Multiplayer slasher and insatiable licensing vortex Dead by Daylight has absorbed yet more horror icons into its all-consuming spiral, this time the creations of legendary manga artist Junji Ito. Earlier this week, developer Behaviour Interactive announced the launch of the Junji Ito Collection, which lets players dress as characters from several of Ito’s most notable works.
More specifically, the collection adds eight new outfits for both killers and survivors. On the killer side, these include a new legendary outfit for the Spirit that lets her assume the guise of Tomie Kawakami, the succubus-like protagonist of Ito’s first-published story, and a Miss Fuchi legendary outfit for the Artist, allowing her to dress up as Ito’s cannibal supermodel. Meanwhile, the Trickster and The Twins each get an ultra-rare outfit inspired by Ito’s works, with the former able to don Soichi’s Party Clothes based on the character Soichi Tsuji, a young boy with anaemia and a taste for iron nails, while the latter gets a costume based on the story Hikizuri’s Dark Past.
Although the killers get most of the new threads, the collection adds three new outfits for survivors to wear while being horribly eviscerated. Yui Kimura gets a school uniform inspired by the character Tsukiko from Tomie, while Kate Denson gets a ballet outfit taken from Marionette Mansion, and Yun-Jin Lee can bag a Terumi’s Fame, a very rare outfit based upon The Hanging Balloons.
There is, of course, a notable absence of any outfits based on Ito’s most famous work Uzumaki, in which a Japanese town is afflicted by a curse revolving around spirals. This could be Behaviour holding back to do something more substantial with Ito’s magnum opus, or it could be a licensing issue, since Uzumaki recently received a (reportedly terrible) animated adaptation shown on Netflix.
Alongside the announcement, Dead By Daylight published a fun, if not exactly insightful video of Ito playing and discussing the game with the Collection, which you can view above. He does discuss the crossover a little bit, saying it is “moving” to see how his horror creations have become “even more terrifying characters after leaving my hands”. The highlight, though, is his observation that the survivors are wearing “pretty flashy clothes”, before adding “I think it’ll be easy to find them, don’t you?”
