Until Dawn (PS4): Making Wrong Decisions Right

*Blows dust off the blog* Oh hey old girl, how you been doing? No, No I haven't forgotten about you. What Laya? No, were just doing a video thing for Youtube is all.. No we're fine, seriously. Come on, quit being like this. It hasn't been that long, know how the summer months are for games. Baby quit being so crazy, can we just do the review please? Thank you.

So as its well documented, I love a good horror game. And as I have said recently, horror games have been on the uptick. Not all of them have been spectacular (See: The Evil Within) but at the very least its a trend I am happy to see. This game got teased at E3 last year, and it immediately grabbed my attention because it looked straight up like horror movie trailer. Needless to say I was excited. But then I watched a game play trailer and it reminded me of games I had less strong feelings for and kinda brought me back to earth. Still, the premise got me going so that was worth the purchase....

UNTIL DAWN (PS4)

Our tale begins with a group of 10 (Josh, Hannah, Beth, Sam, Mike, Jess, Emily, Matt, Ashley, and Chris) friends enjoying their winter getaway at Blackwood Mountain Ski Lodge. During a night of the revelry some of the group drinks to excess and are incapacitated (Chris and Josh). The others get together and decide to use Hannah's crush on Mike to prank her. Mike leaves a note to invite her up to his room, when she meets him, he talks her into taking off some of her clothes to which she willingly complies.

Sam, Hannah's best friend, didn't approve of the prank and tried to find her, but too late as she enters the room as the rest of them show they were hiding, cameras recording and giggling. Humiliated, Hannah rushes out of the lodge into the snowy mountain alone. Beth, Hannah and Josh's sister, catches only the aftermath of the group trying to find her, and infuriated by their prank sets off into the winter to try to find her sister alone.  Neither of them return.

One year later, Josh tries to rally everyone together to continue their tradition and bring everyone back to the lodge. This time meant to be a means of recovery, to try to give themselves a memorable trip and to help (him) get some closure to the tragedy of his sisters' disappearance. There is a great deal of reluctance, but the group gathers again to try to continue their winter fun. But it's very clear that this is uncomfortable for everyone.

Not a great start for me. The group of preps picking on the nerd at her own party?
Seriously, I was ready to make sure all of them died.

So alright, this seems to be pretty typical horror movie fanfare. A group of kids alone on a snowy mountain away from the rest of civilization? Sure, bet NOTHING is going to go wrong with that scenario. As you might imagine, some of the initial story I gave is probably leaving some information out. This is because the prologue to the game is basically the tutorial for the mechanics you need to know to play the game. So there are things you can do with success and failure, but I am not 100% sure if the prologue can affect the rest of the game or not, or if that is held to a single path until the meat of the game starts.

Until Dawn's biggest selling point is that this is a game that focuses strongly on the decisions you make and that path the story unfolds hinges strongly on every little decision you make. Alright, well I have heard that promise before with games like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Dragon Age, Fable, Infamous and the list continues to go on. But basically what they mean is moral choice: do you want to be the good guy, or the bad guy. That isn't as much the case in Until Dawn.

Sam can loosely be considered the game's protagonist as she seems to be portrayed as an
important character. But she does share screen time pretty evenly with the cast.

As you play through the game you are constantly confronted with little decisions as the narrative rolls on. Some of them are simply conversational decisions that affect your relationships to the other characters, some of the are decisions on what path you take, or how difficult the terrain might be, some of them are timed events where if you don't make a choice an alternative option plays out, and sometimes you have to keep the controller perfectly still. But what I like about Until Dawn is that these come up fairly often, so it didn't really afford me the opportunity to set the controller down and watch something play out. I had to be ready to make a choice.

In the examples I used above, I mentioned both Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain. If I had to decide on a game that this title most felt like, those two come to mind immediately. When I saw the gameplay video released before the game came out, it looked like it controlled in a very similar fashion to these interactive storytelling games that have come before it. I'd say it was an accurate assumption because its pretty much how these games control. Move your character around, interact with the interactables, make your choices, quick time events.

Sometimes you are faced with choices where you have to make a quick decision.
Sometimes there is no right answer, sometimes doing nothing is the way to go.
But it forces you to make instinctual decisions, and I appreciated that.

Yes, there are quick time events. It is annoying and has become somewhat a of a red flag on games. These will be the most common in scenes where you are climbing or being chased. But they also added a nifty one with the light bar which requires to you stay completely still. These I found to be the most difficult to do because even breathing too heavy made my fat belly move the controller enough to get caught. And sometimes when making a decision and there is a timer, you can chose to let it go for a 3rd option

And much like the two games mentioned before that, the controls still somehow manage to be shit. Seriously, is this just some kind of video game rule that I am not aware of that when you make a game that is motion captured by professional actors that the controls need to eat a bag of soggy dildos? This isn't a breakneck paced game, and its not even fast as the Last of Us which had some fantastic motion capture work. But if I am trying to walk down a dimly lit hallway while trying to control my flashlight in Until Dawn, then you can expect me to bang into the walls every step of the way because holding one direction is so finicky I've never been able to walk a straight line the whole game.

God, Jessica. Jessica is SO easy to hate in this game, but god damn it she has
probably the hands down best line in the entire game. You'll know when you hear it.

Thankfully, because of the nature of how you play the game, this isn't a game breaking factor. It's a mild annoyance at best and you can learn to ignore it if you get wrapped up in the story. And thankfully, the story is the best part. Unlike other "interactive storytelling experiences" that I have already mentioned before, this game does a very very good job of making sure its pacing and atmosphere keep pace like how you would expect it to in a traditional horror movie. Considering that this game runs anywhere from 7-10 hours that is actually pretty impressive. Horror movies need to feel oppressive to keep you on the edge of your seat, and to do that for that length of time is not easy.

What I didn't like, is they do they Alan Wake thing between chapters. "Previously on Until Dawn: here's some shit you did literally a few minutes ago". Its annoying because this game isn't long enough to need to remind me what shit that I literally just did. It worked in Final Fantasy 13-2 because its a long game and it reminds me of important points that happened much earlier. So the game either has a poor estimation of my memory, or thinks its not good enough to hold your attention the whole time and expects you to put it down. I understand not letting us skip the actual story elements, but we should have been able to skip this crap if we have been playing continuously.

In between chapters, you'll talk to Dr. Hill with all his creepy facial expressions.
He might be the most terrifying thing in the game. 

I thought the characters models in this game were incredibly appealing. Almost all of them, specifically the girls, had this unbelievably lifelike quality to them that in a lot of points made me feel like I was actually watching a movie in some scenes. So my brain initially thought, this must be motion captured. A correct assumption because not only was the game motion captured for all of the major characters, it also is backed by a handful of professional hollywood actors that appear in both movies and television.  So if people want to start pining that video games aren't a legitimate art from, guess what, you are still wrong. Because the people who contribute to the forms of are you have already accepted are starting to get onto the video game bandwagon.

My biggest question in this game is what is the replayability going to be like. Throughout the entirety of the game it keeps making references to the Butterfly Effect, and that every little decision you make affects the entire story as a whole. And maybe to a degree this is true, but the game notifies you by a flutter of butterflies in the corner when a decision you have made has effected the story. It seemed to happen often enough but I wonder if the game is designed in a way that certain characters can't die until certain points of the game.

For example, there are scenes in the game where you are given a choice when climbing a ledge. There are safe paths to take, and less safe paths. When I wasn't being chased or time wasn't a factor, I opted to choose the path that seemed safer. But if I was being rushed at these same points, I would take the riskier option to save time. Now, botching up one of these QTE's killed my character in one sequence, but I wonder if I were using one of the more important characters, would they just get hurt but the game would continue?

From what I can tell about how the game ended, from what I can see, the ending doesn't grossly change depending on the number of survivors that you get through to the end. I know there are endings where everyone dies and one where everyone survives, but from what I have read this hinges on collecting the right number of items along the playthough. This is kind of frustrating because collectible gathering can destroy the pace of a game like this. And that's a real problem since the pace in a horror movie or game is everything. Sure I can play them again to find all the collectibles, but if I know the story already how many times am I going to play it?

Most annoying of the collectibles are the Totems. When you find them they give you a brief glimpse of something that can happen later in the game depending on the choices you make. On one hand, "ok, cool mechanic". On the other, they are pretty much in game spoilers. If on my first playthrough I knew they wouldn't affect the ending? I would have just skipped getting them so I can be surprised.

The menus for all the clues you uncovered is very intuitive. But
exhausting and intimating. There is a lot of stuff you can miss.

In my first play through I did a pretty good job of keeping mostly everyone alive, having most of the cast make it almost to the end. but then I made some phenomenally bad choices that ended with a number of the cast members dying. Thankfully, the game allows you to pick back up at specific chapters so I was able to replay the last chapter to see how the situation could change. It also seems like doing this allows me maintain the collectibles I have so this might affect my ability to get the other endings.

So ultimately the question is, is it a fun game? I guess it depends on context. As a game is it fun? No, its basically a decisions making simulator in the vein of the usual "cinematic storytelling experience". And typically as far as gameplay goes these are lacking. But what it does right and where it earns its fun appeal is that it keeps you making regular decisions however minute at frequent intervals so you don't really have a moment just set down the controller and watch. From a simple bit of idle banter or a cheeky snowball fight, it keeps you making decisions so you have to be engaged. So on that front it succeeds were others in this genre fail.

I fucked up so many of these "don't move" scenes.

Did I like it? Fuck yeah I liked it. It had all the makings a great horror movie. You have some likeable protagonists, you have some hateable protagonists, you have some good twists in the story, you have some visceral gruesome horror. But more so than that, yes, it does have some replay to it. I have been talking with my roommate and some of my game night friends and its been incredibly interesting to hear how all of our games shook out differently, telling each other about the scenes we missed and giving us motivation to go back and try it the other way.

Look, let's call a spade a spade here. Until Dawn is not really a game. It is an interactive movie, but it's a really good interactive move and it gave me pretty much everything I want in a horror movie experience. I've played through the game once alone, halfway through with friends, and will probably play it again soon. That's at least 15-20 hours of play of the game, and that makes it worth 60 bucks in my book. Until Dawn was a unique and beautifully designed, and earns my recommendation. If you own a PS4, you should own Until Dawn.

I seriously didn't think Josh's face was real person's.