Until Dawn

I know October is over and I promised I would avoid Horror games for a while but this was a unique experience for me that I could not pass up on and it puts a twist to how horror games are played so I won't leave 2015 without reviewing the hilarious experience of Until Dawn.

Here are your fortunately unfortunate characters

Originally planned for the Playstation 3 with the Playstation Move by Supermassive Games, Until Dawn was rescheduled as a Playstation 4 Exclusive. The game was not under my radar until it was close to releasing and I checked it out without knowing anything about its setup and it was definitely worth getting surprised by it. I could not help but relate it to the movie Cabin In the Woods for many reasons.

Hello this is Until Dawn, your choices matter kthxbai

Until Dawn is a survival horror in an interactive story setting where it is designed to be played multiple times right off the bat. The game gives disclaimers about your choices being able to change events in the future and it would go on and on about The Butterfly Effect. I did not take these disclaimers as seriously as I should have simply because I thought there would be an illusion of choices much like how Telltale games emphasizes how choices matter in the story but the only change that occurs is how the story is told. Regardless of choices, Until Dawn sets itself up quickly with eight teenagers revisiting a cabin in the woods (Yes, much like the movie of the same name's setting) where a traumatic event happened a year beforehand. The eight characters treat this getaway as a means to move on from the friend they lost a year ago... or friends in that case based on what you pick.

What I love about Until Dawn's story is it doesn't take itself serious at all and surprisingly this took me a while to figure out. I initially thought the whole setup was serious but it is no different than watching a typical terrible horror movie where a bunch of idiots are ignorant about their surroundings only to be sent into their demise a few minutes later. It reminded me of the many terrible movies I watched as a kid in the 90s and yet I still found myself rooting for these characters. There was no main character so I could not relate to a single character, however I did feel comfortable with some of them enough to consider them the protagonists... until they died in my game. That's right, if you lose a character here, the game doesn't tell you to restart a checkpoint and it saves automatically which brings me to the second thing I am in love with in Until dawn. For once at least I don't have to have second thoughts about my choices and how they lead to a character getting killed so I get to live with that choice as bad as it might sound to others. I honestly liked having two characters survive this nightmare instead of all eight of them.

For a PS4 exclusive, Until Dawn does look beautiful for the most part with its gorgeous aesthetics and animations. The setting looks influenced by Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and it barely reminded me of John Carpenter's The Thing. I still find it hilarious how a cabin in the woods is connected to an asylum, an underground mine and a subterranean cave underneath all that but the level design was amazing in those areas. My only issue with the graphics of Until Dawn is during some sequences and scenes in the outdoors, the framerate would lag for a few seconds but other than that everything looks stunning. 

Camera angles were fixed and followed the characters while I controlled them where they felt haunting as if someone was watching them. Speaking of controlling my characters, I'm not sure if it was intentional to leave them slow but I was frustrated at how it took me a while to even explore as well as rotating the flash light. There are a lot of control schemes used in the Quick Time Events during Until Dawn. Most of them are your standard dialogue choices along with reflex buttons, but one wrong mistake could lead to a character's death. What I hate about that is one of the control schemes was leaving your controller idle so a character would not move around to be discovered by someone. It sounds like a great concept but it was poorly implemented as I have left my controller idle on my table only for my character to move and die (I had vibration off) and that was the closest thing to an unfair death for that said character. Other than that, the sequences in Until Dawn were fairly straightforward with their many jump scares that I barely flinched at. It is also good to note that there were barely any puzzles to work with for those Survival Horror Fanatics that expect something out of an interactive "Drama"

One of the worst control schemes introduced in my opinion

Levels are linear but still gorgeous

Another thing the game did other than choices of the story's path is shape or tone how gory it can get by putting the player with a therapist who gives a few personality tests to find out what grosses out the player the most. I had enjoyed picking what I thought would scare me and I had enjoyed it even more at how ridiculous my game ended up with clowns running after me and pig heads stuck on trees or cockroaches running out of objects I pick up, something I thought would find repulsive and yet I was happy to be laughing at my own misery. I count the therapist as a character that progresses with your own characters' choices and he does asks more questions about your game but I'd like to leave the rest as a surprise.

Which do you hate more? Clowns or cockroaches? Or maybe both?

I haven't described the characters in detail and for good reason. Even though they are stereotypes found in your typical horror movie setting, I still found it engaging with their performance and acting. It was the kind of bad that I loved and I still do believe it was intentional. It is clear to me especially after watching a few of the commentary videos that the writers are big fans of the genre so even the composition of the game's main track felt cliche. The developers really seemed to have fun with the game that even the director of the game made a cameo as one of the characters. All that along with the aesthetics provided a complete amusing experience of cat and mouse where I am mostly the mouse.

Um, do you mind? I have... Clown business to do, move away.

Regardless of any points that had disengaged me, I had a fluid experience that was short and sweet. Until Dawn was a wonderful ride that had cheesy scenes and characters that we loved to hate with an outlook on almost every horror genre I could think of ranging from slashers to zombie movies which brings its low point on its story where its buildup was interesting until the second half of the game where I couldn't care less about what happens to my characters along with a plot that was going nowhere, then again that was part of its charm. Part of me wanted to check out a different playthrough for different combinations but the part of me that seemed convinced was the one that was satisfied by the ending where only two survive. Until Dawn is available exclusively for Playstation 4 and you can choose to save all your characters or kill them all on it.