All Things Wicked brings 'Analog Horror' to DbD as devs talks new Survivor, Killer & map
A ‘wicked’ new Chapter is coming to Dead by Daylight, and it’s rooted in some of the spookiest horror tropes around. From the game that has introduced everything from Chucky to The Xenomorph and even Alan Wake, DbD is introducing a new set of original characters and locations that tap into some of our most uncanny fears.
I had the chance to sit down with Dave Richard, Dead by Daylight’s Senior Creative Director and posed some questions to Killer Designer Nicolas Barrière-Kucharski, to talk about how All Things Wicked came to be. From the influence of Analog Horror to spooky small towns and how they created its new Killer, The Unknown (no, not that Unknown from the Willy Wonka experience - I checked).
Fear of The Unknown
In the run-up to All Things Wicked’s reveal, Behaviour gradually teased us with a series of found footage clips and messages that built up the ensnaring lure of The Unknown, an entity (pardon the pun) that's largely rooted in the slow burn of Analog Horror motifs.
“What was very alluring,” Dave Richard said, “was how Analog Horror manages to have a very intimate relationship with fear. And when I say fear it is like the visceral fear. Not a creature, but just fear itself.”
This can very much be felt in The Unknown’s power. It has two facets. A projectile that leaves Survivors with a status effect that can only be removed by making direct eye contact with The Unknown, and a series of hallucinations that the Killer will generate and can use to rapidly teleport around the map.
The hallucinations especially are a great way for Survivors to stay on their toes, as they’ll never know where the Killer could leave them. As Nicolas, put it, "We discovered during prototyping that if we made the placement of Hallucinations predictable but hard to control, it allowed us to make the Teleport ability much more quick and advantageous for The Unknown!"
Click to enlargeThe goal of The Unknown’s visual design was to create something wholly uncanny. Almost an approximation that attempts to emulate humans audibly and visually to hunt them down.
However, as Dave puts it, The Unknown “needs to mimic humans but it’s terrible at it […] there's no truth around it, so we wanted to design a creature that you look at and you're not sure what’s happening here.”
Something Wicked This Way Comes
But of course, if you’re going to have a creepy cryptid lurking around the woods, you’re going to need someone with the power to fend it off: enter Sable Ward. Sable’s story is pretty unique, as it ties intrinsically into the lore of a pre-existing Survivor, Mikaela Reid. Sable’s introduction into The Fog comes as a result of Mikaela’s disappearance.
“We knew we wanted to revisit some universes that we've been building in the past and going deeper into these stories,” Dave said.
“When we created Michaela, she was a love letter to our community. She's a character that we've created that represents our community. She loves the same kind of thing [and] would be potentially a Dead by Daylight player.
"It resonated super well with the community. So, when we decided to revisit the universe, we thought that it'd be best to go into Michaela's sub-universe.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen DbD’s lore get revisited and tied together, though - after all, The Oni is an ancestor of The Spirit. And by the sounds of it, it may not be the last, as Dave said “never say never”.
Click to enlarge
Sable, to some extent, is the antithesis of Mikaela. While Mikaela specialises in light Boons and introduced that mechanic into the game, Sable has her dark Invocations that give, according to Dave “a possibility for Survivors to embrace their monstrous side”.
Rooted in her Perks and design is the use of The Basement, an area in each map where Killers can take Survivors and place them on hooks. It’s notoriously difficult to escape, and typically a place to avoid.
However, Sable’s Perks brings the space to life and allows for more interaction from it on the Survivor’s side. As Dave said, “We wanted to create a new space and The Basement was kind of an underused space for Survivors […] it's an interesting space and these Perks have a big risk component to them.
"So you need to understand what you're going into. They're great powers, but they're quite dangerous”
Small-town scares
The most recent map that was introduced to Dead by Daylight before All Things Wicked was the Nostromo Wreckage from Alien. However, this new map is a far cry from the far reaches of space, instead placing us in a small town with a forest and a movie theatre: Greenville Square.
This map is part of the Withered Isle Realm that was introduced alongside The Dredge and was built to emulate the more contained stories of Analog Horror. Dave said, "Both are what we could call, liminal spaces. At a glance, they represent typical Americana small town, yet something is amiss".
He also mentioned that “we knew back then that this Realm of The Entity was going to be an amalgamation of many, many different towns in America. We wanted to create that Realm because it's something that is close to us as horror fans.
"There are so many horror movies set in that type of setting. It's something that a lot of us can recognise as a normal place. It's very intimate, it's where we feel safe.
“The theatre is supposed to be a very fun place you go to relax with your friends and your family. So having it transform into a horrible place of nightmare and the juxtaposition is interesting.”
Small towns often act as great extensions for horror. In a place where you think nothing happens, they have the most tremendous scares. As someone from a small town myself, I’ll be looking behind me a lot more after the Chapter launches.
The All Things Wicked Chapter for Dead by Daylight releases today, March 12, 2024. So whether you’re spying on Survivors from the shadows, or invoking some rites against the Killers, I'll see you out there in The Fog.
