An uneven experience but nonetheless an enjoyable one, this is a fun horror game that mostly delivers on the high expectations I had for it.
Until Dawn fills a hole curiously left open in the history of videogame horror, that of the campy slasher.
One year after a double tragedy befalls a group of teenagers at a snowy mountain resort, they return for a weekend of sex and fun, but end up hunted by what appears to be a psychotic killer. As the night rolls on, more mysterious and terrifying characters reveal themselves, the mountain's haunted past comes to life and each of the eight teens must fight to stay alive until dawn.
The Blackwood Pines location is great with some textbook horror settings - a mansion, an abandoned sanatorium, disused mines, etc on a desolate, forest-covered mountain range. But while each of them looks pretty and is well-designed, none have much character, which is a shame.
I'm a huge horror fan and a lot of the homage this game pays to the film genre - through both style and direct references - tickled my fancy a great deal. But the story and acting are far from great. The main characters react in really bizarre ways to what's going on around them, bringing a great deal of comedy to the proceedings that I don't think is intentional.
Sure, you can control what they do to a certain extent, but the options you have and they dialogue they emit often don't seem anything like what humans from Earth would do and say. That may be part of this game's charm, should you dig schlock.
There are cliches and jump-scares and so on, which may annoy some players, but there are undoubtedly some fantastic horror sequences that are well-directed and helped out with a solid musical score. But there's also quite a few dull sequences. It all gets off to a slow and bumpy start before things ramp up and thereafter there's often sections that had me thinking, 'get to the good stuff again already'.
While the story seems really predictable to begin with and indeed is to a certain extent, there are a lot of twists and turns thrown in by the game's end and it finishes up being something altogether different than what it appears like at the start. Like, not even a slasher. In ways I can't elaborate on, because spoilers.
Sure, this review is being published shortly after the international embargo has lifted and the game is about to hit shelves, which means spoilers will flood the internet around the time I publish. But finding those out from a whiny YouTuber or whatever will seriously impede your enjoyment of the game, and I'd highly recommend you don't find out what's really going on up Blackwood Pines until you head up there yourself.
Although many of the early death scenes are pretty tame, toward the end of the game there are some real doozies. My favourite involves severe head trauma centering on a jaw removal, with the camera lingering on the grisly remains for a surprisingly long time. It's full on.
At the end, I wasn't very impressed with the story, although I appreciate how it changes things up and gets a bit darker than it seems early on. There are multiple subplots and red herrings that almost felt like too much through the middle of the game, but they all pan out by the conclusion - just not in all that satisfying a manner.
Gameplay-wise, it's pretty light - a quicktime event here, a point-and-shoot in an allotted timeframe there, and lots of walking around picking stuff up and looking at stuff.
The guts of the gameplay is player choices, much like a Telltale Games or Quantic Dream game. What you choose to do can vastly alter what happens in this interactive cinematic experience, resulting in each of the characters surviving or dying in one of several gory ways.
This divergent storyline system is called the Butterfly Effect here and it is the real appeal of this game. Even though the storyline isn't ultimately all that crash-hot, it's impossible not to want to go back and change some actions you take to see how it plays out differently.
Until Dawn makes great use of the PS4 controller's Move functions, meaning you're often physically moving it up and down or pointing it in different directions to interact with objects in the game. The best use of this is when scary stuff is happening and you have to remain completely still - which is harder than it may sound.
Should you be one of those anti-Move controller people, you can switch to a traditional layout more dependent on the analogue sticks if you like.
Like Jason Voorhees, you can never run anywhere. Holding down L1 will make you walk faster, but running while you control a character is never an option. This is a little annoying as you move down long tunnels and such.
Just as there are possibly too many red herrings and subplots thrown into the mix for the story's own good, and there are also a few too many game elements. Picking up 'totems' reveals a snippet of video showing one of the potential events coming up for one of the characters – but only very briefly, generally in a way that doesn't indicate how to avoid or achieve the vision. Kinda pointless.
Each totem does fit into a set which you can pull up in the menu system, working as a collectible along with clues which are also arranged into a few different sets. Finding these fleshes out the storylines and will mean trophy collecting, ticking those important boxes for completionists.
Peter Stormare is a welcome addition to the cast and is fun to watch in little segments at the end of most chapters in a psychiatrist role, but these segments are fairly pointless and don't add anything meaningful.
Replayability of Until Dawn rests almost entirely on the player's desire to see different story arcs unfold and different people live or die. Replayability is very important as it's a reasonably short single-player only game (around 10 hours or so), definitely not worth buying to play through once.
Once you've finished, you can jump back into any chapter to replay it and try to get different results. What's very frustrating about this, however, is that should you replay a chapter and get a different outcome, then jump to a different chapter, the storyline reverts to the original play-through and wipes all the new progress you've made.
So if someone dies quite early on in the game and you want to see how things end up if they live, you have a lot of replaying to do - through all the tedious bits as well as the good ones. I wish someone had've told me this before I found out the hard way, too.
Alternatively, you can start the entire thing over again, which means your story will be wiped and all the new actions you take will definitely be saved. However, this means all the totems and clues you've found are also wiped, meaning you have to pick up every single one again to get all the bonuses, full story and trophies.
I think how much you will enjoy Until Dawn ultimately depends on how much you dig the horror genre - of films, rather than games. If you are a sucker for it, you'll forgive a lot of this game's flaws and love how much it loves the genre. I think everyone will enjoy playing with the Butterfly Effect system, too.
Supermassive Games have tried out quite a lot in this title and some of it works, while some of it doesn't. It's a great-looking game, and if they use the same engine and most of the same gameplay systems for a sequel, with a better story, better acting and some of the other issues smoothed out, we could be in for a huge treat.
For now, this first attempt is pretty decent fun and horror fans should definitely give it a crack.
Three-and-a-half stars.
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Until Dawn :: Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment:: Developer: Supermassive Games:: Format: PlayStation 4:: Rating: R16
