Alan Wake heads to Phasmophobia next month in a new limited-time event, because we all know writers love a deadline

Phasmophobia has rotated through the same handful of seasonal celebrations for years now, but that schedule will see a major shake-up soon. As part of the Twitch Galaxies Showcase, Kinetic Games announced its first-ever collaboration event with another game, Alan Wake 2. Seems fitting enough, Mr. Scratch definitely fits the Demon profile.

You won't have to wait long for the Dark Place crossover either, as the event, simply titled Phasmophobia by Alan Wake, kicks off in May, a few weeks after finishing its annual Easter hauntings. Like the co-op ghost hunting game's other events, Phasmophobia by Alan Wake will include a few in-game rewards—I'm assuming that means ID cards, character cosmetics, a trophy, etc—but we don't know the specifics just yet.

It's certainly not the announcement I expected from Phas, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Alan has a storied career as a guy who can't stop writing himself into bad situations; he's practically the king of manifesting. It's the perfect setup for projecting himself into the ghost-hunting world, and I'd love to try and classify some of the malevolent spirits haunting Mr. Wake using Phasmophobia's evidence systems.

The actual mechanisms of the event are still unclear, but Kinetic's communications make it sound like this "new presence" that ghost hunters are dealing with is a professional Mimic. The studio describes the Dark Place's unknown entity as something that "bleeds into familiar locations, shifts in the shadows, and twists investigations in ways ghost hunters have never encountered."

I wouldn't be surprised if Alan canonized the Mimic's origin story as being some hellish creature spawned by the Dark Place; those things are the worst.

You've already got a little to work with if you want to start piecing together how this all comes together in Phas. As part of the Twitch showcase, Kinetic teased Phasmophobia by Alan Wake with a brief 50-second trailer highlighting a few of Remedy's iconic set pieces. It's a nice little montage of "oh hey, I know those triangles" and "it's that one desk!"

The Alan Wake 2 event is a one-time-only affair, so I guess this finally solves the mystery behind the placeholder text in Phasmophobia's 2026 roadmap. Speaking to PC Gamer, Kinetic Games art director Corey Dixon confirmed it has no plans to rerun the Alan Wake collaboration, although he thinks the worlds "work well together" and sounds open to future opportunities.

"There's no plans to [rerun the event], but obviously we'll have a connection with Remedy," said Dixon. "If it's something the players like and they're happy with, then it's something we could revisit."

It's been a wild ride to watch Phasmophobia grow from an ambitious little puzzle idea into a genre-defining behemoth with a movie on the way and an Alan Wake crossover, but it's truly among PC gaming titans now. As part of today's reveal, Kinetic also announced that Phasmophobia has hit a new milestone with over 28 million copies sold—that number is around 23 million if you only count PC.

The Phasmophobia by Alan Wake event begins on May 12 and runs through June 2, so if you're the collector type treat this as your one shot at getting the collaboration's in-game rewards.