Until Dawn review: Don’t open that door!

I have a certain level of respect reserved for games where the scope is relatively lean—where the characters don't save the universe but simply have to get through more personal challenges. Surviving a single night isn’t that ambitious a goal for most people, certainly not for those in most big budget video games. But it’s a big lift for the characters in Until Dawn.

At first, Until Dawn seems to have a lot in common with other last-generation Sony exclusives: Quantic Dreams’ Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. Soft, lingering push-ins on the detailed faces of Peter Stormare, Hayden Panettierre, and Brett Dalton immediately bring to mind similarly detailed models of Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page in Beyond. It’s also an indication of the massive amounts of time and probably money Supermassive Games has sunk into this highly polished title.

Credit where it’s due, those faces look great, even if the game’s framerate can barely keep up with the detail. You’ll get quite inured to both beauty and choppy animation during the principal characters’ ascent up Washington Mountain, where a pretty awful night awaits all of your favorite horror movie archetypes, as outlined by the ritual from Cabin in the Woods. After a year away following the disappearance of two of their friends at the same location, the gang returns to their mountain retreat in order to celebrate life (or something), obliviously pressing through the clear signs of danger and sabotage in their way.

What follows is a horror movie and not much more than that. The group tries to hold it together until dawn (hey, that’s the title!) while being stalked by a Jigsaw stand-in, apparitions, and possibly other supernatural forces. As the player, you more or less get to decide the tone of the horror movie you’re watching.

Interwoven terror

The vast majority of Until Dawn is in making binary choices: do you go upstairs or downstairs? Run or hide? Save a friend or save yourself? If you’ve ever shouted at the screen for a character to make a more logical decision, well, now that’s on you. It’s all occasionally broken up with sequences of quicktime events and the slightest bit of walking through linear passageways to soak up collectibles.

No campfire story would be complete without some appropriated folklore, of course, so such collectibles include Native American totems, which offer flashes of the story’s future to guide your decisions toward an “optimal” ending. Others simply clue you in to what the hell is going on in the game’s pastiche of horror movie sub-genre tropes. To be honest, I was engrossed enough in the mystery for about six or seven of the game’s eight hours to bother tracking down as many of these as I could.

In that time, before its big curtain-pulling moments, Until Dawn isn’t especially scary. Our eight protagonists split up rather early in the proceedings (because of course they do) and the game bounces direct control between each of them, showing their vastly different experiences in parallel. The constant jumping doesn’t maintain a great sense of pacing or tension. Instead, the game relies on jump scares and violin wailing in the early goings to compensate. Sometimes the jump scares land, and sometimes they don't. They aren't all that necessary, since the plot itself provides plenty of tension in the effort to keep the disparate teens pranking, breathing, and talking-about-sex-more-than-actually-having-sex until sunup.

The upside to this fractured storytelling is the breadth of subplots snaking through the greater tale. Ashley and Chris—the requisite unrequited lovebirds—endure sadistic torture at the hands of a masked stalker before shifting gears into ghost story territory. Sam (Panettierre) gets a more mundane home invasion/slasher treatment, while Mike (Dalton) undergoes a regular monster movie triathlon.

There are some dud storylines as well, or at least there were in my play-through. Letterman jacket-sporting Matt and cold, calculating brain Emily are more or less forgotten for three-quarters of the game, and they were almost comically oblivious to the whirling saw blades, masked figures, and general gore spraying itself over their cabin retreat just a few hundred yards away.

Deadly consequences

It all leads to a couple of very big reveals that, while not attempting to break any metatextual ground (like, say, the aforementioned Cabin in the Woods), offer some gratifying twists and turns in return for the time you spent trying to puzzle them out.

The most compelling part of the plot, though, is that I’m not so sure it had to end the way it did. Until Dawn repeatedly (and none too subtly) reminds you that the butterfly effect is very much in play. Lots of games employ “choice” these days, but more often than not those options only shuffle the players along the conveyor to a predetermined ending. Until Dawn seems different. Maybe it’s because the game’s horror story doesn’t require that everyone—or really anyone—needs to survive for the sake of a sequel. Maybe it’s because the game is nothing but choices, making the cost of different outcomes easier to swallow.

Whatever the reason, based on the future visions offered by totems and alternate timelines shared by other reviewers, it seems the state of my surviving cast could have looked very, very different. And I’m eager to play through again to confirm just that.

That’s good, too, because once the great mystery of Until Dawn is revealed about three-fourths of the way in, it’s only the strength of the characters and how much you care about seeing them through their ordeal that pull the story forward. That’s not to say that the big reveal is bad—it’s a damn good one, actually—just that the pace turns on a dime from “slow-burn mystery” to “full-blown struggle to survive the night.”

Thankfully, by this point the game has already spent a lot of time laying groundwork for the characters, aided by dialogue that often feels partially improved. You’ll pick your favorites, you’ll see them through, or you’ll groan as they don’t make it because you did exactly the sort of thing you’re not supposed to do in horror movies.

It’s fun in the same way that horror movies are fun, but with more investment in the characters and outcome. It never felt like Until Dawn was trying to achieve more than exactly that, and the game nails it as a result.

Like any solid horror franchise, I’d happily see the franchise continue in a year or so: hopefully with a new cast and locale (and maybe not at $60 a pop). But even if we don’t get a sequel, I’ll still be able to boot up Until Dawn again and see how things might have played out differently with some alternative choices.

The good

• A wide variety of choices and outcomes that feel genuinely meaningful
• A tense horror mystery that evokes more curiosity than chills
• Gorgeous character models

The bad

• Unstable frame rate
• Choices, while meaningful, are extremely binary
• Not every character hits the mark

The ugly

• Peter Stormare doesn’t play a partying teenager

Verdict

Until Dawn is entertaining in all the ways it needs to be, even if it isn’t perfect in all the ways I’d like it to be. Try it, or wait for a discount.