Disorienting analog horror comes to Dead by Daylight

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Perhaps the most popular sorts of horror is the type that action-survival game Dead by Daylight subsists on: slashers, ghost stories, creatures born of mythology or urban legend. In other words, the known.

But what happens when a game like Dead by Daylight wants to traipse into the subtle, reflective, sustained fears of analog horror, the unknowable?

A door in your home. But was it always there?

A series of bland corridors in a bland backroom filled with things that may be horrific—if they’re ever discovered.

The muffled sounds of a distant childhood playing softly in a room lit only by the static-filled screen of an old television.

What can start as a sense of confusion or nostalgia grows into disorientation, and finally twists into suspense; suspense without release. The absence of meaning, of a clear idea of what’s happening, leaves space for your imagination to take root—often in its darkest forms.

Read the full story, which ran on March 12, 2024, on Epic Games Store.