Until Dawn - Review | A Uniquely Chilling Horror Experience

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.

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As a cinematic horror game, Until Dawn molds itself pretty closely after teen slasher movies or TV shows in an effort to make it feel more like an interactive movie. There's a heavy reliance on cutscenes with dynamic camera angles and camera movement, of course, and every single character is not only voiced but also motion-capped by real actors including Hayden Panettiere, Peter Stormare, and the academy award-winning Rami Malek. In that regard it definitely has the look of a real movie, but it also feels like a movie, too; the prologue sequence functions like a typical pre-credits sequence that's meant to set the tone and act as a mini-teaser for what the audience can expect in the full movie before the story actually begins, and then it goes right into an actual opening credits and title sequence. The game's use of chapters, meanwhile, act as baked-in stopping points with designed cliff-hangers like you'd find in episodic television, with each chapter opening with a "previously on Until Dawn" sequence as most long-form shows do. The story likewise follows a typical three-act structure (split into 10 chapters) where the first act is used heavily as exposition to introduce the characters and the setting before the main threat appears, which leads into act two where the group has to investigate the threat and try to find ways to avoid dying, and then act three where the mystery is revealed and the group hatches their plan to escape their situation.

With the story and cinematic presentation being arguably the game's main focus, Until Dawn spends a lot of time early on establishing its tone and atmosphere before the horror kicks in and the characters' lives become at stake. The game spans 10 chapters, plus a prologue, with each chapter representing roughly one hour of in-game time over the course of a single night. The prologue takes place one year prior to the real start of the game, and gives us a glimpse into how two of the group's friends went missing -- the group had been playing a prank on Hannah by tricking her into a fake setup with Mike, whom she had a huge crush on, only to pop out and surprise her as she started taking her top off. Embarrassed, Hannah runs out of the lodge with her sister Beth chasing after her in hopes of consoling her, when they're suddenly attacked by someone (or something) in the woods, fall off a cliff, and are never seen or heard from again. One year later, their brother Josh invites everyone back to his family's lodge as a way to honor their memory by partying like old times because, as he says, "it's what Hannah and Beth would've wanted."

That's where the game starts in proper, with chapter one showing everyone arriving at the lodge and awkwardly dancing around the subject of Hannah and Beth, and chapter two putting the characters into their respective situations where they start to split off and eventually have to face different assortments of terror throughout the night based on their own unique situations. The game is sure to drop hints throughout both of these chapters that foreshadow the looming horror, like seeing wanted posters for an escaped criminal in the area, newspaper clippings about a disgruntled Washington family employee who seems to have an agenda against Josh's family, and a missing fire axe, among other things, along with the usual B-movie horror tropes of harmless fake-out jumpscares by the characters startling each other or wild animals suddenly jumping out of nowhere, but no one is actually attacked until chapter three and the real danger doesn't really kick in until chapter four, so the first couple chapters are really all about introducing the characters and setting the mood with a slow and steady buildup to the horror.

At first glance the characters seem intentionally set up to fit into stereotypical "teen slasher movie" roles -- Sam is the compassionate vegan, Mike is Mr Popularity and Class President, Jessica is the hot girl who knows it and takes advantage of it, Emily is the conceited honor roll student, Matt is the kind-hearted and well-intentioned athlete, Ashley is the quiet bookworm, Chris is the comedic class-clown, and Josh is the wild party animal -- but as the game progresses those cliche roles start to fade away and the characters just start to become like real people. Although those basic character traits remain consistent for each character, they aren't solely defined by those traits -- in other words, they aren't shoe-horned into situations with ham-fisted dialogue meant to exaggerate or draw attention to those traits. The fact that Matt is a letterman-jacket-wearing athlete doesn't really play into his character and the game doesn't do anything stupid like having him use some sort of football maneuver to juke past the psycho, or drawing up a football play while strategizing a plan with the rest of the group. Rather, he's just a guy who's maybe not the most out-going socially and a little whipped by his girlfriend as a result of wanting to be a people-pleaser. Likewise, it would've been too easy to write Jessica like a spoiled princess who complains about every little thing, or as a useless bimbo who just gets in the way with her ineptitude, but they made her fun and capable, showing her winning a snowball fight against Mike and in my case, surviving in the mines all on her own, with no help from anyone else. They also added a little extra depth and complexity to her character by having her reveal to Mike during a moment of intimacy that her outward confidence and "I'm a sexy babe and I know it" attitude are really just a facade to hide the fact that she's actually very insecure and anxious about herself.

What's most impressive about the characters is that I found myself rooting for and caring about people that I initially didn't like, because they actually started to grow on me. Mike, for instance, seemed like a bit of an insensitive, inconsiderate jerk at first, what with him scaring Matt and Emily and patronizing them when they rebuke him, not taking things seriously, and then being seen possibly cheating on his current girlfriend Jessica with his ex-girlfriend, Emily. But, throughout the game he rises to being the most heroic, courageous, and level-headed thinker of the group, risking his life racing after Jess when she's violently abducted from the guest cabin, using the best judgment of what to do once they've apprehended the psycho, and volunteering to go off searching for the gondola lift keys. Josh, likewise, started off on my "hate list" because "partying like pornstars" seems like a totally inappropriate tone and mindset to have considering what happened to his sisters a year ago, and then he does some other questionable things that make it seem like he's out of touch with reality, but later in the game you get to see a little backstory into what he's been going through over the past year, and I started to sympathize with him. In fact, I found myself really attached to each and every character, caring about their relationships with one another and genuinely wanting each and every one of them to not only survive, but with the best possible psychological outcomes. The only one that really bothered me from either a character or writing standpoint is Emily because she's constantly and excessively condescending to her supposed friends and boyfriend, but even then I still found myself compelled to try to keep her alive.

The story is actually framed by trips to a psychotherapist's office where you, as the player, get evaluated and questioned by a therapist between chapters with dialogue that just straight up breaks the fourth wall. These segments have ostensibly nothing to do with the actual gameplay, but they give you opportunities to slow down and reflect on your decisions, and to give more thought to characters or situations that you might easily gloss over otherwise. He'll ask whether you value honesty or loyalty more in other people, for instance, which can possibly influence the way you play the game now that you're thinking about it and he'll later judge you if you aren't sticking with your chosen principle. Some of your responses to his surveys actually end up being implemented in the game later on; if, for example, you say that you're afraid of needles, then the psycho will use a syringe injection to tranquilize Sam instead of sleeping gas, or if you say you're afraid of scarecrows then a spring-loaded trap in the woods will be styled like a scarecrow. Besides offering moments of reflective respite from the horror, these scenes also help to set the tone of upcoming chapters; as the game progresses and the horror elements become more and more prominent, Dr Hill's office progressively deteriorates and fills with disturbing horror imagery, somewhat matching the descent into madness that the characters go through over the course of the game.

The first few chapters will likely feel pretty boring to anyone seeking instant thrills, since most of what you do is simply walk around and talk to people while trying to complete straightforward objectives like "find the spray deodorant in the bathroom" (so that you can use it as a flamethrower to melt the ice off the lock on the front door) and "get the water heater in the basement running" (so that Sam can take her precious bath), while the fake-out jumpscares could be seen as a cheap and ineffectual way to inject horror into otherwise mundane situations, but I for one really appreciate the slow pacing in the early chapters because all that time spent interacting with the characters and exploring the lodge gives you time to become invested in the characters and immersed in the setting before the stakes begin ramping up, which is a big part in making the horror actually effective because it's pretty hard to feel scared if you aren't immersed in the game and don't care about what's happening. Many of those "false alarm" jumpscares, likewise, aren't necessarily meant to scare you -- the player -- but rather to scare the characters and put them a little on edge, while maintaining a suspenseful tone by implying that, although these scares are safe and harmless for now, they soon won't be -- you as a player just don't know when -- as we've already been shown in the prologue sequence that there is real danger to these characters, and as the story clues picked up while exploring the early chapters point your mind towards expecting something sinister.

The story presents a pretty strong mystery that starts out grounded in reality, where early indications suggest there's a grudged psycho on the loose and are later confirmed when you actually start encountering this psycho, but as the game progresses and you discover more and more story clues, you begin to realize there's something else also happening on the mountain, out in the woods, which ultimately poses a bigger threat to the group's survival. For various reasons, characters end up having to leave the lodge to explore the surrounding mountain range and discover an old mine and sanatorium, both of which have been abandoned for 60 years and have interconnected backstories that relate to what's happening to the group in the present time. These areas provide a nice change of pace in terms of the environments, but it's here that the story really starts to come into full form by expanding the mystery into whole new areas as you try to piece together how these dilapidated old areas relate to one another, and to the Washington family lodge. The mystery, then, is about figuring out who the psycho is, what his motivations are, and how the old mine and sanatorium connect to the current events, and then later, what's happening out in the woods on the rest of the mountain.

The mystery is pretty solid, here, with there being enough hints offered through the various clues you discover during exploration to guide you towards the solution, but only if you pay close attention and take the time to study the evidence with relation to everything else, because there are also a few good twists and red herrings to keep you guessing even when you think you've started to figure everything out. In other words, the evidence gives you enough information to form reasonable theories without making the solutions too predictable. I, for instance, was able to figure out most of the game's major plot twists before their big revelations, but that was with me periodically stopping to review and cross-reference evidence and actively trying to fill in the gaps as best I could, and I still had one major twist completely elude me while an early theory proved to be completely false. Even though I'd already figured out many of the important twists beforehand, it was still satisfying to come to those conclusions on my own and see how it all played out.

Finding evidence isn't too hard, since it mostly amounts to checking everywhere in an area for the telltale item sparkle before moving on, but whereas other games would treat this gameplay element as pure filler for the sake of item-collecting achievements that only vaguely add backstory to irrelevant things you don't care about, Until Dawn weaves the item collecting directly into the main story. Most pieces of evidence have something important to say about the story, or about the other pieces of evidence, and how much evidence you collect actually influences the outcome of certain scenes, with characters commenting on things you've noticed or acting even more confused by what's going on if you've missed key pieces of evidence. One clue subtly warns you about a potential threat that could lead to a character's death, and another character dies if you don't find enough evidence to reveal what actually happened one year prior. So besides cluing you into the story, it also clues the characters into what's going on and can have practical effects on the outcome of the story.

Besides clues, you can also find various totems, which act as more meta, fourth-wall breaking premonitions of things you can expect up ahead, like danger totems that warn you of risky situations, or guidance totems that suggest favorable actions you should take, or fortune totems that show potential positive outcomes, among others. These totems show a brief glimpse of a potential future cutscene, and can help you to make smart decisions if you can find them, and more importantly, if you can interpret them correctly. Most of the time the snippets are so short that you can't really gleam much information from them, like for instance, when you see a shot of Ashley's decapitated head rolling on the floor in the mines -- it does nothing to clue you into how she dies, and basically just says "hey watch out, this character can die sometime in the mines." In some cases they're taken so far out of context that you have no hope of guessing their purpose until moments before the scene actually plays out, when the puzzle piece finally drops into place and you can see the full picture, so to speak.

It's an interesting system because it gives you genuinely helpful rewards for thoroughly exploring your environments, but at the same time they're sometimes not really helpful at all, or are more confusing than if you just never saw them in the first place. Various decisions that you can make in the game lead to branching consequences, and so you might acquire totems that are straight up wrong, or that will never happen, depending on what choices you've made. There's a point in the story, for instance, where Jessica disappears off-screen and isn't seen or heard from for several chapters, while two totems show directly contradicting outcomes of her fate; a "loss" totem shows her dead with half her face missing, and a "fortune" totem shows her waking up in the same location, alive and seemingly unharmed. The whole thing is like a Schroedinger's Jessica because she's apparently both alive and dead with no way of knowing which one is true until you find her much later. Another one shows some character getting their head or eyes crushed, but there's no context to indicate when, where, or how this might happen, or even who it is in the first place, so it's of practically zero value in helping you make any sort of decision, especially when none of the decisions you make have obvious implications that a certain action might lead to getting your head crushed in.

Sometimes they're just straight-up confusing, like when a danger totem warns of Ashley getting punched in the face, which makes you think later on when you find a pair of scissors "I should hold on to these and use them to stop the psycho from attacking Ashley," which is apparently what causes her to get punched in the first place. The worst offender has to be a guidance totem that shows Emily handing some type of gun to Matt, insinuating that this is something you should do to ensure these characters' survival, but depending on what you said as Matt a few scenes prior, giving him the flare gun is actually the wrong decision and can lead directly to Matt's death while also significantly lowering Emily's chances at survival. As per the game's logic, if you (as Matt) agree with Emily that the two of you should go to the radio tower to try to call for help, then he'll choose to shoot the flare gun immediately if you give it to him, while you're controlling Emily, meaning that neither of them has the flare gun available when faced with dangerous situations.

This situation is particularly frustrating because there's no logical connection between "agreeing to go to the radio tower" and "shooting the flare gun." For starters, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to fire the flare gun in that moment, in the middle of a snow storm with low visibility and while no one knows to be actively looking for a distress signal, meaning it's a complete waste to use it there at all, and secondly, just because you agree with Emily that going to the radio tower to call for help is a good idea doesn't mean you think it's a good idea to randomly shoot a flare gun. When it comes to these types of games that emphasize choices and consequences, it's important that those choices lead to logical conclusions so that you feel like you have some degree of predictive control over what transpires, and so that a wrong decision feels like an error in judgment as opposed to getting randomly screwed for no reason. When a game's central gameplay focus revolves around making smart decisions, it should be possible to actually make smart decisions based on information provided to you, which isn't always the case with Until Dawn. I guess that's actually the whole point of the "butterfly effect" system, but while there are times when the game's unforseen consequences feel like a logical progression that at least makes sense in retrospect, there are also plenty of other times when they feel somewhat random and arbitrary. 

Early on, for instance, you're given a choice as Chris to shoot a squirrel who runs onto the shooting range; if you do so, it startles birds in the area who attack Sam and cut her above her eyebrow. Then later, when she's being pursued by the psycho and falls, the wound opens up and starts bleeding, leaving enough of a blood trail for the psycho to find her once she goes into hiding. There's no way you could've known that shooting the squirrel would lead to Sam getting caught by the psycho, but the chain of events at least makes sense, and you probably should've known that killing a harmless animal for show would be a bad decision with no real benefit. In contrast, there's no reason to believe that giving Matt the flare gun would be a bad decision, especially since a guidance totem specifically advises you to do so, and so "failing" that decision feels like you just got screwed by bad game design instead of making a bad choice.

Naming the consequences of these decisions after the butterfly effect feels somewhat pretentious, because they ultimately don't have that much of an impact on how the game plays out, in the grand scheme of things. The term "butterfly effect" is named after the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the planet can have a rippling effect that influences thousands of exponentially compounding variables eventually leading to a hurricane forming on the other side of the planet -- huge, far-reaching and unforeseen consequences for a small innocuous stimulus -- but the story in Until Dawn is rigidly programmed to follow a particular script and never really branches from the main path. You can't really change the story -- just how dialogue plays out in each scene, and which characters live or die, with a few short scenes or situations unlocking if you do everything just right, or getting closed off if you make a mistake or if characters die before getting to them. Most of the choices, therefore, don't have a very profound effect on the game, but I think it's unrealistic to expect fully branching storylines in a game of this length, with this much production value. Complex situations have to get distilled into narrower choices with more streamlined outcomes because it's just way too expensive to motion-cap and animate hundreds of different scenes that won't ever get triggered in a single playthrough. The limitations are understandable, in other words, but I think it does a good enough job masking the occasional linearity of its choices that you generally don't notice until you replay the game and have the opportunity to dissect it a little closer. During your first playthrough, the only time the choices feel limiting is when you think of a solution that the designers never thought about, or for whatever reason never put into the game as a viable option.

For example, when Mike comes to a suspicious-looking contraption with a piece of evidence on it, a totem has already warned you that "hey, there's a bear trap under there that'll catch your fingers if you try to grab at it," but despite knowing this your only options are to stick your hand in there like an idiot, or else ignore it completely, when the logical solution should be to use the machete (which you already have) to lift out or cut away the evidence from a distance. When Ash comes to a suspicious-looking trap door banging like something's trying to escape, your only options are to open it or ignore it, when the logical solution should be to try interacting with whoever (or whatever) is behind the door, such as saying "Hey Jess, is that you" before making a decision. Decisions like these aren't really satisfying to make, because the options are either "do something" or "do nothing," with doing something being the obviously bad decision and doing nothing leading to, well, nothing as you sort of awkwardly wander around the area wondering what else you can possibly do in that situation, and then awkwardly wander off with no resolution to that stimulus. The game makes a point during one of the tutorials that "sometimes doing nothing is the best course of action," but that idea is executed better in situations where they expect you to make a quick reaction during a cutscene, like whether to throw a rock into the woods where you saw suspicious movement, or whether you should strike a wolf when it's lunging at you, because then you have a clear definition of your options as opposed to a somewhat open-ended situation where doing nothing doesn't really feel like a gameplay decision so much as ignoring content, and there's usually a cutscene immediately following your decision to show an actual resolution for what "doing nothing" actually led to.

The social stats don't seem to have any sort of logical correlation to your actions, either, since different sliders seem to go up or down at random with every decision. If Chris finds a bloody note from the psycho in a hidden room and chooses to conceal it from Ashley, say, so as not to cause her extra worry or panic, then his honesty stat predictably goes down while his charatability goes up, but then apparently the game also considers that to be a "funny" option, among other things, which just doesn't make any sense at all. If Mike goes bravely chasing after Jess when he's abducted from the cabin, that apparently increasing his relationship with Josh, even though Josh is nowhere near them and has zero involvement with that encounter. If Ashley suggests they're not totally at fault for Hannah and Beth's disappearance because Hannah overreacted and didn't have to run out into the woods, then that's apparently considered funny, brave, and romantic. These stats don't play a major role in the game, since they're mainly meant to show the cumulative effects of your various role-playing decisions -- you don't perform RPG-style skill checks based on your social traits -- but some scenes can play out a little differently depending on these stats. If, for instance, Matt's relationship with Emily isn't high enough, then she'll refuse to climb through a window and force Matt to break the door open with a fire axe, and if Mike's relationship with Jess isn't high enough then she'll resist his sexual advances.

In that sense, decisions do actually matter -- even if they don't change the course or general outcome of the story, they do affect how you get there, and in many cases they do show lasting consequences for various decisions. It doesn't really matter whether you, as Matt, agree with Emily that you should go to the radio tower, or if you think it's better to return to the lodge, because you're going to end up at the radio tower regardless, but it does affect their relationship with one another, what they're willing to do for each other, what you're willing to do for them, and how they talk about each other to other characters, and a critical decision with the flare gun can potentially determine whether they both live or die. When Mike is chasing after Jess, you get several choices to take short cuts with more frequent and more challenging quick-time events, or slower but safer routes with less demanding QTEs; if you take too many safe routes, or fail too many QTEs, then you don't catch up to her in time and she dies. Even when a decision has no real consequence, the way the cutscenes are scripted, shot, and edited adds genuine tension to the scene. When Mike's hand gets caught in the bear trap, for instance, it doesn't really matter whether you choose to cut your fingers off, or sacrifice the machete to pry it open, because losing his fingers won't have any adverse effect on his performance, and losing the machete just means he'll use other options in critical scenarios later on, but that scene implies an immediate threat to Mike's livelihood by cutting to wolf (or monster) vision while he's stuck in the trap -- obviously you'd prefer not to permanently amputate your fingers in that scenario, but with a threat closing in you might feel that you don't have time to pry your fingers out and might choose the quicker, more devastating loss if it means saving your life. It turns out Mike's life isn't actually in danger in this scenario, because even if you take the slower, safer route you'll still get out in time -- but you don't know that when you're in that situation, and the game has already established earlier that there are potential life-or-death consequences for not moving quickly enough.

And really, that's what makes the choices and consequences in this game so effective -- it's a combination of really immersive atmospheres, mixed with the constant threat of real and dire consequences for these characters. The scene composition, motion-captured animation, and voice acting all do a great job of pulling you into the experience and making it all feel more plausibly real and tangible so that you can feel the conflict and tension that the characters are supposed to be feeling in these situations, so I found myself deeply engaged with each and every situation and genuinely caring about each and every character's fate. Normally it's pretty easy for me to shrug and think "it's just a video game, there's no real danger" but the great characterization and cinematic production-quality combined with the fact that it was largely my decisions leading to each character's outcome, made me care a lot more when Mike was hacking his fingers off with a machete to escape a bear trap than, say, a game like Outlast where I don't know anything about the protagonist and have no influence over whether or not he gets his fingers cut off by a deranged psycho. Despite feeling more like a movie than a typical video game, where you have no real identity within the actual game world since those characters on screen aren't supposed to be you, the way that Until Dawn shapes its events around your decisions adds a greater degree of personal attachment to its horror, as opposed to certain other games where you're more of a spectator witnessing horrific things happening to other people.

For me, horror games are best when they aren't just about spooky atmospheres with disturbing imagery and thematic concepts, but when they have a strong element of dread. Being confronted by an armed burglar in your house is scary, but the even more unsettling moment comes before, when you hear something and wonder "Is someone in the house? Did I lock the door last night? Are they going to hurt me? What do I do?" Those moments are scary because the fear is completely internalized -- before you've even encountered the threat, you're anxious and worried about what it might be or what might happen, and even if it turns out to have been a false alarm with no actual threat, the fear you experienced was absolutely real. Until Dawn captures that feeling of dread pretty well by virtue of having so many consequences for your decisions; knowing that every decision could possibly lead to one of the characters' deaths, but not knowing how, when, or if it might happen, adds a lot of weight and tension to every decision, especially since the game forces you to live with whatever consequences arise since it doesn't allow you to save scum. Even if you could reload a save to pick a different option, the consequences are often so far delayed that it would be impractical to go back and change a decision once you know the outcome. Furthermore, we know that there's a very real threat in the form of the psycho and whatever is happening out in the woods because we've already experienced Hannah and Beth's disappearance, and so there's also a lot of suspense waiting for something that we know is going to happen, but just don't know when.

The main blemish with the game's design that I can point to, other than a few mechanically disjointed butterfly effects, is that certain story elements don't make any sense and almost ruin the immersion. It's pretty contrived, for instance, that the group decides to split into four different pairs almost as soon as they arrive; we only get to see the whole group all together for two or three minutes at the very beginning of chapter one, and even then it's limited to two or four people squabbling about their relationships with no acknowledgement of Hannah or Beth or why they're all there in the first place. Who, for instance, shows up at a social gathering and then immediately decides to go spend an hour taking a bath listening to music by themselves? Why are teenagers so adamantly seeking out a Ouija board as the main event for the night's entertainment? Why is there a remote-controlled electronic gate way up on a secluded mountain path? Why can't you climb over that tiny little gate when it locks behind you after the game has already established that characters are capable of climbing much bigger gates? Why is the guest cabin a mile or more away from the main lodge when there's an abandoned ramshackle hunk of junk shack on the main path to the cabin? Why does an abandoned shack have functioning electricity but not the guest house? Is that abandoned shack somehow on the same power circuit as the electronic gate a mile away, that's being powered by the generator? Why don't characters use obvious tools and weapons lying around the environment? How did a baby wolverine get inside a locked house and then close itself inside a bathroom vanity cabinet? How does the psycho run all the way around to ambush you through another door when he was literally right behind you three seconds ago when you slammed the door in his face? There are a lot of little things like this that feel like they were designed because of gameplay/story constrictions that just don't work in the context of the world if you actually stop to think about them.

One more nitpick is that movement controls and input don't always feel very tight. In an effort to make the game look more cinematic it'll sometimes override control of your character's movement to steer them a certain way, or else forcibly bring your movement to a halt when it looks like there should be clear space ahead of you, so that we don't see the old video game trope of characters walking in place while butting up against an obstacle. I guess it looks better than the alternative, but every so often it creates a weird disconnect between your brain and what's happening on screen when you think you're doing one thing and then something slightly different happens. With all of the constantly-changing cinematic camera angles, I think I likewise would've preferred to have had more consistent "tank" controls where "up" is always forward, and "left" is always left, and so on. The actual movement system is fairly generous in allowing you to continue holding whatever direction you were pressing to continue moving in the same direction after a camera change, so the context-sensitive directional movement is never really an issue as it is, but did cause a few occasional moments when I lost my orientation and then struggled for a brief second to get back on track, or when I was trying to aim my light a certain direction and the game struggled to interpret what I meant by "up." I do like how seamless the transitions between cutscenes and gameplay are, though, because it's usually pretty easy to tell when the game has shifted perspective and control back over to you, and in situations when it isn't so clear they just throw a little joystick icon on the bottom of the screen to let you know in a fairly un-intrusive way.

There's also a pretty neat control feature that uses the PS4's motion controls to force you to stay still during moments where your character is trying to stay still as well, and it functions as a decently effective way of translating your physical input to what the character on screen is doing. It's a cool idea, and I could see it being particularly trying for more squeamish gamers who tend to recoil in fear when scary things are happening on screen, but it didn't really do anything for me other than make me frustrated and annoyed in moments where I apparently failed to stay still will feeling perfectly calm and with the controller resting perfectly still in my lap. What the game doesn't tell you, and which you have to figure out for yourself, is that it's not so much a matter of "don't move" as it is "keep the blue icon inside the lines," which means you're actually supposed to move if the icon starts drifting, in direct contradiction to the instructions that you're explicitly told at the start of those sequences, and it took me a couple of failures to figure that out. In those situations, it felt like I ultimately moved more trying to adjust the icon than I was apparently moving to cause it to drift in the first place. This thought might be a little cruel, but I kind of wish they'd thrown a jump scare into one of them, or alternated "don't move" segments with QTE gameplay or other motion-controlled segments to make them a little more challenging.

I also have to decry the amount of time that the game is apt to hit you with surprise one-way paths and points of no return. Often times you'll walk up to something and press X to examine it, or you walk a little too far forward and cross an invisible threshold, and then find yourself in a cutscene that ends up transitioning you to a new area when you still had other things to examine or places to explore in the area you were now leaving. I hate it when games do this in general, but it's particularly frustrating in a game where so much of the backstory is derived from searching the environment for clues, and where the only real gameplay consists of exploring environments for totems and clues. It left me constantly anxious about what order I was expected to interact with things so as not to inadvertently advance into a new area before examining everything else in that area. Sometimes (but not always) these transitions are specifically telegraphed to you with a message under the screen-prompt that says something like "Press X to Crawl Through," but you spend so much time pressing X when you see the "Press X" icon appear to examine things that it's easy to get in the habit of just pressing X when you're up against a sparkle and see the "Press X" icon appear because you want to look at something more closely and don't realize the character is going to "crawl through" or whatever because you didn't see the message appear in time.

Finally, I wish the game had a little more active gameplay. I realize that the style of gameplay in Until Dawn is pretty typical of these types of games, but I think they could've put a little more active problem-solving into the game by giving you more actual puzzles to solve, or obstacles that required a little more active player input to overcome. Adventure games, for instance, rely heavily on story, cutscenes, and dialogue, much like Until Dawn, but also require you to solve puzzles -- either with clever use of inventory items, or by doing something in the environment -- to advance. Most of the time when you're given an objective in Until Dawn, like "find a way into the lodge" or "start the generator," the gameplay ends up being a matter of "walk to the intended area and press X to watch a cutscene," when it would feel far more engaging to have to do something yourself to complete those objectives, like needing to figure out for yourself that you can use the lighter in conjunction with the spray deodorant to melt the ice off the lock by combining them as inventory items, or by doing some kind of basic repair work on the generator like fixing a loose electrical connection. The closest we get is when starting the water heater, where all you have to do is press a button when the gauge is in the right spot, which isn't very complicated and not particularly satisfying. It doesn't have to be much, but just a little something to make you feel a little more involved in the gameplay than just walking from place to place and making decisions/reactions during cutscenes.

I was a little skeptical of Until Dawn going into it, because I thought the heavy reliance on cutscenes and QTEs would make the gameplay feel a little too passive, but the story presentation combined with the choice and consequence system did a really good job of pulling me into the experience and making me care about every little thing that happened, which made it easy for me to suspend disbelief and become a willing participant in its horror premise. For as much as I enjoy horror games, that's not something that happens easily with me, so it's a great compliment to say that Until Dawn made me feel actual moments of dread and tension. I was so captivated by it that I blitzed through the entire game in a single weekend, and then immediately went back to replay it -- in fact, it's probably one of my top 10 favorite horror games I've ever played, so it's easily worth a recommendation from me if you enjoy horror games and own a PS4.