MadCap's Game Reviews - "Until Dawn"

Choices...choices are what lie before all of us every day.  Every so often, they can have grand and long-lasting consequences.  But most of the time, they're mundane.  To paraphrase Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation: "the decision to go through a door will result in me being in the next room". And that is, ultimately, what the draw of Until Dawn is not supposed to be.  The choices are supposed to matter and, ultimately, they really don't. That being said, that doesn't make Until Dawn bad, per se. It's just not really a game except in the strictest sense...it's an 'interactive storytelling experience'. And, in that capacity, it actually tells a very good story.

I'm serious, and you - my dear readers - should know by now that I will play through just about anything if the story is any good.  The story here...is admittedly pretty good, though it is riddled with every single horror cliche to be used in the last...forever, really.  To put it in perspective to all of you, let's play the Until Dawn drinking game!

The plot begins with a group of teenagers alone in a cabin in the woods (take a shot!) who play a prank on one of their friends that goes horribly wrong (take a shot) resulting in her and her twin sister going missing.  One year later (take a shot!) the friends regroup to try and honor their memory at the same place they went missing: the cabin in the woods, which is built near an old sanitarium (take a shot) and the entire mountain that both are built on is a cursed Native American burial site (take a shot) and they are stalked by a mysterious masked man with a machete (take a shot).

So yeah, a lot of them and that's just the plot itself without actually getting into the characters. You have the final girl (take a shot) played by Hayden Paniter...Panita...Panera...the cheerleader from Heroes, the jock (take a shog) played by that guy from Agents of SHIELD who was apparently in HYDRA (spoiler alert!), the bitch (tag a spog), the other bitch (tak a smok), the "nice girl" (gag a frog), the nerd (smoke a shod), and the incredibly creepy kid who is so obviously either going to die first or be the killer (COASTERS!).

Okay, I'm assuming now that you've woken up from the alcohol-induced coma, so let me continue with the fact that I honestly don't mind the cliches being used, as I much as I joke about them.  I'm a horror fan myself (or didn't you know?), so seeing the concepts highlighted and having fun poked at them is a joy of mine (also a fan of irreverent humor, or didn't you know?). What isn't a joy of mine, however, is two things that this game is absolutely filled with - quick time events and jump scares.

Let's go ahead and get the big one out of the way - jump scares are so inappropriately misnamed as to be libelous. The fact is that jump scares are not scares at all, they're startling.  Think back to any Screamer video you've ever seen (and no, you never have to worry about that from me, I'm not that much of a dick).  If someone jumped out at you in real life what would you do? Punch them in the face.  In the misquoted words of The Spoony One, using loud noises to slap someone upside the soul is not remotely fair as a scare.

Jump scares are the cinematic equivalent of the fart joke - rarely done well and, even if they are, it doesn't take away from the fact that there's a terrible brown stain on your underwear now.

As for the second problem, Quick Time Events.  This is where the game gets into barely qualifying as an actual game, because the player does actually have to pick up the controller to interact with the world.  Although interestingly enough, with the Playstation 4's movement technology, there are several times when the player is outright instructed to move as little as possible, so much so that they could just set the controller down on a flat surface and wait it out with no penalty.  That's right, a game that actively tells you to not play it.

But yes, as you move the characters through certain areas, cutscenes will trigger that will force the player to do a quick time event or three that will often determine the fate of the characters in question.  And, for horror fare, they do die if you fail in some very visceral and even some creative ways.  That being said, it is very cheap to have a split-second decision or a wrong-button press mean a character will immediately go down the wrong pathway or open the wrong door to be devoured by a hungry monster. Though, perhaps, I'm just missing the point.

That being said, we come back with the problem with the choices.  Much like life, only a handful of your choices actually have any consequences in the grand scheme of things.  Characters can die, though two of them are off the chopping block until literally the very end of the game when you make the last decision, which - now that you know that - kind of makes any dangerous situation they find themselves in rather pointless and lacking any sort of tension, doesn't it?

It feels like the developers are simply having you along for the ride.  This is their story, and you're just here to watch and occasionally press a button...and, honestly, I'm conflicted because the story is actually really good.  I mean it.  You can pick up items throughout the game - papers, photographs, and items, that will tell the various stories from the asylum, the mines, and even the house the characters are bunking over at.  While its to different degrees, the stories all have their own flavor and complexities and really show that the developers were thinking of the world beyond just the player and the characters that they control.

The problem comes with choices that ultimately are meaningless because certain events must always happen, quick time events that tie into that by unduly stressing a player at the beginning and then pissing them off once they realize they're pointless, and jump scares that serve no real purpose.  Couple all those with a game that you're barely playing as much as you are watching, and it's just...really depressing.  And yet, I still have to recommend this game, because the story is just that good.

I hope, when and if we get a direct sequel (from what I'm given to understand, Rush of Blood is going to be more a spin-off than a sequel, and I have no interest in a rail shooter...) that we see a little bit more of an actual game in the game.  Having big name actors is nice and (sometimes) brings considerable talent to the screen, and making the screen very, very pretty is good, but that doesn't sell me on a game and - even if your story is great - games are an interactive medium.  Put more game in the game, Supermassive, and I'm all aboard!

Until Dawn is now available for Playstation 4 from Supermassive Games and Sony Interactive Entertainment.

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