It’s a big time for Dead by Daylight and Darkest Dungeon.
Both games turn 10 this year, and both represent significant successes in the Canadian video game industry. With DbD, Montreal-based Behaviour Interactive has fostered a unique and enduringly popular multiplayer horror game that’s featured all kinds of major crossovers. And with its two Darkest Dungeon games, Vancouver-based Red Hook Studios has crafted some of the most acclaimed roguelike RPG experiences.
Now, the two properties are coming together. With Behaviour having acquired Red Hook in late 2024, the groundwork was laid for a Darkest Dungeon crossover in Dead by Daylight. In the Ruin Rift event launching April 28, players will traverse an appropriately dark dungeon and be able to earn Outfits, Badges and Banners inspired by Darkest Dungeon, like The Highwayman look for David King or The Prophet costume for The Blight.
To learn more about all of this, MobileSyrup sat down for an exclusive interview with Dave Richard, senior creative director of Dead by Daylight, and Chris Bourassa, Red Hook co-founder and creative director. They talked about the conception of the collab, preserving the spirit of Darkest Dungeon in DbD, what makes (or doesn’t make) the Canadian gaming industry special and more.
How did the idea for this collaboration come about?
Dave Richard: It was so easy. It was just there. We just started collaborating together. Both studios are part of the same family, so it was like, ‘Yeah, we absolutely need to do something at some point.’ On the Montreal, DbD side, we’re fans and we’re passionate about Darkest Dungeon, so we absolutely wanted to do this.
Chris Bourassa: Yeah, we threw it out as a one-off when we were talking to [Behaviour] during the early acquisition process. We’re like, “Oh yeah, it’d be really cool to get in Dead by Daylight.” And they’re like, “Well, they’re very busy team!”
Richard: Well, yes, everybody’s busy! [laughs]
Bourassa: Yeah. I’m happy we got there. It was kind of like Dave said — it just made sense.
The collab is focused on this sort of Ruin Rift and bringing in outfits and banners and badges, that sort of thing, from the world of Darkest Dungeon into The Fog. Once you knew that you wanted to do this collaboration, how did you iron out the specifics of what it would look like?
Bourassa: That team are pros. The DbD team was on point. They gave us a proposal: “This is how we do it. We’ve audited both Darkest Dungeon games. We’ve paired our characters with the best match. We’re open to your feedback. Please give us your feedback in this time window so that we can keep things moving forward.” They were awesome to work with, and they’ve done so much homework that it was pretty effortless on our side.
Richard: That’s great to hear. After 10 years of DbD, we’re used to working with partners that already have their universe mastered, so [we made] sure that we were together to make the best for the fans of both universes. There was a challenge, though, in finding the right characters because we all have our favourites internally. And some of them are, of course, harder fits because of who they are, what they wear in the world of Dead by Daylight where they need to be vulnerable. So that was a bit of a challenge, but we found good fits.
DbD and Darkest Dungeon are both in the horror genre, but they’re obviously different kinds of games. What were the elements of Darkest Dungeon that you felt were most important to preserve in this collab?
Bourassa: It was interesting. We refer to Darkest Dungeon as an “export only” business. Like, we don’t want to break our own fourth wall, but we love sharing the IP outward. And I’m an artist by trade — or that’s how I kind of came up in the industry — so I knew right away we would be dealing with like character rigs and limitations, legacy stuff built into the DbD kind of pipeline. And so the framework that we kind of adopted as a group was just that the Dead by Daylight characters are going to cosplay ply as Darkest Dungeon characters. It’s almost like they’re going out for Halloween dressed up like these characters.
It’s a small note, but it’s an important conceit. Because what it means is that we need to get the outfits close, but we can make edits that are appropriate for the DbD game so we don’t get crazy stretching or the rig just doesn’t work, or it’s too much work to create, and it keeps it kind of fun. And they don’t have to be 1:1 with the Darkest Dungeon characters. It’s more just like a good-natured influence and an idea sharing, as opposed to, “No, no, no, you’re literally this character from Darkest Dungeon in this other game.” We feel like our players would hold that to a really high, exacting standard that would be kind of impossible to meet. So that early kind of contextualization, I think, was really healthy for the collaboration and just how everybody internally was looking at it. I don’t know, Dave, if you feel the same way.
Richard: No, that’s a great explanation of one type of process we make. And if I can add on our side, we wanted to make sure that the tone was correct. Obviously, we love these characters as well, as fans of the Darkest Dungeon universe, and so we wanted to make sure that anything that’s iconic about them is recognizable.
As artists, as creators, as fellow developers, I’m curious — on a personal level, what are each of your favourite things about each other’s games?
Richard: I love how tough Darkest Dungeon is. I love tough games. I love the whole mood of the game. Of course, I’m a fan of horror. And the artwork. I think that today, as we’ve seen years and years of Darkest Dungeon, as fans kind of get used to it, we take it for granted. But when it first came out, it was truly unique. And the mood, the ambience, really suck you in the world. And obviously, it’s fun gameplay.
Bourassa: Aww.
Richard: I love it, man! It’s great!
Bourassa: I think for me, it’s vulnerability. You mentioned it earlier. That’s a big part of of my view on horror. That’s ultimately at the heart of why we made Darkest Dungeon was a subversion of the sort of RPG power fantasy. And I think Dead by Daylight plays in that space as well where it’s like, “Isn’t it fun to be weak and afraid?” That’s a crazy proposition, and then to explore that through a video game is really fascinating. So I feel like there’s a lot of shared DNA there.
One of the little fun coincidences with Behaviour and Red Hook coming together is you’re both celebrating 10th anniversaries this year. So I’m curious for each of you, what’s it like to have DbD turning 10 and having Darkest Dungeon turning 10?
Richard: I’m so grateful to be working on a game that has a chance to have a community, lots of fans that are absolutely passionate about what we do and allow us to continue to work on something we love. It’s just amazing.
Bourassa: Yeah, gratitude is a big one for sure. It’s a tough market in video games at the best of times, and certainly even more so in the past several years. So I think it’s just incredible when you have a community that enjoys what you make and that you get to make it. It does make me feel freaking old, though. I just turned 49 like two days ago, and I am feeling it. The mirror has no good news for me! [laughs] And so I look back like, “It’s been quite a while!”
Richard: [laughs] And it’s blurry, eh, the 10 years? Like, “Oh, when did that happen?” On DbD, we’ve seen so many people in the team come and go and come back. And there’s so many war stories over 10 years. It’s crazy.
Bourassa: I don’t pay attention to that stuff, either. At home, my wife will remind me of things that I’ve done that are good. [laughs] At work, I need someone else to remind me that “10 years is a huge deal!” And I’m just kind of heads down on the next thing. I’m like, “Yeah, great, I guess. Cool, whatever. What are we going to do?” [laughs]
Richard: Yeah. “What’s the next problem we need to fix?”
Bourassa: Yeah! It’s kind of a problem for me, I guess.
Richard and Bourassa: [laugh]
As game developers with properties that have lasted so long, you each have your own fan bases. As you’ve been working together and talking more, have you noticed any sorts of fun overlap or differences between your respective fanbases?
Richard: That’s a great question. I haven’t seen it personally myself yet. I think we’ve seen legitimate concerns very early on — and that happens all the time — when studios buy each other. But the great thing is that the way it’s been made now is that the teams and how the games are built, and the DNA of both of these games, are staying as they are.
Bourassa: Yeah, we’re not trying to mash them up. Like I said, we were approached almost like they were pitching any other partner that they wanted to work with on DBD, which was cool because it respects that we do have different audiences. It’s exciting for us to do this because we get a chance to show off a fragment of our creative work to a bigger, different audience with DbD players. That’s really awesome. But I wouldn’t expect someone who thrives on like white-knuckle, real-time adrenaline to immediately gravitate over to a turn-based game. They’re just different players. But I think they obviously share a love of a kind of horror and misadventure. So they’re compatible, but I don’t think that they’re the same audiences. But that’s kind of a neat thing, to share ideas across different communities, without the expectation that it’s going to congeal into a single, amorphous thing. We don’t really want that. We like different having different things for different groups.
Richard: Yeah. One thing that I hope we’ll see once we get this collab out and we get exposure of the two things is ideas from our fans on the DbD side. What we see often is that they will request more narrative. They want to be able to play stories of our characters, which our game doesn’t allow because it is multiplayer with a scenario that’s quite vast. And making that link in between what will live in Darkest Dungeon and our characters, for example, I think it’s going to be interesting to see.
Something that I thought was always interesting when the Red Hook acquisition was announced is that it was a Canadian developer buying another Canadian developer. When we hear about these kinds of acquisitions, generally it’s an American or European or Asian company buying a Canadian team. But here, Red Hook gets to still be Canadian, which is really cool. What was it like to come together having that common ground, and is there anything in particular that you guys have learned from each other, especially coming from different provinces?
Bourassa: I’ve learned more French.
Bourassa and Richard: [laugh]
Bourassa: My co-founder, Tyler [Sigman], he’s American and has moved back to the States, and has regretted it ever since 2016. [laughs] But it was really a huge upside for me to be able to keep the studio Canadian, I believe strongly that we need more strong creative companies in our country. So that was a big win. The culture was really good, too. We didn’t sell to Behaviour because we had to sell; we had money in the bank. We were doing just fine. It was more that they believed in what we wanted to make for our next game, and we wanted to make something bigger, and we wanted a partner to get there. And just the tone of the conversations was always super frank. I think maybe that’s a French Canadian thing, like you don’t mind throwing your elbows around a little bit. You get to the meat of things a little bit faster. So we’ve always had a really positive impression, certainly, of their management leadership group throughout that whole process.
Richard: Well said.
I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realize just how big the Canadian gaming industry is. Quebec alone being very large, Vancouver’s got a lot of developers as well. From your experiences, being in Montreal, being in Vancouver — what makes the Canadian gaming scene so special or unique?
Bourassa: Maybe it’ll be controversial: I don’t think it’s inherently unique. We have some of the same big companies that every other gaming hub has, and they’re doing big company things. Where I think it gets interesting is we have had a preponderance of very successful independent developers and some standout hits: Celeste, Rift of the Necrodancer, these other kind of smaller indie breakouts. And I think what’s really interesting about Behaviour is it is one of the largest independent studios in Canada. And I think we need more of that. But I wouldn’t say that’s unique about Canada. I just think it provides a view that it can be done here, and I want more people to do it.
I would love for some of the smaller developers that I know to partner up or to join forces with studios mid-sized or like Behaviour in the same way to strengthen our industry. But I can’t say there’s anything uniquely Canadian about what we’re doing. We’re making video games; they’re sort of agnostic. Like, a “level up” is a “level up” in China or in LA or in Vancouver. But I do think that we have an opportunity in our country to be leaders in this space. And so I sort of view the successes that I see locally in Vancouver, and then in Montreal, as being important kind of markers of that possibility.
Richard: I have a bit of a more of a personal story. I’m, of course, of the generation of getting Mario on the NES and growing up with great RPGs on the Super NES and all of these games coming from Japan. And the [premier, Lucien Bouchard], an older guy, absolutely gets that video games are important as an art form, should be the next big thing, and that we should invest in it. And they invested massively in building a video game industry in Montreal and in Quebec. I’m of that generation when this happens when I’m deciding what I’m going to do with my life at school, and many other boys and girls are in the same situation. And their teachers say, “Hey, you know what? Games are also made here. You can make games here.” And it does this incredible mind shift where, “Oh, I’ve just been enabled to do something I really love without having to export myself to Japan.”
Bourassa: Use his answer! This is exactly what I was trying to say, but like in a way more wholesome, positive kind of way. [laughs]
No, I appreciate both perspectives!
Richard: Yeah, it’s different experiences! Today, that’s potentially taken for granted because it was put forward as a strategy back in the day and now it’s going well.
Bourassa: We have the capacity to be world-class on all different scales.
Richard: Totally, yeah.
Bourassa: That’s what I was trying to get at. We can make very successful small games in Canada. We can make successful huge games in Canada. I think we’re positioned to do well. The government thing is a great shoutout.
You mentioned how your audiences are unique, although there might be a little bit of overlap between your respective games. But obviously, the hope with a collaboration is you might bring in some new fans to each game. So if someone comes and plays this collaboration, either as a DbD fan or a Darkest Dungeon fan, what advice would you give to both of those players?
Richard: What I like to give is that a lot of DbD players to be see DbD the first time through content creators and streamers who are extremely competitive and extremely skillful. But there is another facet to DbD, which is its lore, the joy of being scared and being hunted and creating these little scenarios where you don’t need to win. There’s a huge portion of DbD that’s about the fun scenarios that happen that you can live with your friends. That’s what I would say to somebody that comes from a non-multiplayer, competitive space. You can enjoy this. Take it easy, have fun, explore.
Bourassa: That’s well said. For me, there’s a meta thing that I hope people see that I hope gamer kind of culture sees: a company can buy another company without it turning into a dumpster fire. Since Behaviour acquired us, we have shipped on Darkest Dungeon the things we wanted to ship when we wanted to ship them. Now, no integration is without friction, but we’re now seeing even more fruits of that partnership. Our identity is being respected in a lot of cases. We’re uncomfortably praised in Montreal. [laughs] And we’re very grateful for that.
And I know there was a lot of cynicism when we went through with the transaction. So partly, I’m hoping that as time passes and they see Red Hook ship Red Hook product, they see us working together on collaborations like the DbD thing. And the level of care that the DbD team put into honour our IP is very humbling. And that this can be something that is not necessarily a death knell or something to be lamented. It’s a functional partnership between two groups.
Dead by Daylight is available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PC, Android and iOS. Darkest Dungeon is available on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC, while Darkest Dungeon II is available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PC and Mac.
Image credit: Behaviour Interactive
