Until Dawn

I'll say straight-up that I've never seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th/Halloween movies that this game is based on. I love horror, but I've always been more of a fan of the creeping psychological horror than the gorefests. That existential dread of being faced with something beyond your comprehension. While gore and jump scares have their place in horror, Until Dawn relies on them far too heavily for them to be effective.

The biggest problem with this game is the characters - the vast majority of the are completely unlikeable shitheads obsessions with partying and sex. They play shitty pranks on each other, some are actively antagonistic towards each other even before they find out that there's a murderer loose out there. It's baffling trying to understand how these people are even friends with each other, because they lack any kind of chemistry or charisma. It's a whole game full of frat boy douchebags and slutty sorority girls. You know, the kind of people I actively try to avoid in my life. I quickly reached a point where I was excited to see the serial killer come out just so I could stop listening to these idiots talk about how much they want to fuck each other.

Even worse, the game does that fake jump scare bullshit over and over again, to the point where once there was a credible threat, I could no longer take it seriously. These kids love playing pranks on each other, hiding in the shadows, jumping out and going "ooga booga". One girl gives a deathly scream and forces her boyfriend to search for her out in the woods at night, only for her to go "haha, got you." Even the animals are in on it, hiding in closets and stalking humans like no real-world animals would, only for you to find out that they really aren't a threat at all. This happens over and over again throughout the game, and while I fell for the first few jump scares, after a while they became trite and predictable. If you were to watch my stream of the game, you would have seen me predict three jump scares five seconds before they happened, all of which happened within the same hour of playtime. By the end, I was laughing every time the game tried to scare me. Suddenly, loud noises were hilarious. Compared to Corpse Party, a horror game with Super Nintendo-style graphics that I've played recently, Until Dawn was just lame. Part of it was because I actually liked the characters in Corpse Party, so when they were threatened, I felt much worse for them, but also, the game never tried to fake me out aside from the occasional strike of thunder.

The game boasts up front that "your choices matter", though it's dumb that games keep flaunting this like it's a big deal. I do enjoy a little bit of choice in games, as it gives me a sense of agency even if the choice is meaningless in the moment. I mean, I enjoyed the first season of The Walking Dead, even though everything's fucked up at the end regardless of what choices you made, but at the very least, the minute-to-minute choices of that game at least made me feel like I was influencing the story. However, it's not long into Until Dawn that you realize that many of the choices you're presented with aren't really choices at all. Do you want to break down the door to this building and possibly alert the killer if they're inside, or do you want to sneak in the window and hope you won't need strength in numbers? Well, joke's on you, because the girl who's thin enough to go through the window doesn't want to do it, and you wind up breaking down the door anyway. In another scene that I won't spoil, you have to make a choice regarding a mechanical contraption. In one choice, the contraption works as intended, and if you try the other way, it malfunctions and goes the other way anyway. Honestly, this has got to be the clumsiest implementation of choice in any game I've ever played. This was especially grating having just played through Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma, a game where every choice you make splits the timeline in two. Granted, that game tells a story spanning across alternate realities, but at least if you're told someone will die if you do a certain action, they actually do die.

As for the actual story of Until Dawn? Eh, it's alright. The game gives us a lot of horror tropes up front in order to play around with them later, but I was able to guess the game's biggest plot twist hours in advance. It's going for that Cabin in the Woods/Tucker & Dale vs. Evil vibe by playing with genre conventions, but the writing just isn't strong enough for it to effectively make its point. I'll admit that it picks up towards the end once the threat is established, and to the game's credit, it punishes the player for ignoring information the game had provided. Though in one case, the character I was controlling would not have known the correct response to the situation, so I don't feel as bad for leading her to her death. Eh, she was one of the worst characters anyway.

And while it's not worth dwelling on, I think it's really dumb that you have to hold R2 in order to hold up an item. Can't I just press X to pick it up?

Until Dawn might be worth playing through once just for curiosity's sake, but the poor writing and lack of any real choice in the story make it hard to recommend, especially considering most of my enjoyment came from the unintentional comedy. That, and the part where Sam walked around wearing nothing but a towel.