Here’s a demo for Dead By Daylight spin-off The Casting Of Frank Stone, from the makers of Until Dawn

This morning I left my listless apartment in search of coffee, sniffed the restless wind, noted with approval the darkness gathering under the trees, and thought: Summer is finally over. At last we leave the loathsome sunny months. At last we leave all that is green and good behind us, and return to the time of monsters.

Supermassive Games and Behaviour Interactive must have gotten the memo too. They just released a demo for their upcoming horror game The Casting Of Frank Stone, in which you play a police officer, Sam Green, investigating the disappearance of a child. The search leads you to Cedar Hills Steel Mill, “where chilling secrets await, revealing a truth far more sinister than anyone could have anticipated.” I’m looking forward to: QTEs during escape sequences, branching choices that leave people dead, and general mature content befitting the arrival of Halloween.

Revealed back in December, The Casting Of Frank Stone is a single-player endeavor that, from what I’ve seen so far, takes the playable B-movie format of Until Dawn and applies it to the horror multiverse of Dead by Daylight. “This demo serves as a prologue to the main game, offering a highly engaging segment full of twists, turns, and hidden Easter eggs that Dead by Daylight fans will be eager to discover,” the Steam page explains.

“While progression from the demo will not carry over to the full game, it offers a unique opportunity to experiment with the game’s mechanics and explore different outcomes and secrets by testing out different paths and choices,” it continues. The full game, due out next week on September 3, features a young ensemble cast and sees you pursue a serial killer whose crimes “bring horrors beyond comprehension.”

The launch of The Casting Of Frank Stone follows mass layoffs at both Behaviour and Supermassive, with both companies attributing the decision to “challenging” broader conditions within the industry. Supermassive is also porting Until Dawn to PC and is working on Little Nightmares 3. Behaviour’s current focus seems to be on throwing every character that’s even remotely horror-minded into Dead By Daylight’s wood chipper.