Until Dawn Rant

Lucas Versantvoort / 13 Oct 2015

I remember seeing the occasional advert for Until Dawn. It was feverishly being promoted as one of the few PS4 exclusives actually worth waiting for. The game was released, the gaming press heaped its usual 7s and 8s on it. Having watched several Let's Plays, I found myself getting angrier by the minute, about the gameplay, the story, the characters. I rarely get angry about games. My reasons are numerous as you will soon find out. Let get to it.

First of all, I kept coming across a particular argument in the game's defense, namely that it was self-aware. Each time someone criticized the story or the characters, there'd always be someone saying, 'but it's fun. It's playing with its own genre and clichés' and so on. While in certain cases, I can accept such an argument, here it becomes a catch-all defense. Don't like the characters? It's mocking horror character archetypes. Thought certain twists were dumb? The game's playing with certain tropes. You get the idea.

Is the game self-aware? Of course it is, to a degree. The entire premise screams 90s teen horror flick. The problem is that it does a terrible job of letting us in on the joke, if there is any. It awkwardly straddles the line between playing it straight and showing us the winks and nods. Any story that is self-aware shows said self-awareness through humor, by playing around with or subverting all kinds of genre expectations. The key word here is humor. Until Dawn doesn't play around with its genre expectations, it merely adopts them and then awkwardly tries to tell a straightforward horror story. Take a look at the moment when the killer is revealed around the halfway point. It's entirely cliché, not to mention outrageous and if the game was more obviously satirical in its setup, it'd probably be really funny. But the game doesn't indicate it finds anything funny about it at all. The plot twist is played out with a straight face and you're left wondering whether it was meant to be a parody or that the developers honestly believed in their creation.

This imbalance also has consequences for the rest of the story, particularly its characters. On the surface, you'd think the game's mocking all the usual character archetypes, the nerdy girl, the jock, the slut, etc., but the lack of satire makes you feel like you're supposed to be invested in these 'people'. The fact that you have to control them only enhances this effect. In a movie, you can more easily detach yourself from the proceedings, but in Until Dawn you actively control the characters. Also, the game's stats regarding characters' relationships only serves to enforce the notion that you should care for these characters. 

One of the most mindboggling aspects of this game is the therapist. He asks you questions and your answers influence certain gameplay segments like what horrors you'll face. At a certain point, however, the therapist starts blaming you for what's happening to the protagonists. Remember, we don't know who he's talking to yet, but since he always talks to the camera, he's basically addressing us. He asks whether you're enjoying this 'game', tormenting these poor people. The game's obviously telling us something, but again I'm unsure if Supermassive Games are suggesting what I think they're suggesting. What the therapist is saying is simple: we, the gamers, are sick fucks for playing a game in which we know people are going to get hurt and die. Why do we know this? Because the game was advertised this way. While our fascination with violence is an interesting topic, I despise this way of conveying that message, because this isn't about dealing with said topic, but merely throwing accusations around. Let's assume Supermassive Games are serious. They spend all this time crafting this game, rendering all kinds of horror in all its gory glory so to speak, have the game advertised as such and then blame their customers by claiming some moral high ground: 'No, but you see, YOU are the monster. You are the cause of these characters' suffering, toying with them like lab rats. If you didn't play the game, none of this would've happened' What's worse is that many players' indifference toward the characters would actively contribute to these accusations. After all, if we don't care about characters, we don't care about whether they live or die. The game might as well be saying, 'why would you have character X die? Just because he/she said some annoying things or did this or that? That's not a reason to kill someone, you sick fuck'. You'd almost think Supermassive Games made the most aggravating group of characters they could think of just to play this blame game...but that's probably a bit far-fetched. I seriously hope this aspect of the game (blaming the player) wasn't meant to be taken seriously, not even a little bit, because this is not the way to get people to reflect on why they play games like this.

Next up is gameplay. Until Dawn freely borrows from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Telltale Games and probably a few others to shape an experience that eerily resembles The Order: 1886 in terms of linearity. I already mentioned the therapy sessions where your answers influence the game's events to some degree. For example, if you say you fear rats more than birds, there'll be a predictable jump-scare involving rats. 

And what about the butterfly effect, the gameplay mechanic that allows for teeny tiny variations in story outcomes? While this is in theory an interesting mechanic, it's been applied to a vacuous story starring vacuous characters. Sure, the game allows for all kinds of variations in how the story ends, who lives, who dies and so on. But when it's a story about a bunch of boring monsters and characters you don't care about, who cares about replay value? 'Oh man, I hope I can save Boring Character #4 next time.' Imagine if, instead of this tripe, Supermassive Games dedicated their time to crafting an intricately woven story filled with three-dimensional human beings and ask yourself if the butterfly effect (and basically the entire game) wouldn't be way more intense and fulfilling as a result?

Again, I am astounded at the praise heaped upon this game. I can appreciate a linear, intense, story-driven game if I'm compensated for the lack of player freedom by things like interesting drama, character development and so on, but none of those things are to be found here. Character drama? You mean the overly prepared, insane kid who wants to torment his friends because they were indirectly involved in the death of his sister? Or the characters who just can't stop pranking each other? The characters who are physically unable to not speak in double entendres? The character development that basically comes to a grinding halt around the halfway point? Yeah....0/10. 

Gameplay? You mean the endless series of hallways you get to stroll through that make Final Fantasy XIII look like Deus Ex? You mean the thrill of running away from a killer by pressing one button? Look, there's a place for these kinds of point-and-click adventure games. I just don't feel they convey to the player the horror of, say, running away from a serial killer. 

Horror? You mean the cheap jump-scares that qualify for fear nowadays? The horror of B-movie monsters? The horror of having to not move your controller to remain undetected? Wow, what immersion! The horror of quick-time events? The only true horror to be found here is having to spend hours and hours with these walking cardboard cutouts. That and the fact there are people who think Peter Stormare's character was actually terrifying. Really guys? Is this what qualifies as a scary performance nowadays? Hopping from one random expression to the other without rhyme or reason?

Until Dawn has a few redeeming qualities. For one, you can't load a previous save to undo a mistake you made that got someone killed. It pretty much autosaves immediately, so--like in real life--you're forced to live with the consequences of your actions. Even this, however, is a double-edged sword due to the game's insistence on using quick-time events. If you accidentally screw up due to missing a single quick-time event, you'll just have to live with it. It feels undeserved. If something happens due to a choice you consciously made, that's one thing, but if it's because of bad reflexes...

The graphics are obviously quite good too. I'm specifically referring to the character models of course, not the environments. Again, however, there's a downside: the Uncanny Valley. In case you're unfamiliar with this term, it basically refers to how high quality face models always look slightly inhuman. You'd think that as graphical quality increases, characters would look more and more realistic, but this isn't necessarily the case as seen in Until Dawn. Sometimes, characters' expressions will be spot on and other times unintentionally creepy. 

The other redeeming quality, and the game's key feature, is obviously the butterfly effect. If applied to a game actually worth playing, then we could be in for a treat, but that will take a while. What we'd need is a game not just with a story worth experiencing and characters worth spending time with and so on, but a game that takes this butterfly effect to the extreme. Until Dawn emphasizes your ability to influence character relationships and who lives and dies, etc., but the possible variations still feel slim as a short trip through Until Dawn's wiki will show you. We need more variations and possible story outcomes; the ability to take the story in wildly different directions and, in Until Dawn's case, more possible variations in character relationships; more choice types in general, not just A or B, the list goes on.