Starting on Jan. 30, 2019 and ending on Feb. 13, “Dead by Daylight” will premier the event “Moonrise.”
“Dead by Daylight” is an asymmetrical survival horror game developed and published by Behaviour Interactive.
In celebration of the Lunar Year of the Hog, the game reprises a past event known as the ‘Howling Grounds’ (which was an event for the Lunar Year of the Dog) and was announced on the official forum before a teaser trailer was later released on Twitter.
Several in-game changes are made, including: adding a thematic hook and generator for the event, a red envelope offering from the original Lunar Year event comes back to be used for a new gameplay mechanic and finally, golden coins are re-enabled as a temporary currency in-game in order to pay for cosmetics.
The featured cosmetics go to the Huntress (one of the 14 available killers) who gains a boar’s head, a new outfit, and a new skin for her hatchet.
Two survivors also get cosmetics that change how their hair and face looks along with their clothing being that of the kind someone would wear for the holiday.
As for the new gameplay features, the Entity (the being that presides over the realm the characters are in for the entirety of the game) will add two Lunar Vessels per match. Survivors can pick them up and escape to earn points towards getting golden coins.
If a killer hooks a survivor while they are holding a vessel, it becomes corrupted and is returned to where it was found. From there, it can be destroyed and the points will go to the killer instead.
Burning the aforementioned red envelope will call the Entity to add more vessels, up to a total of seven. Gathered points will be used to fill the moon, which will turn into a golden coin when enough are collected.
“Dead by Daylight” was released for Microsoft Windows in June of 2016 before coming out on PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One a year later.
It exclusively plays as an online multiplayer game where the setup is one versus four with the majority of players being survivors and the single killer trying to bring them down.
While the game is mostly made of original characters, DLC is available and includes killers and survivors from the “Halloween,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Saw” franchises.
The lore starts with a man named Benedict that investigates the town of Weeks in the summer of 1956. Weeks is a town with an unusually high amount of missing person reports, hitting 364 prior to Benedict’s own disappearance from the location.
The most unsettling part of the mystery is that no bodies have been found, leading to them vanishing without a trace.
He spends around two weeks there before disappearing once he approaches the MacMillan Estate, where he wakes up in another realm entirely.
From there, he writes journals detailing his time in this strange reality and how, despite being killed several times over, he has not remained dead or been returned to his original world.
The Entity, a supernatural being that has come from the ancient blood web, has been awakened from its slumber and summoned by actions of great violence.
This starts off the game, with the Entity pulling serial killers from reality and placing them in a realm of its own creation, where it recreates places the killers are drawn from with fog covering the area.
Survivors that step too close to these kidnapping spots end up swallowed as well, forcing them into an endless game of cat-and-mouse where losing means they get thrown on a hook and lose a piece of their soul.
As Benedict has noted in his journals, death is not an escape in this world.
Erika Brandenburg
Arts and Entertainment Editor