Dead by Daylight's flashlight teaser has a lot of fans convinced that Alan Wake is on the way

A couple months after bringing diminutive psycho-stabber Chucky to the multiplayer survival horror game Dead by Daylight, Behaviour Interactive is teasing something new—and a lot of fans are convinced that an Alan Wake crossover is on the way.

In terms of substance, the tease is awfully thin: It's a flashlight. Alan Wake is a pretty big fan of flashlights, it's true—they're pretty much his number-one defense against the Dark Presence—but as several people on Twitter pointed out, flashlights also play a big role in Dead by Daylight, too. Survivors can use them to temporarily blind Killers, affording them a brief moment in which to escape.

But that's not the only thing that has people expecting an Alan Wake crossover. The flashlight on the table is shining on a stack of pages flecked with blood—like a manuscript having a bad day, perhaps, an association that makes the flashlight imagery much more pointed. 

It's also fair to ask why Behaviour Interactive would tease a new addition to the game with a picture of a commonly-used tool. Flashlights are no doubt handy in the world of DbD but I don't think they carry quite the iconographic heft of, say, Valve dropping an image of a crowbar to tease Half-Life 3. (Which, to be perfectly clear, has not happened.)

Also interesting, in hindsight, is this December 28 tweet from Dead by Daylight fan g0rejira. Lucky? Prescient? Make of it what you will:

An Alan Wake team-up would be a pretty big deal as far as videogame tie-ins go, but it's certainly not beyond Dead by Daylight's scope. Behaviour Interactive has wrangled some big crossovers in the past, including movies (Hellraiser), television shows (Stranger Things), big-name actors (Nicolas Cage), other videogames (Resident Evil), and even a touch of K-Pop. In that context, an Alan Wake partnership makes sense, and it wouldn't be the first time Remedy brought its favorite troubled writer to a different game in recent months: Alan Wake turned up in Fortnite in October 2023, just ahead of the release of Alan Wake 2.

I've emailed Behaviour Interactive and Remedy to ask if an Alan Wake crossover is indeed in the offing, but I don't imagine anyone's going to spill the beans. The tease says followers will "learn more on January 9," which is tomorrow. We'll let you know how it goes.