With the exception of some of Telltale’s back catalogue, the “interactive movie” style of game has never really been my cup of tea. I didn’t like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls barely made a dent. Thus, I went into my review of Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn with no small amount of skepticism. Despite my preconceptions, or perhaps because of them, I found Until Dawn to be an extremely pleasant surprise.
I’m going to do my best to adhere to a no spoilers policy in this review, both because we are bound by the terms of review code embargo to keep things vague and because it really would spoil the fun if I were to tell you anything too specific.
The overall plot of the game hinges on a pretty common horror movie conceit – eight young and beautiful friends go to an isolated cabin in the mountains. A horrible accident, the direct result of a prank gone awry, occurs and a year later they return to the cabin at the behest of one of their number, a film-maker’s son named Josh (Rami Malek). Josh would like the group to find some closure after the previous year’s horrific events and his friends grudgingly agree to come along. Among them are your standard slasher movie archetypes – the empathetic and resourceful Sam (Hayden Panettiere, Heroes, Kingdom Hearts), the swaggering jock Mike (Brett Dalton, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), the trying-way-too-hard nerd Chris (Noah Fleiss, Brick), bookish hipster Ashley (Galadriel Stineman, The Middle), demanding queen bee Emily (Nichole Bloom, Shameless, Project X), the athletic Matt (Jordan Fisher (Secret Life of the American Teenager) and the pretending-to-be-far-more-sexually-adventurous-than-she-really-is Jessica (Meaghan Martin, Awkward).
But strange things are afoot in Blackwood Pines – unexplained supernatural phenomena, weird animal behaviour, a maybe haunted house and – to cap it all off – a deranged killer is on the loose. Together and apart, these eight squabbling frenemies must find a way to stop, collaborate and listen in order solve the mysteries of the mountain and survive the night. Simple enough, right? The story itself sputters and lurches in the game’s first few hours, trying way too hard to squeeze edgy dialogue into the actor’s mouths. Some are talented enough to make it as painless as possible, others deliver the baldly expository dialogue through gritted teeth. Once the horror begins, however, all of this awkwardness in script and performance goes away for the most part. Writers Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick are clearly more comfortable writing about scary shit and the actors gamely embrace their terrified alter egos.
The game’s narrative plays out similarly to that of a TV show – indeed, each chapter takes around 40 minutes or so to finish, complete with “Previously on” clips – and your progression hinges on two specific things: your ability to react and make smart decisions quickly, and the information you feed to a mysterious psychiatrist named Dr. Hill played by character actor Peter Stormare (Prison Break, 22 Jump Street), whose scenery chewing performance damned near steals the show. Hill will ask the player a series of questions during first-person scenes that bookend each episode and the answers you provide will inform the fears of the characters in the game by playing on your fears. Does the supernatural freak you out? How about clowns? Be careful about how you answer his questions because the answers will come back to bite you – possibly literally.
Decisions and the answering of the game’s questions are a major facet of Until Dawn’s design. Every decision you make triggers the game’s “butterfly effect”, creating a different version of events depending on what you chose. My first playthrough clocked in at around 7 or 8 hours and told a cracking horror story with a few surprises and lots of delicious gore and macabre discoveries. Until Dawn is designed to be played through multiple times, however, and my second and third playthroughs allows me to make significant changes to the story – some people who died in one version did not in another. Some discovered new pieces of information where they’d overlooked them before. Some died in new and exciting ways. A problem I found with this ability to replay particular chapters was that if I stuffed up on a crucial decision I still had to replay the ENTIRE game or the chapter would reload based on decisions I’d made up to that point on my first playthrough. It can make retracing your steps especially tedious when repeat a mistake or miss an important cue you’re trying to hit right at the end of a chapter. Maybe it’s just the meta-gamer in me but that really bugged me. This is doubly frustrating when you hand the controller to someone else. My first instinct upon finishing the game was to get my housemates to play it but they couldn’t start a game of their own without deleting mine and they wanted to go ep-by-ep they were chained to my base save. Again, for a game that’s supposed to be about branching story arcs, it’s rather frustrating.
In terms of mechanics, Until Dawn plays very similarly to a Telltale game. You character is able to explore and investigate various areas and look for clues and interactive objects. Generally, they only have two speeds in this mode – slow walk and slightly faster walk. While it ratchets up the tension on your first playthrough, on my second and third I found myself wishing there was a sprint button for when I entered familiar sections. During these sequences you view the game through fixed camera angles. I genuinely haven’t seen the fixed-angle gimmick used so effectively since Resident Evil 2. Supermassive’s directors and camera teams are to be commended for their atmospheric work.
Interactive objects are picked up and manipulated using the right trigger, the touchpad and right stick. In this, it’s kind of like L.A. Noire where you’d turn items over to inspect them for hidden information. These clues – and there are a lot of them – will provide the player with a wealth of valuable information that can help you work the game’s narrative to your advantage – there are totems that will provide precursor knowledge of obstacles or possible fatalities, important documents and journals that fill in the game’s substantial backstory and some that can provide some insight as to the identity of the killer and their motivations.
Aside from clue hunting, there are also periodic action sequences performed through reacting to quicktime events. These are actually quite well balanced, generally offering enough time to take in the information and react. That said, there’s always the option to not to react. Making a move is not always the right one – doing nothing at all might lead you to an entirely different branch of the story.
Graphically, this is easily one of the most beautiful games of this hardware generation. Despite a few significant frame drops here and there, the character models are incredibly detailed and expressive, the motion capture and facial capture work is of an incredibly high quality and their environments are among the most detailed on a console right now. The level of artistry on display is absolutely stellar and, when all these elements combine in the right way, the uncanny valley drops away and it looks so realistic you could swear you’re watching an actual movie.
For fans of these interactive movie style games, horror games or even fans of the horror movies to which the game owes a debt, Until Dawn is well worth a play (or two or three if you want to change things). If nothing else, it’s worth picking up just to see what an independant developer can do when they’re given the time, room and money to make something they truly care about. I would never have expected a game so accomplished from a developer with Supermassive’s back catalogue. With Until Dawn, they’ve established themselves as a developer to watch and I look forward to seeing what they come up with next.
Review Score: 8.0 out of 10
Highlights: Gorgeous visuals; genuinely scary; intriguing story
Lowlights: Playing ep-by-ep still weirdly confining
Developer: Supermassive Games
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Released: August 25, 2015
Platform: PlayStation 4
Reviewed on PlayStation 4
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