Dead by Daylight’s New Silent Hill Crossover: First Details on Pyramid Head, New Map, and More

Dead by Daylight has announced its latest crossover collaboration and this time, the collaboration is with an iconic horror video game franchise. Starting today on the public test server, Cheryl Mason and Pyramid Head from the Silent Hill series are available on Dead by Daylight as the new survivor and killer respectively.Aside from a 2017 collaboration with Left 4 Dead that introduced Bill as a playable character, Dead by Daylight: Silent Hill is the first time a survivor and killer from another video game series have been added to Dead by Daylight.

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Along with Cheryl (also known as Heather as she’s based on her Silent Hill 3 appearance) and Pyramid Head, a new map will also be added based on Midwich Elementary School from the first Silent Hill game. The new map will be playable for all players regardless of whether or not they purchase the Silent Hill DLC.

Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical PvP game pits four survivor players who must try and survive a killer, who is controlled by a fifth player. Both the killer and unique survivor have unique abilities which you can see in action in the gameplay footage below.One of Pyramid Head’s strongest abilities is a power that creates a trench that summons the powers of Silent Hill. If a player chooses to go through the trench, possibly to save time, they will be afflicted with a new status ailment called “Tormented” which was created specifically for Pyramid Head. When a character is tormented, they will be instantly transported to a hook when captured by the killer, making this one of the game’s deadliest status ailments.

IGN spoke with Beahviour’s creative team including game director Mathieu Cote and creative director Dave Richard who shared a bit more about how Pyramid Head is unique in the world of Dead by Daylight.

Cote described Pyramid Head as being “judge, jury, and executioner” in Dead by Daylight as it can skip some of the steps required to “sacrifice” a survivor. Similarly, Cheryl will also have unique abilities with some that can only be activated when cursed.

The map is also reimagined but should be familiar to anyone who’s played the original Silent Hill. “It was absolutely amazing to work on Silent Hill,” said Richard. “We had a lot of choice of different iconic locations but we chose Midwich Elementary School from Silent Hill 1. For me, it’s really the first time you go deep into the world of Silent Hill when you go to that map and see how weird it can get.”

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“Usually when we build a map out of a license in the world of [Dead by Daylight] it’s an interpretation of the location that the Entity builds in a specific way,” Richard explained. “But for Midwich we took attention to detail and wanted to replicate as much as we could about the map players already know about in Silent Hill 1.”

That means that while there are changes to the map, other portions are faithfully recreated. In a way, the Midwich Elementary map players explore in Dead by Daylight will be closer to how the map would look if Silent Hill 1 was remade using today’s technology. The new map will include both an indoor and outdoor segment, two stories, and merge the Silent Hill “Other World” elements into the map layout.

“We also packed it with secrets and winks to the series. So players will be able to discover all these little elements of puzzles, surprise, little jump scares that were in the original Silent Hill,” Richard says.

Behaviour worked closely with Konami to recreate Silent Hill faithfully in Dead by Daylight and series composer Akira Yamaoka has even done a new version of Dead by Daylight’s theme for the expansion in collaboration with series composer Michel April.Another new feature coming with the Silent Hill expansion is Legendary Outfits. Unlike a traditional skin, a Legendary Outfit will change a survivor’s model completely, all the way to a new custom animation. While the survivor will still have the same stats and abilities, their appearance will be completely altered. In this case, a Lisa Garland outfit will be available for Cheryl.

When IGN asked how the collaboration came about, Mathieu Cote explained that Behaviour was already tangentially connected to Konami as the company handles the Japanese physical release of Dead by Daylight.

“We were already connected with some of the tentacles of Konami… They are the official publisher of the physical copy [of Dead by Daylight] in Japan. So we were connected to some of the people already,” says Cote.

After a call with Konami, Cote says “both sides realized it was a perfect fit” to crossover Silent Hill with Dead by Daylight. Cote says whenever Behaviour does a partnership, the new characters have to make sense for Dead by Daylight’s “rules” and vice versa. Meaning Leatherface in Dead by Daylight will behave like Leatherface from the movies, and the same goes for the Silent Hill series.

“In this case, we didn’t have to change much about how these [Silent Hill] characters act to make them fit well within our universe,” Cote says.In the past, Dead by Daylight has collaborated with several iconic horror movies and introduced famous killers from movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saw, Halloween, and more. Beahviour says it’s open to any collaboration, regardless of the medium as long as it fits with the Dead by Daylight world.

Dead by Daylight: Silent Hill is available now on the Public Test build on Steam and will be added to PC and consoles on June 16.

Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.