Note: Until Dawn is best enjoyed going into it completely blind. This review has minor spoilers for specific situations and outcomes but does not spoil any main plot elements or twists.
Until Dawn is a cinematic horror game in which you play as a group of teenagers attempting to survive the night in a snowy mountain lodge after their winter getaway takes a sinister turn. Returning to the same lodge where two of their friends went missing one year prior, the group reunites and soon finds themselves trapped on the mountain with a murderous psychopath who's trying to torture and kill them off one-by-one. You play as one character at a time, usually partnered with someone else, switching characters between chapters and even between scenes, with a main objective of trying to make every character survive until dawn. To do so, you'll have to make smart decisions with quick reaction speeds, as the game's "butterfly effect" system can create far-reaching consequences for seemingly innocuous decisions that could ultimately lead to a character's death. The game plays like an interactive movie, where the bulk of the gameplay consists of making decisions and reacting to quick-time-events during cutscenes, alternating with sequences that give you freedom to explore your surroundings for story clues while trying to complete an objective. While lacking conventional survival-horror mechanics like health bars or resource management, each character has various stats that can be influenced by your decisions and which can affect the outcome of certain interactions. Ultimately, the potential life and death of each of the game's eight characters acts as a sort of resource management system of its own, and it's here where the game derives most of its survival-horror tension, since you'll fail the game (or at least get an unsatisfying ending) if none of them make it out alive.
I'm a huge fan of horror in all forms of media, and yet despite my love for the genre I find that horror games can be really hit or miss, usually missing more often than they hit for me. Part of the problem is that I'm just so desensitized to the genre that the usual tricks of jump scares, violent gore, and spooky imagery just don't phase me much; while I appreciate a good horror aesthetic, I find that I need strong gameplay mechanics to invoke a sense of fear or dread in me, which often isn't the case with a lot of modern horror games that basically amount to "haunted house ride, jump-scare simulators" where you walk around creepy environments while scary things happen at you. With Until Dawn's heavy reliance on cutscenes, quick-time events, and gameplay sequences that border on "walking simulator" territory, I was a little worried this might be the case, but it turns out the game's central "butterfly effect" system, coupled with the fact that the characters can all die in a variety of different ways, at different stages of the game, actually made this one of the more tensely engaging horror games that I've played in a long time.
