fancies starring in their very own slasher flick, either as the killer or one of their potential victims, then have I got great news for you: Dead by Daylight is having a free weekend on Steam from now until Sunday. 

Dead by Daylight pits a group of survivors against a seemingly unstoppable killer in appropriately menacing maps, like foreboding forests and abandoned labs. The killer’s goal is to hunt down the other players and sacrifice them to their dark god, while the survivors have fire up the generators that will allow them to escape. 

It’s a straightforward format that’s got some extra wrinkles thanks to the various abilities wielded by both the killer and survivors. Different psychopaths come with their own hooks, like Michael Myers’ obsession mechanic, which targets specific players, making their survival all the less likely, while survivors have their own skills that can be mixed and matched to create unique loadouts. 

To increase your chances of surviving the night, make sure to check out our Dead by Daylight beginner’s guide. The base game and most of the DLC is also 50% off on Steam during the free weekend.