Time Extend: Until Dawn
How a schlocky teen horror confounded everyone’s expectations
Developer Supermassive Games Publisher SCE Format PS4 Release 2015
Until Dawn makes you wait a while before it springs its first big surprise. A masked psychopath has bound the bookish Ashley and the creepy Josh into a Saw-like deathtrap; as affable nerd Chris, you’re forced to pick which one to save. Girlfriend or best friend? In any event, your choice doesn’t seem to matter: the buzzsaw blade automatically heads towards Josh regardless, cutting him in two at the waist. It’s the moment at which Until Dawn makes good on its promise that no one is safe – not least since the victim, played by Mr Robot star Rami Malek, is one of the cast’s biggest names – and reminds you that choices don’t always have the expected consequences. It’s also, as it turns out, a total fake-out, the first shock of many in a game that rarely plays by the rulebook.
Then again, for a while, Until Dawn seemed to confound its makers, too. Initially planned as a comparatively limited, motioncontrolled, firstperson horror game for PS3, things soon changed after its developer, Supermassive Games, took a demo build to Gamescom in 2012. An unexpectedly warm reception forced the studio to sit down with Sony and discuss making a Move-required title into something everyone could play, before development shifted to PS4. If on occasion the finished game bears the scars of its difficult birth, abandoning Move certainly paid off. Indeed, Supermassive knew it was on the right track when, two years later at Sony’s PlayStation Experience showcase, an onstage demo saw a rowdy audience participating in each decision.
That’s fitting for a game where you spend plenty of time simply watching events unfold. At times, you’re made to feel like part of an audience on the opening weekend of a popular new horror film, where the usual code of conduct naturally extends to accommodate nervy laughter and screams at the inevitable popcorn-spilling jolts. Only this time, instead of shouting at the screen to encourage the witless protagonists to run or hide, you’re often afforded the option to directly influence them.
Which can, of course, mean deliberately putting them in harm’s way. At first, the most horrifying element of Until Dawn seems to be the characters themselves, a group of irritatingly self-absorbed teens who assemble at a cabin in the mountains for a party. Most of them fall into familiar archetypes: wannabe cheerleader Jess has recently hooked up with apparent jock Mike, former beau of the spiteful Emily, who’s now coupled up with the sporty but submissive Matt in a rebound relationship seemingly designed to make her ex-squeeze jealous.
Matt aside, you’ll likely be waiting for the first opportunity to send the others to their maker, but all reveal hidden depths. Jess is smarter and more resourceful than she makes out, her ‘dumb blonde’ routine merely an act to mask her insecurities. Mike similarly proves to be more likeable and capable than his profile would suggest. Even Emily belatedly proves her worth – and, in one particularly tense scene, where the group’s fragile alliance is at its most precarious, she unexpectedly becomes the most sympathetic character of the lot.
In this instance, it’s less about the writers wilfully misleading us about the characters’ true nature, so much as establishing an early shorthand connection with them without resorting to extensive exposition. With a more luxurious running time than your average movie, it can then build upon – and subvert – those archetypes, without affecting the natural rhythms of a cabin-in-the-woods (as opposed to Cabin In The Woods) type of horror.
Given that it has eight hours, rather than 90 minutes, to fill, it’s no surprise that Until
Dawn heads in a different direction from the generic teen slasher as which it starts out. The arrival of the cannibalistic wendigo is the game’s big second-act shift, by which time you’ll have learned that not only are you spending the night in a cabin on top of a mountain in the dead of winter, but you’re also next to a sanatorium within a site that has been cursed by a First Nations tribe. It’s the kind of place that’s unlikely to get beyond two stars on TripAdvisor.
If all that seems a little too much, there’s a streak of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness throughout the script that means it gets away with such contrivances. In fact, it only works at all because it’s so genre-literate, the recruitment of horror veterans
Graham Reznick and Larry Fessenden on script duties proving a masterstroke. Fessenden himself takes a plum role as another archetype: the kind of wild-eyed stranger whose unsettling behaviour would have most ordinary people alerting the authorities immediately, but who ultimately turns out to be entirely benevolent – until he’s brutally decapitated, at any rate.
With hindsight, it feels less like a film and more like a Netflix series, made for bingeing in one or two sittings. The episodic feel is heightened by cliffhangers and weird interstitials, in which Peter Stormare, not so much chewing the scenery as taking great, greedy gobfuls of it, is cast as a psychiatrist more profoundly disturbed than any of his patients. How you respond to his questions can impact future frights: it’s not exactly a new idea, but any game that borrows from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is looking in the right places for inspiration.
For all that Until Dawn wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve – from its chiaroscuro lighting, through the framing of its shots, with nods to the likes of Carpenter, Hitchcock and Raimi – it’s equally in debt to Shinji Mikami and Makoto Shibata, its use of static camera angles deliberately evoking the early Resident Evil and Project Zero games. The difference here is that, where normally horror games cast us as a tremulous star or nervy chaperone, we’re more frequently made to feel like the director. And given that we’re only ever in control up to a point – characters’ fates aren’t necessarily predetermined, but their actions are often beyond the player’s jurisdiction – at times it’s like being placed in the editing suite. The script is done, the scenes have been filmed; we simply have to choose which ones make it into the final cut.
If there’s some confusion over the role you’re playing, at least some of that is down to your own investment in the story. Even as they develop nuance, you may feel that these teens are unworthy of your help as they blunder headlong into danger; in which case, you can be the malicious audience willing them to their doom, deliberately shaking the controller when you’re supposed to keep it still to avoid detection. On the other hand, you can choose to be much more empathetic, doing your level best to keep all eight alive for the finale – though in some cases you might simply luck out, an unfortunate choice leading to an equally unfortunate demise.
Either way, you’re never entirely in control, and that might just be the making of Until Dawn. Horror is, after all, partly contingent on a feeling of helplessness, but also surprise. As such, it’s only right that your decisions should pay off in unexpected ways. The Josh fake-out might make you feel that it’s all smoke and mirrors, not least as the reveal that he’s still alive comes after a second deathtrap from which both participants survive. And yet your choice here can have serious ramifications: should
IT FEELS LESS LIKE A FILM AND MORE LIKE A NETFLIX SERIES, MADE FOR BINGEING IN ONE OR TWO SETTINGS
Chris opt to shoot Ashley with what turns out to be a blank-filled gun, there’s a good chance she won’t help her would-be beau when he most needs it later on.
There’s also something quietly irresistible about the tangible recognition that you’re meddling with fate’s designs.
Until Dawn is honest about its mechanical underpinnings, acknowledging the potential ‘butterfly effect’ of each decision in text form at the top-left of the screen. It’s the equivalent of Telltale’s ‘[character] will remember that’, but with these stakes you’re left anxiously wondering just how you might have changed the future. Has the fragile bond between two characters just been broken? Have you inadvertently doomed someone? The questions raised only heighten the unfolding mystery and give you a deeper, more nourishing sense of involvement. And yet you can still just play it like a schlocky horror, ignoring the rest of it and simply letting the chips – and the bodies – fall where they may.
Either way, it’s far from the game that many were expecting – including, or so the evidence would suggest, its publisher. Certainly, it’s clear Sony was anxious about the response, unceremoniously dumping it out in August with little publicity when it seemed made for a big Hallowe’en weekend push. Still, an inevitable early price drop and its deserved popularity among streamers raised its profile, such that Sony has twice returned to the well. Lightgun spin-off Rush
Of Blood didn’t ostensibly have much in common with its predecessor, though that’s not the case for unsettling prequel The
Inpatient. And its success surely had a part in inspiring Sony’s PlayLink line: in fact, this seems a far better fit for a communal, often combative smartphone-controlled game than Supermassive’s own Hidden Agenda. It’s a pity Sony didn’t have more faith in
Until Dawn, but it’s fitting that it found its audience: this is, after all, a crowd-pleaser at heart, and while it may not be high art, its makers – and, for that matter, its cast – treat its silly conceit with laudable seriousness. Beyond all that, it’s simply rollicking good fun: a funny, jumpy horror flick with bite. As Josh says to his unnerved friends when he pulls off his psycho mask, “It’s good to get the heart racing every now and then, right?” He might have been a little crazy, but the man has a point.