AdHoc Studio Co-Developing Until Dawn 2 — Dispatch Creator’s Next Game Is Official

If you’ve been waiting to find out what AdHoc Studio — the people behind 2025’s breakout hit Dispatch — were working on next, the answer is now official. The studio is co-developing Until Dawn 2 alongside Firesprite, and the horror sequel is coming to PS5 on January 28, 2027. For fans of Dispatch and the whole Telltale lineage of choice-driven narrative games, this is a pretty exciting combination of studios.

Who Is AdHoc Studio and Why Does This Matter?

AdHoc Studio was founded by veterans of Telltale Games — the studio behind The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and other beloved episodic adventures. Their debut game, Dispatch, launched in 2025 as an episodic superhero workplace comedy, and it absolutely nailed the thing Telltale always did best: sharp writing, memorable characters, and choices that genuinely felt like they had weight. The game reached four million players, won multiple BAFTAs, and became one of 2025’s most talked-about narrative gaming experiences.

So when Firesprite needed a story partner for Until Dawn 2, bringing in AdHoc made a lot of sense. Until Dawn has always lived or died by the quality of its characters, its dialogue, and how much players actually care about the decisions they’re making. That is AdHoc’s exact wheelhouse.

In the PlayStation Blog post confirming the collaboration, Firesprite creative director Stu Tilley put it simply: “We’ve partnered with our friends at AdHoc Studio — the brilliant minds behind the acclaimed Dispatch — so you can expect a deeply layered story packed with rich characters, razor-sharp dialogue, fraught relationships, tough decisions, and yes… more than a few gruesome deaths.”

until dawn 2

What Is Until Dawn 2 Actually About?

The sequel is a standalone story — you don’t need to have played the original to follow what’s going on. The new game follows a group of ghost-hunting YouTubers called Dead True, whose entire brand is built on faking paranormal encounters for clicks and subscribers. The irony of what happens to them next is, as you can probably guess, extremely unpleasant.

The story kicks off with Dead True investigating Blackwood Sanatorium — the location connected to the tragic events from the first Until Dawn game, which happened twelve years earlier. Their newest team member, Izzy, stumbles across something that throws their whole plan sideways. Later, at HorrorCon in Sydney, they cross paths with Yoona, a survivor of a genuine supernatural attack who bears a dark, necrotic scar as proof. Her warning points the entire crew toward Akishima Island — a remote South Pacific island whose luxury resort mysteriously shut down in the 1970s, leaving behind secrets that are, as Firesprite puts it, “centuries old and hungry for vengeance.”

It’s a smart setup. Trading the snowbound mountain of the original for a tropical island keeps things visually fresh while keeping the isolated-and-hunted DNA completely intact. And basing the protagonists around a crew of fake ghost hunters who end up in actual supernatural danger is exactly the kind of premise that earns a horror game points before it even starts.

The Cast

Until Dawn 2 has assembled a genuinely stacked ensemble for Dead True. Confirmed cast members include:

• Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things) as Owen, Dead True’s cocky on-camera frontman
• Sarah Catherine Hook as Izzy, the crew’s new intern
• Camila Senna as Mina, the conflicted co-host
• Spence Moore II as Nate
• Gia Kim as Yoona, the supernatural attack survivor
• Neil Newbon (Baldur’s Gate 3’s Astarion)
• Janina Gavankar, Hannah Kepple, Tanner Buchanan, and Andie Ju

And the one returning face: Peter Stormare is back as Dr. Alan J. Hill — the cryptic psychiatrist who became one of the most memorable elements of the original game. His return ties the two games together without making Until Dawn 2 dependent on prior knowledge. He’s essentially the franchise anchor, having now appeared across the original game, the film adaptation, and this sequel.

How Does the Gameplay Work?

Until Dawn 2 is built around the same core principles as the original — and the same principles AdHoc mastered with Dispatch. Every decision matters. Every character can live or die. The infamous Butterfly Effect system returns, meaning that major choices, small character interactions, and the ongoing state of relationships within the group all feed into how the story branches.

The pre-order trailer demonstrates what these decisions actually look like in practice. Owen has to choose between following a mysterious signal to find his missing crewmate Nate, or crossing a rickety bridge to investigate a bar that looks unusually busy. Mina faces a demand from the network for a live, on-camera ritual sacrifice — and players decide whether to sacrifice the group’s chicken mascot or slice their own palm for the ritual instead. QTEs are back as well, keeping that pulse-raising interactivity that made the original such a great couch co-op experience.

The game has eight playable characters total, and whether any or all of them make it to the end is entirely up to you.

Editions, Pre-Orders and Bonuses

Pre-orders opened on September 10, 2026 through the PlayStation Store. Two editions are available:

• Standard Edition — includes the base game plus Dr. Hill pre-order bonuses: his classic Until Dawn outfit, an Akishima Island holiday costume, and Dr. Hill collectible bobbleheads hidden throughout the game world.
• Digital Deluxe Edition — everything in Standard plus the Y2K Neon Vibes Pack (neon costumes for all eight Dead True members) and the Diorama of Death — a post-completion mode that lets you revisit every death in the game through cinematic vignettes showing different angles of each fatal outcome. That last one sounds incredible for anyone who wants to see all the ways things can go wrong.

Pricing hasn’t been officially confirmed yet for either edition.

What About Dispatch 2? And the Critical Role Project?

AdHoc is clearly keeping themselves busy. Beyond Until Dawn 2, the studio also has a project in the works set in Critical Role’s Exandria universe — a D&D-flavored adventure that has been generating a lot of anticipation from fans of both the studio and the tabletop show.

As for Dispatch itself — no sequel has been officially announced yet, but the universe isn’t going anywhere. An animated Dispatch series is in the works, a tabletop RPG is coming, and star Aaron Paul has publicly expressed interest in returning. Given how well the first game sold, it’s hard to imagine a Dispatch 2 doesn’t exist somewhere in AdHoc’s future. The studio is just getting through its current slate first — and Until Dawn 2 landing in January 2027 is the next big milestone on that road.

It’s a genuinely exciting moment for fans of this style of narrative gaming. AdHoc’s writing pedigree combined with Firesprite’s technical production on a franchise with real horror credibility? That’s a collaboration worth paying attention to. Circle January 28, 2027 on the calendar.

Lots more worth catching up on this week too — the Persona 6 Steam achievements leak dropped a huge amount of story and gameplay details nobody was expecting, the Blizzard workers ratified a historic union contract with real AI and layoff protections, and the full PS Plus Game Catalog for September 2026 is live with RuneScape: Dragonwilds headlining. And over on the survival side, Valheim 1.0 just launched out of five years of early access with a massive final update.