Dead by Daylight X Ringu Coming in March
Behaviour Interactive can be very clever when they approach licensed content. As much as we all would love to have Sidney Prescott in Dead by Daylight, we have to settle for The Ghost Face. Why? Because there is no Scream license. Behaviour licensed the actual Ghost Face mask from Fun World, the costume company that produced the mask used in the film. Now you can buy variants of the Ghost Face mask in the game and even buy a physical version of the Scorched Ghost Face mask and costume designed for the Halloween event.
People have speculated on how Sadako from The Ring could fit into Dead by Daylight for a long time. When they teased The Spirit, many guessed that it would actually be Sadako, Samara, or a ghost-like character inspired by the popular film series. I can’t imagine it’s easy to pick up the license to a film franchise with eight successful entries in its home country. The worst performing Ring film, Sadako, still took in close to $1.5million in Japan; most entries took in almost 10 times that amount. That’s not counting the US series, TV series, video games, and manga inspired by the iconic 1995 film.
The thing is Behaviour Interactive did what it does best. They acquired a license to bring an iconic horror character into the game by any means necessary. This is not Sadako from Ringu; this is (presumably) Sadako from Koji Suzuki’s incredible 1991 novel Ring. The marketing material clearly says “from the original story” under a brand new logo design.
Here are a few things to know. One, Sadako’s powers are the same in the books and the movies. She is responsible for a cursed video tape that will kill you in seven days if you do not get someone else to watch it after you. And by responsible, I mean she created the virus, printed it on the tape, and knows how to keep her legacy going.
Two, her story and motivations are much darker in the books. Not that any film or TV adaptation of The Ring is a happy story. The books are among the bleakest, most hopeless horror novels I’ve ever read. The heroes in the story are worse off than the tragic villain and that’s saying a lot. I’d put the tone and scares around the same level as Ari Aster’s Hereditary. That’s just the first book; the sequels are each more damaging than the last.
Three, Sadako in the books is driven by vengeance and will not stop. She’s a perfect match for The Entity. We’re talking Michael Myers “why not?” levels of just being a killer. Sadako’s backstory is tragic (content warning for sexual assault and death by suicide), but it doesn’t even begin to explain why she uses her powers the way she does to create one of the deadliest viruses ever unleashed upon the world.
I’m throwing up a major caveat right now. We do not have confirmation that the killer is Sadako. This seems likely, but you never know when cinematic licensing is involved. Like, the company producing the modern Ringu series might own the exclusive rights to that character name or certain elements of her likeness. Behaviour might be vamping with a “close enough” story like they did with Ghost Face. I will be shocked if it’s not Sadako. Just remember that everyone except for Ghost Face has an alternate name. She might be The Psychic or The Virus, but she definitely won’t be The Sadako.
We do know that Behaviour is already leaning into the well imagery in the teaser as well as the grainy footage like the cursed tapes. The official press release from Behaviour also stresses the virus and the phone call elements. There are a lot of ways this killer’s powers can go with mechanics we’ve already seen in Dead by Daylight. Will she teleport between wells like Freddy teleports between generators? Will survivors have to answer a phone call or interact with a tape to stop a status effect? What Hex totem will she bring to the game? She literally created a cursed tape. There has to be a Hex perk, right?
It won’t be much more of a wait. Dead by Daylight X Ringu is scheduled to come out in March. That puts the PTB for this chapter anywhere from the end of February to the beginning of March. If the new download system coming in the mid-chapter patch works as intended, I’ll surely try out the new chapter on the PTB. If not, I’ll queue up the 2+ hours for the download alone (give or take another hour of re-patching the game when the files inevitably fail in Steam) to interact with this story in this game.
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