Dead by Daylight is a unique multiplayer survival horror game developed by Behaviour Interactive that released on PC back in 2016, made its way to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 the following year, and is due to arrive on the Nintendo Switch this fall. Since its initial PC release it has amassed a huge following thanks to its tense and strategic gameplay, where four players take on the role of survivors who must complete a certain amount of tasks to escape the level and a fifth player takes on the role of a murderous psychopath who is trying to capture those survivors before they can escape. Well if you follow along with the Dead by Daylight scene pretty closely, you may know that a couple of weeks ago a mobile version of the game was accidentally leaked and videos of the in-progress build were posted online. Perhaps because of this or just because it was planned anyway, last Friday during a live stream celebrating the 3rd anniversary of Dead by Daylight and laying out their plans for the coming 4th year, Behaviour officially announced that a mobile version of the game was in the works. You can hear that initial announcement at about the 54:35 mark in the livestream video, and they also talk about it in this year 4 dev diary video at about the 3-minute mark, where they describe the mobile Dead by Daylight as “a very different way to interact with the game, but at its core it’s the same experience."

If you’re a mobile gamer that’s not familiar with Dead by Daylight specifically but the game’s concept sounds awfully familiar, that could be because Behaviour Interactive partnered up with NetEase to release Identity V (Free) which is more or less an officially sanctioned mobile clone of the main game. Identity V was a massive hit in China before making its way to the US last summer, where it has also seen a huge dose of success. You might wonder then why Behaviour would want to bring Dead by Daylight to mobile when there’s already a perfectly comparable experience out there. Well, while both games do feature some minor gameplay differences, I’d say the main reason is the cast of characters that’s in Dead by Daylight. Horror icons like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Leatherface, and soon Ghostface from the Scream movies are all playable killers in the game. There’s also several famous survivors in the cast, often the counterparts from the various horror franchises that the killers come from, like Laurie from Halloween or Quentin Smith from A Nightmare on Elm Street. There’s also a couple of survivor-only special characters like Bill from Left4Dead and Ash from the Evil Dead series. It’s all pretty awesome, and this is on top of a pretty stellar cast of original killers and survivors.

While no release date has been announced, Dead by Daylight on mobile should be available in playable form at E3 next week, so I expect we’ll be hearing and seeing some more concrete details around then. I’m super looking forward to seeing how a mobile iteration of Dead by Daylight turned out and once those additional details are unveiled we’ll be sure to give you the heads up.