Here's a demo for Dead By Daylight spin-off The Casting Of Frank Stone, from the makers of Until Dawn

Beware, your progress won't transfer to the full thing

This morning I left my torpid flat in search of coffee, sniffed the restive wind, noted with approval the gloom gathering beneath the trees, and thought: at last, summer is over. At last, we quit the disgusting sunlit months. At last we leave all that is green and good behind, and return to the time of monsters.

Supermassive Games and Behaviour Interactive must have gotten the memo too. They've just released a demo for their next horror game The Casting Of Frank Stone, in which you are a policeman, Sam Green, who is investigating the disappearance of a child. The search leads you to Cedar Hills Steel Mill, "where chilling secrets await, revealing a far more sinister truth than anyone could have anticipated". I am anticipating: QTEs during escape sequences, branching choices that get people killed, and General Mature Content appropriate to the coming of Halloween.

Revealed in December, The Casting Of Frank Stone is a single player endeavour that, going by what I've seen so far, takes the playable B-movie format of Until Dawn and applies it to the horror multiverse of Dead by Daylight. "This demo serves as the prologue to the main game, offering a deeply engaging segment packed with twists, turns, and hidden Easter eggs that fans of Dead by Daylight will be eager to uncover," explains the Steam page.

"While the progression from the demo will not carry over to the full game, it provides a unique opportunity to experiment with the game's mechanics and explore various outcomes and secrets by testing different paths and choices," it goes on. The full game, out next week on 3rd September, features a young ensemble cast, and sees you pursuing a serial killer whose crimes "spawn horrors beyond comprehension".

The launch of The Casting Of Frank Stone follows mass layoffs at both Behaviour and Supermassive, with both companies attributing the decision to "challenging" wider industry conditions. Supermassive are also porting Until Dawn to PC and working on Little Nightmares 3. Behaviour's current focus appears to be chucking every halfway-horror-adjacent character ever imagined into Dead By Daylight's woodchipper.