Should You Play ‘Until Dawn’ If You’re Afraid of Horror Games?
I have avoided the horror genre for as long as I have been aware of it, but I cautiously stepped a toe out of my protective comfort zone to experience Until Dawn. Often described as a schlocky teen slasher, B-movie horror game, Until Dawn features adventure-style gameplay that is heavy on environmental exploration and dialogue choices. It’s clearly inspired by its campy filmic roots and shaped by the interactive design tropes characteristic to games in the Quantic Dream portfolio. Knowing my aversion to horror, I still begrudgingly purchased this game to investigate its branching storytelling – I just wasn’t brave enough to endure the story alone.
One of the best decisions I have ever made in gaming was asking my two fellow Epilogue staff members, Zach Rogers and Nina Salenius, to accompany me throughout my playthrough. I knew that I would not make it through without quitting or panicking to the point of post-game paranoia, so I enlisted these two friends who had both played the game enough to coach me through the scarier moments. Hearing my friends suppress their laughter as I shouted in incomprehensible expletives was enough to keep me from ever diving too deep into the negative emotions that my exposure to the horror genre as a child evokes in me. And for a game so centered around player choice, it was fascinating to discuss my decisions and hear how they differed from my friends’ own in real time. If you, like me, are easily spooked, I highly recommend you play this with trusted friends.
The Charm of Until Dawn‘s Characters
Until Dawn is the perfect entry point for someone who doesn’t like horror games because it balances its tension with levity. The corny stereotypes presented in the game’s main cast enable practically any player to make free associations with the characters as they are initially presented. Each character is framed through a handful of traits that are introduced to the player when the player first meets them. The first playable character, Sam, for example, is described initially as brave, charitable, and honest. Mike, on the other hand, is introduced as romantic, funny, and brave. These traits mix and match based on how you interact with other characters – some major and some minor – which impacts certain future events in the story and what options are available to you.
The characters are also wonderfully performed, motion captured, and voice acted by a talented cast of typically well-known actors. Rami Malek, known for his stellar performance in the television show Mr. Robot, was my anchor point for these characters. Reading the IMDb credits to each of this game’s actors, there is bound to be someone that almost anyone who follows television and film will recognize in this cast. While the game’s script may be overly dramatic to reflect the mood swings of developing young adults, the performances carry those moments of weak writing in a way that efficiently develops sympathy for many characters that initially seem unlikeable.
Until Dawn’s horror comes in small waves, because so much of the early game is devoted to developing the bonds between characters. The game gives the player a starting point for each character to strengthen or reduce their relationships, which results in plenty of dialogue that are intended to evoke empathy and establish to the player who they care about most. It’s possible to save every character in Until Dawn, but the likely reality is that you will have to make choices between characters along the way. That tension is where the player agency transcends from horrifying to exhilarating.
How Does Until Dawn Fit Into the Horror Genre?
I worry that many people like myself pigeonhole the horror genre into a tighter corner than we ought to, for horror games aren’t purely jump scares and gore. One of the ways that Until Dawn helped me come to that realization is the mid-game plot twist that occurs, shifting the story from a purely psychological thriller about a psychopathic murder to a supernatural plot involving Native American mythology and cannibalistic wendigos. This plot twist completely shifts the focus of the story, and caused me to start thinking about what “horror” means as a genre more complexly. Whereas there is a clear bifurcation within Until Dawn’s story, it’s clear that not all horror is so cleanly separated between the natural and supernatural.
As a lover of adventure games, notably Telltale’s The Walking Dead as the catalyst for my love of that genre, I have learned that I am willing to step out of my comfort zone narratively speaking for a deeply involved sense of narrative agency. In particular, games that evoke emotions outside of the typified range of engaging action found in most AAA releases are the games that stick with me far after I played them. Until Dawn fits that category entirely, because it gave me a genuine sense of providing me with my unique version of its story.
How Player Choice Impacts the Narrative
One of the greatest things to do after finishing a branching narrative, adventure-style game is discussing your personal choices with friends. Luckily, I had the advantage of hearing reactions to my choices in real time with the two friends who were talking me through my playthrough of Until Dawn.
Unlike its peers in the adventure genre, Until Dawn chooses to withhold a percentage-based choice breakdown at the end of each series of major decisions throughout its story. On one hand, that’s an impressive use of restraint to not show off the flowchart of major choices in the narrative. On the other hand, it would be nice to analyze which choices are the more morally divisive.
The game does try to address the impact of your choices through its menu system involving the Butterfly Effect mechanic that responds to your decisions, but the presentation of your choices remains vague throughout a first playthrough. Regardless, talking about your choices with other players is nearly as fun as the game itself and justifies the playthrough on its own.
Plenty of Jump Scares
As for the horror elements themselves, this game plays cheap tricks all over the place, for better and for worse. I spent my first several hours jumping at every shadow, flicker, or sound that appeared as abnormal. But I quickly realized that Until Dawn wanted to inspire uncertainty in the player, leaving them perpetually anticipating the next jump scare or the next dark twist. This didn’t diminish the severity of the deep feeling of dread that welled up in my stomach when turning a corner or opening a door. A favorite moment of my playthrough was verbally lamenting the fact that I was reluctant to open a bathroom cabinet to retrieve a bottle of hairspray, only to have that cabinet contain a full-on jump scare that still got me.
Though I never ended up “liking” the jump scares, I grew used to them. As a tactic of emotional reaction, you can begin to develop a sense of awareness around design elements that suggest to the player where the division of safe and unsafe lies. That being said, I still found myself completely alarmed for reasons apart from simple jump scares, and there are a handful of animation sequences that I could never forget were coming on a second playthrough. So much of the first half of Until Dawn is everyday and pedestrian in its human interactions between teenagers that the gorier segments and frightening moments hit that much harder in spite of the lightheartedness established earlier in the narrative.
Supernatural or Realistic Horror?
One of my biggest complaints about the narrative in Until Dawn is simultaneously a reason I would recommend this game to people newer to the horror genre of gaming. This complaint arises from the shift in plot focus from a human-centric plot of a psychopathic killer that psychologically tortures his victims. That framing of the narrative creates suspense and mystery, including some unsettlingly uncanny moments that evoke supernatural elements. There is never any certainty to the story apart from the relationships between characters, and that’s why those relationships are the anchor to the plot. It almost doesn’t matter what the threat is so long as it remains unknown to them, but as soon as the threat is revealed – both the person behind the mask and the creature outside the cabin – I found that the tension and horror within the game almost completely evaporated.
I jokingly compared Mike’s character in Until Dawn to Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series, mostly due to his aesthetic design but also the bizarre acrobatics through wooden ruins that he must perform in the latter half of the game. But that comparison led me to understand why I think the ending to Until Dawn is almost completely silly, despite the moments that made me genuinely jump with fright or shout with surprise.
As soon as the game’s human threat is unmasked, the true threat is revealed to be a species of wendigo – a zombie-like creature that hunts human prey with superhuman aggression, strength, and speed. The design of these creatures is gruesome and their gameplay integration is well implemented, but I couldn’t help but feel that the game made the same exact mistake as the earlier Uncharted games when the plot unnecessarily turned supernatural. The story didn’t become stronger because it took a supernatural twist. If anything, the horror that both games intended to evoke are countervened by the sudden understanding of what the threat has become – just another shootable video game monster.
It’s this shift into the supernatural that I think renders Until Dawn as a palettable experience for the gamer who typically avoids horror. In the beginning, the story is completely centered around establishing setting and context for character relationships. For the next few hours, the story keeps you guessing as to who the threat to your friend group is. Once it reveals that character, the story opens up into more dramatic action filled with moments to mistakenly get your beloved characters killed, and the gameplay truly comes into its own towards the end. From unforgiving QTE sections to motion sensing moments of being stalked by a predator, Until Dawn’s late-game mechanics are some of the best that its peers like Heavy Rain have offered.
I never for a moment thought that Until Dawn was a masterclass in storytelling, breaking new ground for the horror genre. Despite avoiding horror in my entertainment diet, I am well-versed in the tropes of the genre, and Until Dawn makes no bones about borrowing heavily from that tradition. As with many games, however, the right combination of artistic touchstones can result in a truly memorable pastiche that belongs in the tradition of the genre despite confining itself to tropes. Until Dawn feels to me like a necessary step into the genre for people like me who are afraid to get too deep too quickly, and prefer to wade their way into the discomfits of the genre.
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