Until Dawn Review

Spooky Has A New Coat Of Paint

Until Dawn is the type of game I’m beginning to gravitate towards more so than RPGs. It is a game that presents one thing above all, player choice. More importantly, the choices it allows you to make are one’s like blasting someone you don’t like in the fucking face.

Graphically, the game outshines competition by leaps and bounds. The characters look so realistic that as one is decapitated or disembowelled by rotating blades, you squirm in your seat. Guts dangle from the stomach like a roll of sausage as a half mutilated corpse hangs from a wall. I often sat admiring these grotesque scenes with a morbid curiosity whilst in real life, masturbating with sandpaper and occasionally glancing at my other screen playing A Clockwork Orange. Seriously though, these graphics are some of the most incredible I’ve ever seen.

While the main theme song about death had me wanting to rip off my fucking ears, the sound of ears being actually ripped off left me stunned. These sounds, like that of a monster eating the flesh of my favorite members of the cast, are ones that I won’t soon forget, much to the dismay of my counsellor. One that I enjoyed in particular was the sound of footsteps crunching through freshly fallen snow. This quaint noise added to the cadence of howls in the background and made me feel as though I was being hunted.

Actual gameplay is where Until Dawn is at its weakest. It’s basically an insanely long movie mixed with a choose your own adventure novel. Spliced into these sections are the beef of the game, the choices you make. Every choice not only affects the dynamic between the characters, but also who will and won’t survive. Piss someone off? Don’t be surprised when they fail to save you later on in the game. It makes you feel as though your choices could have serious repercussions, which makes timed sections more dramatic.

And while exploring could get you killed, you’ll find many treasures scattered about the linear pathways. The most prominent of these objects of totems. They show the possible future of your game should those specific choices occur. So, if the specific set of characters needed survive, this course of actions will play out, and you’ll have an advantage when the time comes. There are also smaller items that reveal more of the story, and you should do everything in your power to collect these. While you won’t miss anything from the grand story, you will miss a lot that puts certain motivations of certain characters into perspective.

Until Dawn is a game that all Playstation fans have to experience. As layers are peeled away and the intrigue becomes pants-shittingly awesome reveals, you will grow to love this game and it’s purposefully cliche cast of characters.