The wait is nearly over for fans of PlayStation’s interactive horror series. During the September 3 State of Play, Firesprite creative director Stu Tilley confirmed that Until Dawn 2 launches on PS5 on January 28, 2027. Pre-orders open on September 10. And in one of the more exciting creative announcements of the showcase, AdHoc Studio — the Telltale veterans behind last year’s acclaimed Dispatch — is confirmed as the narrative partner on the project.
Here’s everything revealed about the game, its story, its returning faces, and what AdHoc’s involvement actually means for the quality of the writing you can expect.
The Setting — From Alpine Snow to Tropical Terror
Until Dawn 2 makes a bold visual departure from the original. The snow-blanketed Blackwood Mountain resort that defined the 2015 game — and the mood of the entire series — is gone. In its place: Akishima Island, a remote South Pacific paradise that has been abandoned for decades, its secrets buried far longer than the new cast has been alive.
The game’s premise follows the Dead True, a popular crew of TV ghost hunters — essentially staged-for-YouTube paranormal investigators — whose latest assignment takes a genuinely horrific turn. As the PlayStation Blog describes it: after an investigation at Blackwood Sanitorium (a direct nod to the original game’s location) takes a chilling turn, an encounter with a supernatural survivor named Yoona leads the Dead True crew to Akishima Island. What they find there is something far older and far worse than anything they could have faked for content.
The shift from winter to tropical isn’t just aesthetic. It represents a conscious design choice to make Until Dawn 2 feel genuinely distinct rather than iterative. The original game’s claustrophobic snowed-in horror derived its tension from isolation — nobody’s getting off the mountain. Akishima Island offers the same isolation but with the dissonance of sunshine and warmth, which is a legitimately unsettling choice for a horror game. Daylight horror, in the tradition of Ari Aster’s Midsommar, is a harder trick to pull off than darkness — and the decision to attempt it suggests Firesprite has real confidence in the tone they’ve built.
The Dead True crew also brings a team mascot along: a chicken. The PlayStation Blog mentions this specifically. We have no additional context. The chicken’s fate is presumably among the “gruesome deaths” advertised.
One Familiar Face Returns — Peter Stormare as Dr. Hill
The entire Dead True cast is new — this is not a continuation of the original’s characters or story. But there is one deliberate thread connecting the two games: Peter Stormare is back as Dr. Hill, the memorably unhinged psychiatrist whose wraparound framing sequences were one of the original Until Dawn’s most distinctive storytelling elements.
Exactly how Dr. Hill fits into Until Dawn 2’s narrative hasn’t been explained — and given the nature of how his role played out in the original game, that ambiguity is deliberate. Firesprite clearly wants players to arrive at that discovery themselves. What’s confirmed is that he’s fulfilling a similar role to his original one, which means he’ll likely be serving as some kind of omniscient observer or interrogator whose relationship to the game’s events is not what it initially seems.
Stormare’s Dr. Hill was one of the most genuinely creepy elements of the 2015 game — unsettling in ways that had nothing to do with monsters — and his return is the kind of creative continuity that rewards original game fans while keeping the sequel accessible to newcomers who never played it.
Who Is Making This Game?
Until Dawn 2 is being developed by Firesprite Games, a Liverpool-based Sony first-party studio that most recently collaborated with Guerrilla Games on Horizon: Call of the Mountain. Original developer Supermassive Games has no creative involvement in the sequel — the franchise has moved entirely to Firesprite under Sony’s stewardship.
That transition raised some eyebrows when first announced, but the confirmation of AdHoc Studio as the narrative partner has gone a long way toward settling community concerns about the writing quality.
Why the AdHoc Studio Involvement Is Such a Big Deal
AdHoc Studio was founded in 2018 by four veterans of Telltale Games — the studio that defined episodic narrative gaming through The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. The founding team includes co-creative directors Nick Herman (lead director on The Walking Dead Season 1 and Tales from the Borderlands) and Dennis Lenart, plus writers Michael Choung and Pierre Shorette. When Telltale collapsed in 2018, these four set out to prove that the genre they’d built still had commercial and creative life left in it.
Their debut game, Dispatch, did exactly that. Released episodically across 2025, the superhero workplace comedy interactive drama reached four million players, won multiple BAFTAs, won Outstanding Story-Rich Game at the 2025 Steam Awards, and received D.I.C.E. nominations — becoming one of the most commercially and critically significant narrative games in years. It sold over one million copies in its first ten days and proved that the Telltale formula, executed with genuine craft and confidence, still resonates powerfully with audiences.
AdHoc’s founding philosophy is worth understanding: the studio writes a complete, working script before gameplay is finalized, inverting the conventional development process. Every character interaction, every branching consequence, every piece of dialogue is tested for dramatic weight before production commits to it. That approach is why Dispatch’s writing landed so sharply — the characters felt specific and real because they’d been thoroughly written before any asset was built around them.
Bringing that philosophy to Until Dawn 2 is, on paper, exactly what the sequel needs. The original Until Dawn’s greatest strength was its characters and the emotional investment players developed in their survival. The weakest Until Dawn sequels in interactive horror — and there have been several Dark Pictures entries that failed to land the same way — struggled most when their character writing was thin. AdHoc’s entire identity is built around preventing exactly that failure mode.
The Deluxe Edition and Pre-Order Bonuses
Two editions of Until Dawn 2 are available for pre-order starting September 10, 2026:
- Standard Edition
- Digital Deluxe Edition — includes the Y2K Neon Vibes Pack (new outfits for each core cast member) and the Diorama of Death (“Relive every grisly demise with vignettes exploring unique angles of each fatal outcome — can you unlock every scene?”)
Pre-ordering either edition before launch unlocks three bonus items:
- The Until Dawn Classic Outfit — a nod to the original game’s aesthetic
- The Akishima Island Holiday Outfit — because even horror games need vacation wear
- Dr. Hill Collector’s Bobbleheads — hidden throughout the game’s environments for players to discover in-game
The bobblehead hunt is a particularly nice touch for fans of the original who want to track down every Dr. Hill reference the game is hiding.
Following the 2024 Remake
Until Dawn 2 arrives approximately two years after the 2024 Until Dawn remake, which brought the original PS4 game to PS5 with Unreal Engine 5 visuals and some new content. That remake served as both a visual upgrade and a commercial reintroduction to the series for players who missed it in 2015. Its moderate success gave Sony and Firesprite the runway to move confidently into a proper sequel rather than a second remake or remaster.
The original Until Dawn, for all its behind-the-scenes turbulence — it famously went through years of development as a PS Move horror game before being completely reimagined — became one of the defining PlayStation 4 exclusives of the mid-2010s. PlayStation’s first-party output has shown a consistent commitment to genre-defining narrative experiences, and Until Dawn 2 is positioned as the next entry in that tradition — but with a creative infrastructure built specifically around the writing-first approach that the best horror games demand.
January 28, 2027 is the date. The first quarter of 2027 is already stacking up as one of the most loaded release windows in recent memory. Pre-orders open September 10. And somewhere on Akishima Island, a ghost-hunting YouTube crew and their chicken are about to have a very bad time.
