Doctor Dekker 2 Wants You Back on the Couch: What We Know About D'Avekki's Fifth FMV

The most stubbornly independent studio in British FMV is going back to where it started. D’Avekki Studios has confirmed The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker 2 for 2026 on Steam, the fifth live-action game from the two-person team behind The Shapeshifting Detective, Dark Nights with Poe and Munro and Murderous Muses.

The setup

You are a psychiatrist again, inheriting the patient list of a colleague who did not leave the practice alive. The store page promises a missing body, a murdered professor, five patients and “a former femme fatale”, six suspects in all, wrapped in the series’ usual Lovecraftian weather. You treat them and investigate them at the same time, and the game is explicit that those two goals can pull apart: “Will you save your patients or catch the killer? Or can you do both?”

The signature trick returns. The murderer is chosen at random when a new game begins, so no walkthrough can spoil your run and no two players are guaranteed the same culprit. It was the first game’s best idea in 2017, and it is still rare in a genre where most branching stories have one fixed truth.

What is actually new

The original Doctor Dekker lived on a free-text box. You typed questions and the game tried to find the matching clip, which was magical when it worked and maddening when it did not. The sequel broadens the toolkit. In D’Avekki’s own words this summer, the game has “dialogue trees, combinable conversation topics and multiple choice responses with branching storylines that affect patient outcomes.”

The store page adds the rest of the loop: you link answers together to progress, review replays, gather evidence, and a notepad tracks where your sessions stand. Endings split three ways: patient outcomes, your own fate, and the killer’s.

Combinable topics is the feature to watch. Putting two subjects together to unlock a line of questioning is closer to how Her Story rewarded lateral thinking than to a standard choice wheel, and it could fix the first game’s guess-the-keyword problem without losing the feeling of running the interview yourself.

Where it stands

A demo went live during Steam Next Fest in February 2026, and the studio has spent the year showing the game in person, from MCM Comic Con in London to the BITs showcase in Brighton. The Steam listing still says only “2026”, with no price and no console versions announced. D’Avekki’s earlier games all reached consoles eventually, so a PC-first release would fit the pattern.

Why it matters

FMV’s commercial centre of gravity has moved east, to romance dramas that sell in the hundreds of thousands. D’Avekki represents the other tradition: tiny crews, small casts, one room, and a mechanic nobody else would attempt. A sequel to the game that arguably restarted the British FMV scene is a useful test of whether that tradition still has an audience in 2026. We will review it at launch.

You can find every D’Avekki title, with current player ratings, in the FMV Directory.