At its best, Until Dawn is a gleefully cheesy homage to horror movies, set in a world built by a developer that clearly adores the genre. Although its thrills are tempered by a lack of story cohesion, its robust choice-and-consequence system and keen eye on horror’s most ridiculous tropes makes Until Dawn ultimately worth playing.
Developer Supermassive Games has threaded horror movie cliches into Until Dawn’s set-up and amplified them to extreme degrees. Eight attractive stereotypes, played with great gusto by a well-rounded cast that’s a little too good for the material, have gathered together to “party like porn stars” in a remote cabin on the top of a snowy mountain that can only be accessed by an unreliable cable car. Why are they there? To mark the one year anniversary of the mysterious disappearance of their friends in the surrounding woods, naturally.
Until Dawn’s game world is small, but Supermassive has made it as entertainingly hostile as possible. Its beautifully detailed cabin is huge, cold, and full of secrets, while the surrounding area features a sanitorium with a large morgue, an abandoned mine shaft, and a range of aggressive wildlife. This bitter landscape is filmed with a keen eye on isolation, and Until Dawn does a great job at encouraging the sense you’re always being watched through high angles and tracking shots.
It’s a ridiculous place to spend any length of time, of course, and during its first half Until Dawn really revels in the slasher genre’s idiosyncratic idiocy. Characters take baths with their headphones in. Couples go to dangerous lengths to have sex. Everybody seems to think scaring the hell out of each other is really ‘fun’. While I wish Graham Reznick and Larry Fessenden’s script had been more acerbic overall - sometimes I wondered if the bad jokes were intentionally bad jokes - I enjoyed Until Dawn’s familiarity, from the dumb jock arguing with the bad boy over the queen bee to Hayden Panettiere's character being stuck in a towel for half the run-time.
Such gleeful abuse of genre tropes does dilute Until Dawn’s scares significantly - I laughed more than I flinched - though there is the odd bit of clever misdirection resulting in genuine shocks. Supermassive has an excellent handle on the visual language of horror movies, and Until Dawn is at its most scary when a character is ever so slowly backing out of a doorway, or approaching a rattling trap door.
Until Dawn can’t quite sustain its tongue-in-cheek tone through its ten-ish hours, however, and its story veers off in an entirely different direction in a much darker and sillier second half (which owes an awful lot to a certain British horror flick). While there are still some tense moments to be had here, this sudden shift strips away any cohesiveness and left me feeling like I’d played through two very different - and discordant - games.
Fortunately, Until Dawn encourages a more consistent sense of tension elsewhere. Your goal is to save (or kill?) as many characters as you can over the evening as possible, and every decision they make under your control shapes their fates. Bend a weapon out of shape? Don’t expect to have it later when you’re under attack. Be cruel to another character? You won’t have his support when you need it the most.
Some decisions I made in Until Dawn had minor consequences, some left me genuinely shocked, and all felt satisfyingly connected to an action I had made. I played through twice to mess around with its systems, and was delighted to find new storylines and information I’d missed the first time around by choosing different options.
Quick-time events play a big part in Until Dawn, too, and though occasionally tedious - there’s far too much climbing over walls for my liking - there are real repercussions for failing. Some of Until Dawn’s most thrilling moments came when I was being pursued and had to make split-second decisions on my method of escape, all the while trying not to fumble at a prompt which would result in my immediate capture or death. It’s worth noting I had a tough time with Until Dawn’s motion controls during these frantic sections, and as they brought nothing to the experience elsewhere, I’d recommend sticking with traditional controls.
Less successful is an odd bit of fourth-wall breaking theatre that has a more obtuse effect on Until Dawn’s story. ‘Doctor Hill’ (performed by Fargo’s Peter Storemare) is a psychiatrist who will talk to you directly in between chapters, at first ascertaining your fears and teasing out your thoughts on each character. How you answer him has a subtle effect on Until Dawn’s early scares - you’ll encounter a needle if you tell him you’re scared of needles, for example - but his role quickly descends into a strictly thematic one, which becomes redundant as the story takes that hard left-turn.
Until Dawn is a flawed, but fun experience. Though an unfocused story means it falls short of greatness, it’s an otherwise entertaining homage to the curious traditions of horror movies which pays off your in-game decisions with occasionally shocking consequences.
