Am I missing something here?

Maybe it's because I didn't get into horror until recently, maybe it's because I watched a LP instead of playing it myself, but I really did not like Until Dawn. At all.

The characters were extremely unlikable and stayed that way throughout the entire experience. The ones who weren't unlikeable were flat-out boring. Normally, when watching LPs of horror games, I always find myself being pulled into the long, quiet, tension-building moments where the true horror lies, but in those moments of Until Dawn, I was bored stiff. The jumpscares did nothing for me, only surprised me at most. I watched an entire LP in the hopes that I would eventually get it, but it stayed consistently bad.

What does everyone else see in this game that I don't?

You expected an actual horror game. This game is a cheese fest and it knows it.

You also didn't play it. I honestly don't think it's someone's place to judge a piece of interactive content if they didn't interact with it.

The story is pretty fun, the kills are brutal, and trying to keep everyone alive is a nice concept for a horror game in the style of "david cage"-esque. It's a cheesy teen slasher film you're in control of.

A good deal of the tension comes from having to respond correctly to the QTEs and the decisions you have to make. Simply experiencing it through an LP will probably remove all that.

And like the other poster said, the actual story and the characters are more of a pastiche of slasher films that doesn't really present itself as something to be taken super seriously.

Ultimately though, it's probably a taste thing, and that's okay.

Sounds like it just wasn't for you. I approached it is a campy interactive "B movie" horror film and it was probably my favorite game from last year :D

Also, it's worth pointing out that how most of the characters come off are very much dependent on how the player plays them. If you found the characters flat out unlikeable, that might be more an issue with whoever was playing it playing them a certain way.

I found the characters to be fairly endearing; even at their worst/dumbest, even the ones I didn't really like I ended up wanting to get out. I also found myself liking different characters more than I thought I would at first.

Yes, you are missing ACTUALLY PLAYING THE GAME

Sounds like it's partly just a personal taste issue. The game doesn't take itself too seriously; in many ways it's more of a takeoff of the classic teen horror thriller rather than being something intentionally scary. Personally that appealed to me a ton, because I generally don't give a fuck about actually scary stuff but I really enjoyed Until Dawn's dumb fun approach to the genre.

There also definitely is an aspect both to the tension of moments and to the character-building of making all those minor and major conversational options that is lost without either playing the game yourself or at least being with friends and playing it together (maybe one person with the controller but everyone inputs on the decision making).