#GamingTuesday Until Dawn Review

Until Dawn is a new Playstation 4 Exclusive release of the survival horror genre where your split second decisions shape not only your story, but your characters personalities as well.  The story revolves around 8 teenagers on a mountain retreat after a hiatus from each other because of a tragedy that occurred during the same annual retreat a year previous. Of course, everything starts going downhill from the minute they arrive, and it's your job to get each of the characters through the night. Check out the game trailer below (we recommend watching in fullscreen):

What's wonderful about this game is that it plays similarly to Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls where you are basically in a movie, but because of your decisions, the story arc changes along the way, and you could have a totally different story during your second or third playthrough than the previous ones. There are hundreds of different story arc possibilities, and although it seems overwhelming to a new gamer, it is quite simple to play. During each cutscene, you take control of a different character and make decisions for them along the way, which could affect other characters, and their own live or die outcome. Obviously, it's your job to keep them alive.

We start off with the basic, stereotypical personalities. The jock, the mean girl, the nerd, the bookworm, and so on, but as you make decisions for the characters, you shape them and the world around them, and could possibly end up with a different personality all-together. During our second playthrough, we ended up making the bad boy a true heroic romantic, as well as turning the mean girl - easy girl into a truly complex, modest, and even sympathetic woman, when our first playthrough held true to their starting personalities. Because of this, we got brand new conversations and cutscenes, and even strengthened the bond between certain characters. And there are characters that you love to hate, who you think you might not care if they live or die, but when you are placed in their shoes, you begin rooting for them to live. This makes the game even more emotional if you end up making a decision that results in the loss of one or more of those characters. And by the way, there are no second chances. There is no respawning. You don't get a re-do unless you restart the game. So you have to try like hell to make it count.

The graphics are amazing. You really feel like you are watching a horror movie with all of the scenes seamlessly meeting gameplay to give everything a very cinematic feel. There are also two characters who have scenes during each intermission - or between each chapter. One character you play, but you are unaware who you actually are, and the other is a Doctor or Psychiatrist of some sort who observes your game play and talks to you about it during these scenes. This is where things get tailored to you, your fears, and playstyles. This is one of our favorites parts, as it plays a part in shaping the story's "scares" just for you. He asks you questions regarding your fears, and it's important that you be honest. You may hate something, and not want to see them in the game, but it will make the game all the more scary for you if you are honest instead of choosing something that may not scare you as much. Joey tailored his to spiders and zombies, where Drew choose clowns and darkness. This did significantly change some of the scenes, as Drew's game was dark and more sinister, and Joey's had more creepy crawlies and jump scares.

We also like the fact that just when you think you have the game figured out, it changes up on you. You have the obvious slasher touches, but there are supernatural parts as well, and we love when those two things are mixed.

Also, this: Start watching at 1:11 and stop right after the Don't Move feature for no spoilers.

The Don't Move feature made us almost wet ourselves. Seriously. The controller can sense your movement... in the slightest. Even breathing can make you move. And you don't want to move. Believe us. But it's a truly wonderful feature that lets us delve even deeper into the gameplay and lets us believe that we are actually in it to win it.

Also, when you pause the game, whichever character you are playing will be on the menu and in what condition they are in. If you look at your stats, it shows you how each character's relationship with the current character is, as well as how you have changed their personality during gameplay. You can tell because their starting stats are marked with a white line. Anything you change either dips below the line or goes above the line to show you how you are shaping them with your decisions. There's a glimpse of the character menu below.

Once you have finished the game, you can go back and play by chapter. Be warned, everything after the chapter you go back to will be deleted in order to re-write your story. It's not so bad if you don't like your ended and go back to the last chapter, but we weary when going back further, as you will have to play the rest all over again. This also erases the clues and such that you have found within those chapters. You can also choose how to use your controller, whether traditional, or motion. Motion makes the game a little harder as you are using full movement instead of the sticks to move like in traditional, but can be rewarding. Check out the main menu below to see more.

One last thing before you read on to our gameplay. We absolutely LOVE the theme song! Check it out below.

Playthroughs

The first playthrough was Joey and I, so we split the characters up. I took on the 4 girls, and Joey took the 4 guys. We made it a game all in itself to see who would have the most remaining characters at the end of the game. When a new scene would come up with our characters, we would pass the controller and played it as a two player game with one controller. This made things interesting, fun, and even more competitive.

You know how you can watch those slasher films and scream at the tv when people are running up the stairs instead of out of the front door? Or how angry you get when they decide to check the basement out when we all know horror movie rules, and that checking basements an attics is always a don't. You think you know what you would do, but when it comes down to actually doing it, making those split second decisions (literally, the game gives you maybe 15 seconds to decide what to do), but you just don't know until you are really in it. I thought was a Scream Queen (which I still think I'm holding my title well), but my first playthrough with Joey gave me rude awakening. Sometimes you make bad decisions because it's you, not them, and sometimes that leads to the death of your character... or all 4. Yes, I lost. Hard. I failed to keep three of my girls alive, but one of those was by choice and, well... we went out in a blaze of glory. Literally.

On the second playthrough, we had our friend Drew play with us, and split the characters as evenly as possibly, choosing them like you would choose people for your dodgeball team in gym class, round-robin style. My team consisted of Sam, Jessica, and Ashley (who I dubbed Smashly after the fist to face incident - you'll see when you play), Joey's team consisted of Josh and Matt, and Drew took on Emily, Chris, and Mike. Also, it's against the rules to kill someone else's character, so you lose points if your decisions result in the loss of someone else's character, but you can redeem yourself by being selfless and sacrificing yourself to save someone else character. Also, I would like to point out that the way Drew played some of the characters that Joey had previously was totally different, which resulted in HUGE personality changes of not only Mike (his), but Jessica (mine). We pretty much had a totally different story than the first playthrough, and because Drew was so diligent in finding all the clues to side stories, our main characters had a lot more conversation scenes that previous. Our end result was Drew winning the day  (even though he actually killed on of my characters because he didn't get to her on time to save her, but I forgave him... after about 3 hours) with all of his characters remaining alive. I came in second (tied with Joey) with one remaining character - Ashley, and Joey in with Matt being his only survivor. But, that's pretty good if you think about it. That means, in all, we only lost 3, when our previous play through left us with Mike and Emily.

Drew's first PS4 Screenshot. Just beautiful. We're so proud!

We all absolutely loved this game. We would highly recommend it, especially for story based fans, and absolutely for horror buffs. In all, we give this game a solid 9 out of 10. Make this your next purchase, for sure.