Propnight is a new multiplayer horror that crosses the daylight with goose bumps

The beloved horror novelist RL Stine is best known for two full-length book series; Fear of the street and goose bumps. Where Fear Street can be creepy and gory, Goosebumps tames and reinvents horror tropes for a younger audience. If Dead by Daylight is Fear Street, then Propnight is Goosebumps. His skeleton is identical to the Twitch favorite, but he wears a very different and much more vibrant leather suit. And under that skin is a new collection of guts and organs, freshly transplanted from the shape-shifting game of hide and seek, Prop Hunt.

Propnight, created by FNTASTIC, the developer behind the upcoming zombie MMO The Day Before, is an asymmetric multiplayer PC game in which four teenage survivors must escape a nightmare while being harassed by a player-controlled assassin. Breaking free from this reign of terror requires repairing five ‘Propmachines’ before time runs out, and each new device repaired further delays the failed end of the game. Successfully repairing all five without dying will open a set of doors through which everyone can escape to victory. I’ve played around a dozen games and I can safely say that if you’re familiar with Dead by Daylight, much of Propnight will be second nature to you. Machines repair even have the same brilliantly tense fast-time events, which if they fail cause the gears to sputter and explode, alerting the killer to their location.

However, Propnight is not just a double of the beloved streamer. It splices the concept with another cult multiplayer favorite: accessory hunting. Originally popularized by a mode for Garry’s Mod, accessory quests allow players to transform into items to hide from enemies. In Propnight, all survivors have this ability. Did you hear a murderer walking towards you? You can disappear by turning into a box and stacking on a shelf; run to the cornfields and imitate a scarecrow; or even turn into a cabbage and roll to safety. As long as it is within your immediate reach, it can become a clone of virtually anything you can see.

This small change has a huge effect on how Pronight plays compared to his apparent inspiration. Where Dead by Daylight is a tense game of cat and mouse, Propnight is a hide and seek panic session. As a survivor, the learning curve demands that you master how to effectively disguise yourself in the world, but the urgency provided by a match time limit means you can’t just hide forever. He is also forced to revert to his human form to repair machines, a painfully long time-consuming process and thus increases the stress.

While survivors have their vulnerabilities, my initial impression is that their ability to transform into accessories is an outrageously powerful tool. They currently feel with a significant advantage over the killer thanks to the large number of very small accessories. At least on the only map I’ve been able to play (a classic American farm filled with dusty cornfields and barns) there are rocks, soda bottles, and hammers, all of which are top-tier options as they can be easily hidden. in boxes or under shelves. However, reducing the amount of these accessories would hurt the fun, so I would like to see FNTASTIC experiment with map design to find ways to balance the near invisibility that comes with becoming a rock. Better sight lines on the map, whether through elevated geography or windows and gaps, could go a long way both in assisting the assassin and increasing the pace and tension of the game.

To combat the prop system, each of the four playable assassins has something in their skill set to help search for survivors. The Keymaster, for example, can temporarily place spectral eyes that highlight nearby teenagers. Meanwhile, the impostor can not only disguise himself as accessories, something that no other assassin can do, but also like other survivors, allowing the wolf to hide among the sheep. These tools help control what survivors do, but it seems that skills alone are not enough to guide an assassin through a match. Knowing the map and learning the proper location of each item in the world will surely have significant tactical value – seeing a stack of boxes that is too tall becomes a tell-tale indicator that a survivor is trying to hide from you. But even without understanding how every corner of the map is decorated, I quickly learned to be suspicious of oddly placed items and to hear the soft clink of a soda bottle rolling around the room.

In bonus points for Pronight, all of this is Really funny; Watching a killer hit everything in a room while you sit in a pumpkin disguise behind them is a punchline that endured consistently through my multiple matches. This is helped by an attractive visual style; All four different killers appear to have come off the set of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, while the survivors include a Billie Eilish doppelganger that Epic Games could lift in bulk if they ever did a Fortnite concert. It’s a style that removes the usual grime of horror, but retains a distinctive sense of character; There’s still one last girl, a confident jock, and a nun-like banshee ready to scream until your eardrums burst.

What I’ve seen so far from Propnight is already a solid proof of concept. With only one map and four assassins, it has already proven itself as a fun and humorous alternative to other more creepy multiplayer horror games. And while at this stage it’s probably impossible to knock his beloved progenitor out of his position, Dead by Daylight should probably start sleeping with an extra knife under his pillow.

Propnight will be running an open beta for PC on Steam between October 15-18.

Matt Purslow is the UK news and entertainment writer for IGN.