Dead True built its audience on ghosts it invents. The paranormal crew at the centre of Until Dawn 2, Firesprite’s sequel to the PlayStation horror game that turned teen slasher clichés into life-or-death choices, stages its scares for the camera, and one viral stunt has just earned it a television deal. The first fully funded episode sends all eight of them to Akishima Island. The island has no interest in playing along.

The announce trailer above, shown at Sony’s State of Play in June, is the first look at a sequel made without the studio that created the series. Supermassive Games developed the original Until Dawn for PS4 in 2015 and is not involved this time. The job went to Firesprite, the Liverpool studio Sony bought in 2021, whose last release was Horizon Call of the Mountain, the PS VR2 game it co-developed with Guerrilla. The series has kept busy in the meantime: Ballistic Moon remade the first game for PS5 and PC in 2024, and David F. Sandberg directed a film adaptation released in 2025.

For the writing, Firesprite brought in AdHoc Studio, the Los Angeles team founded by former Telltale Games developers and behind Dispatch, last year’s superhero workplace comedy that won wide praise for its branching story. Firesprite creative director Stu Tilley wrote on the PlayStation Blog that the partnership is meant to deliver “a deeply layered story packed with rich characters, razor-sharp dialogue, fraught relationships, tough decisions,” along with more than a few gruesome deaths. It is a natural pairing. Telltale’s games made choices that characters remember into a genre of their own, and Until Dawn carried that idea into a cabin on a snowed-in mountain.

Akishima is a remote island in the South Pacific, empty since a luxury resort there shut down under unexplained circumstances in the 1970s. The crew arrives to film a woman’s story of demons and ghostly phenomena, expecting another episode built on jump scares they rig themselves. When Firesprite announced the game in June, Tilley described the island’s secrets as “centuries old and hungry for vengeance.” The story does not open there, though. It starts with Dead True shooting an episode at Blackwood Sanatorium about tragic events from twelve years earlier, and Blackwood is the name of the mountain where the first game’s eight friends spent their night.

Owen, the crew’s star host, is played by Dacre Montgomery, best known as Billy in Stranger Things. The rest of Dead True are Mina, Nate, Reagan, Izzy, Luke, Josie and Cameron, a group that includes a conflicted co-host and a new intern. Gavin Leatherwood of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina plays Luke, and the wider cast includes Neil Newbon, known to players as Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3, Tanner Buchanan of Cobra Kai, Camila Senna, Spence Moore II, Sarah Catherine Hook and Janina Gavankar. Gia Kim plays Yoona, the survivor of an earlier supernatural attack who pulls down her collar to show a dark, necrotic scar. Peter Stormare returns as Dr. Hill, the unsettling psychiatrist whose sessions framed the original game.

The structure keeps the Butterfly Effect system that defined the first Until Dawn. Big decisions branch the story, but so do small interactions and the state of relationships inside the group, and any of the eight can survive or die. That matters more with a working crew than with a group of friends on holiday. These people share a show, a star, a pecking order and a reputation to protect, and every one of those tensions can decide who walks off the island. On the DualSense controller, the haptics carry a racing heartbeat and small physical details, while the adaptive triggers change resistance for actions such as forcing doors open or crawling through tight gaps.

Until Dawn 2 launches on January 28, 2027, as a PlayStation 5 exclusive. Pre-orders opened on September 10. The Standard Edition costs $49.99 in the US and the Digital Deluxe Edition $59.99. Every pre-order includes an outfit based on the original Until Dawn, an Akishima Island holiday outfit and Dr. Hill bobblehead collectibles. The Deluxe version adds the Y2K Neon Vibes Pack, which dresses all eight crew members in neon costumes, and Diorama of Death, a mode for replaying each death as a vignette from new angles.

Dead True has spent years deciding what its audience should be afraid of. On Akishima the roles flip. The audience holds the controller now, and it decides which of them makes it to the end of the episode.

Tags: Until Dawn, Dacre Montgomery, AdHoc Studio, Firesprite, Horror games, Peter Stormare