[Game Review] Until Dawn (2015)

Horror games have always scared me more than films. I believe its because you are the character, you have to push the joystick to move around the corner and you are responsible for their fate. In Until Dawn (2015) that responsibility is increased six-fold when you play as a group of friends who try to survive the night. 

Until Dawn follows a group of 6 young adults as they return to the location where their friends had gone missing one year earlier. Motion capture performances from Hayden Panettiere, Rami Malek and Peter Stormare bring to life the story which includes some horror tropes you would expect to find in any teen horror; a prank gone wrong, a scary dark house surrounded by an8 even scarier and darker forest, horny teenagers and a psycho killer stalking the group. The story premise is not original, granted, but the game mechanics of controlling each of the 6 friends -  their actions and their responses to conversations with each other, which in turn will strengthen or weaken their relationships and, will ultimately determine the fate of the characters -  is awesome. If you piss off a friend, well, they might not save you and that character will die. It is brutal. In my first play I accidentally killed someone because I was a fool and separated from the group down a lonely path and the guilt I had was unlike any other game death because the point is to experience the consequences of your decisions. It plays with your morals and ultimately asks the question most horror fans have asked ourselves, would you survive a horror film? 

The gameplay is a ‘choose your own adventure’ style with incredibly accessible controls which a novice gamer can grasp. They employ the idea of the butterfly effect meaning there are key decision points which can dramatically change the direction of your individual game which gives it replay-ability. The game tells you when you have just made one of these important decisions and every time I got one of those notifications my blood would run cold as I doubted whether the decision I had made was the right one. There are many different endings and the game awards achievements for each ending you get; keeping them all alive, they all die, just the women or just the men. 

The friends are a collection of stereotypes between the alpha male to the high maintenance girlfriend, which does feel a bit stale especially after The Cabin in the Woods (2011) satirised these cliché roles a few years prior. Some characters are more likeable than others meaning there maybe a couple you will be more than happy to lose along the way (Emily, I am looking at you). But my favourite is Hayden Panettiere’s Sam who feels very much like her character in Scream 4 (2011), capable and independent. I have played this game three times and I have never let Sam die because, I could never do that. 

The games biggest flaw is in its representation of women primarily through the male gaze; we have a woman running around in a towel, another who spends the majority of her game in her underwear and while playing as one the of the men, if you select the right conversation prompts, his girlfriend will do a striptease. The prank that starts off the whole game involves a female character being lured into believing one of the guys wants to make a move on her, so when she starts undressing, her ‘friends’ are hiding with their cameras to film her – not cool. Contrary to popular belief, women make up around half of gamers (Statista, 2017) and we should be moving away from this vapid one-sided representation.

Overall, I would fully recommend this game to new and experienced gamers alike. There is a lot of fun to be had, especially with friends as you can all argue about which decisions to make and then blame each other when your character’s jaw gets ripped off - yes that can happen. 

Available on PS4.

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