K-SCORE: 80
Developer: Supermassive Games
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Director: Will Byles
Writers: Graham Reznick, Larry Fessenden
Starring: Hayden Panettiere, Rami Malek, Noah Fleiss, Brett Dalton, Meaghan Martin, Jordan Fisher, Nichole Bloom, Galadriel Stineman, Ella Lentini
Spoiler Level: Major
“Until Dawn ratchets up the fear”
Until Dawn is like those choose-your-own-adventure books from my childhood, only not lame. This is entertaining stuff. Something about being immersed in a horror world and having to make the movements, run from the psychopaths, choose whether to hide under the bed or jump over the gap in the walkway, of having to take the steps down the hall and look closer at the mirror knowing something’s going to suddenly appear behind you, of having to choose which of your friends to shoot or whether you’re willing to cut off your own fingers to escape a trap, of desperately fighting the monsters, of having to survive one way or another until dawn is an order of magnitude more fun and more meaningful in this format than others. Any degree of real repercussions to the choices of these characters makes a huge difference in the quality of the story. That characters can live through the story or die in it in any combination and number makes the story so much better and it makes the story feel like yours. And though my personal ability to be so immersed in a story enough that I can be genuinely frightened by it appears to be nonexistent, I can still recognize degrees of scary. Until Dawn ratchets up the fear higher than almost all other games and straight-up all other movies that I’ve played and seen. So it’s great.
Another thing though: it’s also… awful. Nothing is original. The writing is a random compilation of cliches with monsters and slashers and settings ripped straight from the archetype of teenage horror. Thrown in are a hefty number of plotholes. Some of the dialogue is awkward and/or unconvincing, and a lot of it is little more than teenagers yelling “Oh fuck oh god oh shit!” or screaming “No no no no.” Sometimes it’s Saw, sometimes it’s Friday the 13th, sometimes it’s Devil’s Pass, sometimes it’s The Descent, sometimes it’s 28 Days Later. The characters are trying to be The Cabin in the Woods breakdown of The Jock, The Nerd, The Fool, The Slut, and The Virgin, and accidentally end up being The Jock, The Jock, The Nerd, The Nerd, The Slut, The Slut, The Slut, and The Guy from Mr. Robot. Even the format isn’t original. This is the same exact concept as in games like Heavy Rain. Gameplay is minimalistic and simplistic and the difference between playing this game and watching it on YouTube as a ten hour movie is slight.
Writing is what I care about. So here we go. In the story of Until Dawn, a bunch of teenagers with far too simplistic white kid names, pull a prank on their friend Hannah resulting in her and her twin sister Beth’s tragic disappearance and presumed death up on a Canadian mountain. After a year, their brother Josh invites all of them, Mike, his new girlfriend Jess, Matt, Mike’s ex girlfriend and Matt’s new girlfriend Emily, Chris, Chris’s longtime love-interest Ashley, and Sam, a rock-climbing vegan, back to the cabin to… party? They all do things I disagree with regardless of which playable path is chosen, but surely the unifying thing is the acceptance of the insane invitation to spend a night in the same exact site of a tragedy that killed two of your friends and terrified everyone, on a freezing, snow-storming, winter night when the power is out absolutely everywhere. Even when they’re just walking up to the cable car, everything has a very “we’re all gonna fucking die” vibe to it, and they know it. But they soldier on, thinking, alright, let’s light this one more lantern or hold up this one more Zippo and explore this accursed, blood-covered, tragedy-plagued, inescapable, nightmare locale. They’re first instinct is always to split up, and they seem unconcerned when approaching mine shafts and sites of 1950s accidents, former mental institutions where experiments were obviously done on patients, Native American spirit graveyards, and the gore-splattered basements of psychopaths. They never hunker down, they never bundle up, they rarely arm themselves, they never work together, and no one comes up with a plan to survive longer ten or twenty minutes from their current position. Personal conflicts persist through the horrific murders of their friends, and little is more important to them than slowly walking and searching for small wooden totems lying in dark corners of the whole setting. Somehow though, they’re shocked at every turn when things get more desperate and more violent.
“the teenagers again just want a remote location to pair off and have sex”
The writers could have explained their presence on the mountain as a commitment by the group to find out what happened to their friends from a year back. But instead they go with the motivation that the teenagers again just want a remote location to pair off and have sex. And then when they are finding out the details of their friends’ disappearances, the level of irresponsibility on their part, Hannah’s part, and the police’s part a year back, is thrown stark relief, but no one talks about it. Hannah got trapped inside the abandoned mine, ate her dead sister, and turned into a monster after a month. Yet in a single night, all eight characters are in and out of those mines, accessing and leaving them from the woods, the cabin, the lodge, the fire tower, and the sanitarium. They’re able to come and go without equipment and in the dark. A year and no one could find her? Where were they looking? Hey, maybe she’s back in her room? No? Fuck her. And then they come back and say, “Poor Hannah.”
Why won't you blink you nutcase?
Then the writers fumble the Josh character quite a bit, making a large percentage of the horror scenarios centered on the concept of him being the obvious psychopath enacting a sick revenge for a prank that was never that mean and certainly not culpable of his sisters’ death. It’s interesting that there’s a slasher psychopath and monster horror mixed together, but in between chapters there are elements of a therapist who is a delusion Josh’s having that has no business in the narrative and can’t properly intertwine with the story you select, no matter which butterfly wing trail you follow. By the end he’s having some kind of paranoid breakdown that feels like The Evil Within even though everything else in the game has a different tone.
And when they do get around to addressing the actual chief conflict of the cannibalistic monsters attacking, maiming, and decapitating everyone, the writers stumble some more. The teenagers run and fight these things in seemingly random places and random pairs that don’t often speak to the connections the characters have. All those personal conflicts you spent the first five or six chapters building up are still present, they still talk about them, but they no longer can develop. Wonder what will become of Mike and Jessica’s relationship after he tried to save her and she got separated. Here’s some Mike with a shotgun and Sam with a crowbar attacking monsters. Here’s some Matt and some Jessica hiding. Wonder whether the old conflicts between Ashley and Emily will manifest positively or negatively in the conflict of the creatures? Here’s Ashley following voices. Here’s Emily alone in the mines. And though the teenagers aren’t great at resistance, they only need to follow the beast horror playbook. They’re afraid of fire. Like a T-Rex, they can’t see you if you don’t move. They swarm. They in-fight. It’s probably best to Vasquez Suicide these bitches.
“I even grew attached to these jocks and sluts”
I’ve seen it all before. It didn’t make sense then. It doesn’t make sense in Until Dawn. But yeah, this game is great. I’m watching YouTube videos of other people playing as I’m writing this. People’s reactions to the horror is so funny. The little choice differences are so interesting. And though I’ve seen this story a hundred times, I’ve never felt so close to actually living in and that’s exciting and a ton of fun. I don’t care about almost all of the weaknesses this game has because it’s immersive enough to be genuinely thrilling. I played through twice in three days, once working as hard as I could to keep everyone alive and once killing them all off in whatever ways I found most narratively interesting. Still I’m curious what the characters do and say if I make different choices, take different paths, miss different quick-time events. I even grew attached to these jocks and sluts because if you pull off some daring, desperate maneuver while fleeing for your life, it ups the stakes for the next chase. You really don’t want Sam to die after she’s successfully fled the clown-masked crazy man in her goddamn bath towel. Jessica might be a needy, ungrateful, complaining twat, but you know, surviving falling down that elevator shaft was punishment enough. Let’s get her through this last tunnel thirty minutes until sunrise. Emily’s by far and away the most irritating character, but you just… don’t feel quite right... about shooting her in the eyeball on the off chance these wendigo bites follow standard zombie and vampire rules.
Obviously there’s a ton of room for improvement, but I think Until Dawn, unlike other games that have strived for the same thing in this format, proves that this kind of game works - and just when I’d sworn off QTE’s forever. (The “don’t move” shit is different. That’s the best games have ever done with motion controls.) Ultimately though, my best suggestions for these developers or others would be to double down on everything they try. A lot of the choices really change the outcome, but there are also a ton that seem like they should be important, but the net result is the same either way. Less linearity would lead to more replayability, which is crucial in a short narrative. And the character work needed to go way further. All of the setup for all of the relationships is centered on sexual tension: Ashley and Chris, Mike and Jess, Emily and Matt, and to a lesser extent Sam and Josh, but none of those relationships completely develop. The closest is Ashley and Chris because she can kiss him in one universe and let him have his head ripped off in another. I want to be able to play through the game where Jess and Mike have sex and then Mike has sex with Emily and Jess kills her and lies to everyone about it. I want play through such that Mike decides neither of his girlfriends are worth it, lets him die, and then hunts monsters with his wolf friend. I want to play through where the girls resisting these incubi gentlemen causes them to bond in some girlpower way and all make it while the guys get picked off one at a time. I want to play through where Sam decides never to get out of that bathtub, no matter how bad things get outside. She’s got her music. She’s naked in there and warm. She’s good. They tease these ideas, but in the end don’t have enough content to deliver. That’s the dawn I’m waiting for.