Until Dawn was developed by Supermassive Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment.
Supermassive Games is responsible for the DLC in Little Big Planet, Killzone HD, and Until Dawn: Rush of Blood VR. They’re a relatively new company having started in 2009.
Sony Computer Entertainment is just literally Sony. So they've published all the Sony exclusives we all know and love.
The following review may or may not have spoilers. Depending on your own choices and your own playstyle, certain character deaths can be avoided, some characters can be killed, some can be in totally different situations and others can be in the same exact situation as you see in my captured footage. It is highly unlikely you will have the same exact situations that I was in.
Until Dawn begins with a couple of friends hanging out at the Washington cabin owned by Josh, Hannah and Beth Washington.
With Hannah and Beth distracted, the rest of the group put together a crude ploy to embarrass Hannah. Hannah has a crush on one of the guys but he happens to be dating someone else.
The crush, Mike, tricks Hannah into thinking they have some alone time and just as she begins to take off her clothes, the rest of the group burst out from the closet and from under the bed filming her embarrassment.
She runs out in tears and into the cold wilderness. Her sister, Beth, confused, runs after her to get her. When they catch up with one another they are chased by something or someone.
They are both killed and we flash forward to a year later, with Josh Washington hosting a reunion at that same cabin. As tensions flare between all of them, they all split up and in true horror movie fashion, the problems begin immediately.
STORY
Alright so…the story…boy did I have a lot of problems with this story. First of all, here is my disclaimer: I hate horror movies. They don’t scare me. They bore me. I know when you watch a horror movie you have to suspend disbelief but I can’t do it. I can’t ever watch a horror movie without going, “WHY DON’T YOU DO THIS CHAD?” I say Chad since it's always dumb white kids.
To really love Until Dawn, you have to be a true horror film fan. It’s not enough to like horror games and I say this from experience. The number of times that I just thought the game was being super ridiculous and overdramatic is too high to count.
For example, just in the beginning, why is this cabin impossibly dark to begin with? Why is Hannah even attempting to get with Mike when his girlfriend is at that cabin? If you’re going to be dumb enough to cheat, why wouldn’t you first find out where the significant other is before you start taking off your shirt? Why would she run out into the wilderness if she was so embarrassed? She’s not ten. Why would she go so far into the wild? When you play as her sister you walk at least a mile to get to her.
And that’s only the beginning! The story gets tense later on and there were a few jump scares that got to me, but i was never really afraid of anything and I’ll tell you why.
The characters in this game play a huge role in delivering this narrative and they’re not great characters. You get to play as all of them and they try to differentiate them from one another when you’re first introduced to them with like their name and three different adjectives as if that was enough.
CHAD. INTELLIGENT, CHARISMATIC, ATHLETIC.
Throughout the game, it won’t matter. Their personalities just depend on how you play. And my problem with these characters is that they were all instantly unlikeable with the exception of Sam.
I didn’t care about any of them and it wasn’t until the end when I realized that I liked maybe one character. By like the second hour into the game, I was already hoping some of these characters would die which is why I was never afraid of anything in the game. I was never afraid of the monster antagonists, or making the wrong move because I was doing some of these people a favor.
There would be these quote and unquote hard choices but I never spent more than five seconds in making those decisions.
The only one I really cared for was Mike and I didn’t really realize that until the end because I had played him out to be a courageous honest good guy. Sam, even though I didn’t hate her, I wasn’t given enough time to really care. Plus, every character has a significant other and Sam’s apparent significant other/crush/romantic interest was never really given any development in my playthrough. As if from, “Let me show you around” is supposed to translate to “Let’s do it in the basement”.
It was just…like these are all people I would never EVER speak to in real life for longer than five minutes, if that. I do have to give them credit for making realistic characters though because I’ve met…all of these people.
There really isn’t a story as it just a tale of survival. There are revelations and some twists and turns but they play out exactly the way they do in your average horror movie. It’s not some cool tale of redemption and recovery that shows our heroes triumphing over evil that symbolize the evils of our society. Nah, it’s some dumb ass kid that reads a carving in a drawer that says Bye Bye Man, some dumb ass kid who reads a book about the bibbidy babbady babbadook and in this case, it’s just some dumb ass kids who went up to a totally abandoned lodge in the woods without ways of communicating with the outside world in case of an emergency…I mean what if there was none of this horror and some kid slipped and fell down the stairs? “Listen…Chad…I was too excited to come up here…I didn’t think to bring any way of contacting the outside world. You’re gonna die. I’m gonna take your room."
At it’s simplest form, it’s just making a series of choices to keep all of your characters alive until dawn while you build personalities and relationships for these characters. That’s what really disappointed me because I was led to believe it was a complex story that was more than horror movie tropes the game. That was my bad.
These choices though are extremely meaningful. Whether they’re big choices or tiny choices, they all affect your play through in some shape or form through the butterfly effect. The game drives that point home with the constant mentioning of the butterfly effect.
Sometimes you’ll make the wrong decisions. I once gave a character a flare gun and he shot it immediately to my dismay. I later realized that if I had kept it, I could have used it to defend myself against a bite.
I once messed with a baseball bat and in doing that, left it out only for me to be able to easily grab it when I was being chased.
There were times where I was given the choice to take a shortcut or use the given path and that shortcut sometimes helped me save a character, caused me stumble and cause a death, or even changed a series of events altogether.
Unlike the recent Beyond Two Souls that was also a narrative driven game, the choices I made here actually made a difference and the story here made more sense than it did in Beyond Two Souls.
There is a lore here but it’s never explained to you directly. Throughout the game there are collectibles for you to examine and they can give a bigger insight into the twins, the monsters that hunt you down, or what exactly happened on this mountain.
These clues actually can affect your choices and your dialogue. If you find a vital piece of information, you can choose to share it or not. Sometimes, in conversations, a character will drop information about clues they found. One time I listened to a phone message and I thought nothing of it. Later on, when stuff started to get weird, the character brought it up and it made me go, “Oh yeah”. It made no difference in that situation but it's a nice touch.
There are also little…tikis? You pick up and they are color coded. When you examine them, they give you these short little clips of the potential future and depending on the color, they could be “possible ways you can die” “this is a warning” “possible ways to help yourself” and “possible ways your friends will be affected”.
They’re not long enough to ruin the gameplay but detailed enough for you to think twice about something you saw. For example, towards the end, I examined one and saw Mike being on fire so I thought twice about using fire around him.
VISUALS
The visuals are great. There is an attention to detail that is definitely worthy of some recognition. The environments are dark, creepy and moody.
Everything you look at will have just more detail than you’re normally used to whether it be the depth of your footprint in the snow, a crease in a photo, or even the unevenness of a broken window.
As great as they are though, this is expected for these types of games. This narrative driven games are controlled experiences and if you choose to go with this art style of realism, then it’s expected of you to make as good as it is here.
This is a Sony exclusive game and I’m actually surprised that the character animations and facial reactions weren’t as good as they were in either Uncharted 4 or in The Last of Us. Granted, those are both Naughty Dog games but I’d have thought the technology would be shared around or Sony would give them the funding to really go all out.
Sometimes, the character’s facial animations nail it. Other times, they really don’t and because the characters are essentially just video game versions of their actors and actresses, it looks even worse and it just looks fake.
It looks really weird when the face’s emotions don’t support the voice acting.
That being said, when they it does work and when you do actually get a facial animation that supports the dialogue being delivered, it works like a charm and it's like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The creases in the wrinkles, the shadows on their face, their cheeks sagging; they really went all out on making the faces in game to look exactly like they do in real life.
AUDIO
Speaking of audio, the voice acting is killer. I have nothing against the voice acting of any of the characters. Sometimes, some lines won’t hit home but that will never be because of the audio.
Sometimes real actors just can’t cut it in video game roles. We saw that with Bruce Willis in that one video game, that guy from Friends or Cheers or whatever in Fallout New Vegas, and with The Dinkle in Destiny. In Until Dawn, that is not the case. Not at any point did I ever feel the acting was bad or mediocre.
The music was good. It was nice and tense. The music was done by Jason Graves who also did the music from The Order: 1886 and I can’t really say I had much to say about his work here like I did with his work on The Order.
GAMEPLAY
The gameplay is very simple. This is a narrative choice driven game so the most you’re doing is really moving the character around and then pushing whatever button comes onscreen. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to play this game.
Something I noticed though is that you do have to be relatively quick to push the onscreen prompts. Sometimes there is no time limit and you can weigh both options to your hearts content. Other times, you have a second to read both of your options, another second to decide and then one last second to make it.
I thought i could change my answer in a timed response but I ended up freezing in place and my character was decapitated.
Since the game is very story heavy, I think I basically said everything there is to say about the gameplay when I talked about the story.
Pick an option, alter the story. Pick up certain things to affect the dialogue, etc.
My only complaint is the movement of the characters. Sometimes they move too slow for my liking. If you hold a button, it makes them walk a little faster but not by much. I found myself constantly holding that button. I really wish the movement was faster with maybe replacing the faster walking with a light jog instead.
SUMMARY
All in all, Until Dawn was just not my cup of tea and that just happens to be bias from before the game even started.
I was excited to play Until Dawn. The number of times this game went on sale and my friend and I just bit our fists, constantly weighing all of our options to see if we would finally grab it.
Eventually, the game made it to PS Plus as part of one of the monthly free games and I jumped at the chance immediately.
My bias however was a strong dislike for horror movies. I had assumed Until Dawn was a horror game but not one that would emulate horror movies and that’s where things turned sour for me.
The story is fine, I guess for a horror movie, the characters are super not relatable unless you’re an annoying guy or girl in their early 20s that think the world is their fuckable oyster. The visuals are good with the exception of a few moments when the facial capture failed the game. The audio is great. The gameplay is simple and easy to get into given that your don’t have the reflexes of a dead cat.
Anyways, I got this game for free on PS Plus and for free, obviously the game was worth it. If you were one of the lucky ones to get it for free on Plus and you like horror movies, this game is absolutely worth it. If you find it on sale and you’re a horror movie fan, then it’s absolutely worth it.
The replayability is there. There’s no new game plus or anything but in games like these, if you’re really digging the game, you can go back and try out different choices and even go to specific chapters to change it up.
I beat this game in about three days playing for about 3 hours at time more or less which isn’t long at all but given the nature of the game, I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.
If you’re not a horror movie fan, then I do not recommend this game at all. if you like a well written story with relatable characters then I do not recommend this game at all.
Anyways, from me Until Dawn gets a 6…out of 10.