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Of all the games I did not expect among everything announced at June 2026's State of Play showcase, Until Dawn 2 was perhaps furthest from my imagination. More intriguing still is the fact that it's not being handled by the original developer, but a brand new one.
Supermassive Games' 2015 cinematic epic still stands out as one of the best horror games ever made, but with a Rotten Tomato-voted movie adaptation and a similarly mixed response to Ballistic Moon's 2024 remake, I assumed the IP would accept its fate and slink back into the shadows. But Until Dawn 2 is on the way from a different British dev team – Liverpool-based Firesprite – and that one announcement trailer has given me confidence that the upcoming horror game is about to fill the boogeyman-shaped hole Supermassive left behind.
Breaking dawn
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With its mysterious setting on an abandoned island, misfit ensemble of young wannabe ghost hunters, and plenty of terrified screaming for good measure, Until Dawn 2 is what campy B-movie slasher flicks are made of. It's the DNA that made Until Dawn such a thrilling joyride over a decade ago, old-school and slightly simplistic though the premise might be, and I for one find it incredibly refreshing.
Part of that is down to Supermassive's latest endeavor, Directive 8020. The developer takes a knife to its tried-and-true formula here to carve up something a little more serious: its first ever "corporate horror" game featuring a cast of actual adults. The sci-fi terror has nary a werewolf, cryptid, or serial killer in sight as it experiments with cat-and-mouse survival horror – another first for Supermassive – with a greater emphasis put on co-worker paranoia than who's crushing on who's boyfriend.
Directive 8020 sloughs off teenage viscera to reveal a fresh new face, and while it certainly kicks off the second season of the Dark Pictures Anthology with a commendable evolution, I couldn't help but miss the schlock of past terrors like The Quarry, The Devil in Me, and of course, Until Dawn.
It's just as fun to run screaming from cannibals as it is to analyze the symbolism of zombies
But I also don't want to see a developer stuck in its past when it wants to move on, which is why I'm grateful for Firesprite.
From what little we've seen of Until Dawn 2, it manages to hit all the right notes. Young people getting themselves stranded on purpose in decidedly dangerous territory. Risky revels in the dead of night. Romantic entanglements that break the cardinal rule of horror movies as laid out by Scream. Oh, and someone gets their guts spilled over their shoes in the first minute. It's cheesy, it's silly, it's everything I've been longing for since rolling credits on Directive 8020's sobering deep space terror, and it's just become my most wanted upcoming PS5 game.
I also love that it's truly leaning into the cinematic feel with the help of some familiar faces. Baldur's Gate 3 fan favorite actor Neil Newbon co-stars as one of the few discernible adults in town, something that made me audibly whoop at my TV while watching State of Play last night, and I can't wait to see how his character maybe-definitely turns out to be a bad guy (listen, after seeing him in Detroit Become Human, the guy plays bad so good).
Directive 8020 review: "Held back by the inconsistent implementation of series-first stealth"
He's joined in the Until Dawn 2 cast by Stranger Things' Dacre Montgomery, who you also might recognize from 2017's Power Rangers movie and the unforgettable Elvis biopic. This game only has one trailer, and it's already my favorite horror movie that doesn't exist.
That really says it all. The astonished grin that spread over my face while watching it is proof that you really can't go wrong with good, old-fashioned slasher horror. There's a unique charm about stripping back the complexities of what the genre has become – the societal commentaries of Jordan Peele, the high-brow esoteric indies of A24 – to expose the bone and muscle of the thing itself. There's a mindless purity in screechy body horror, a thoughtless glee cementing that it's just as fun to run screaming from cannibals as it is to analyze the symbolism of zombies in The Last of Us. Until Dawn 2 will ensure that I'll always have something to reach for when I'm hankering for the former – and here's to many more to come.
Want more interactive horror movie thrills? Check out these games like Until Dawn and fight to stay alive.
