The Cabin In The (New-Gen) Woods.
The late ’90s/early ’00s were a golden age for teen horror movies, and that period’s immediately apparent in every flickering lightbulb, clown mask and Californian accent of Until Dawn’s ‘friends meet up in a remote lodge in the woods and start getting picked off’ horror adventure. In fact, the game’s co-writers, Graham Reznick and Larry Fessenden, have three decades between them of acting, writing, directing, editing and sound department credits in horror movies. Supermassive’s interactive scarer is clearly very aware of the old clichés, to the point that Until Dawn’s corniness seems intentional – an uncomplicated, schlocky teen slasher flick that you write and direct with the DualShock 4.
Thanks to a modified version of Killzone: Shadow Fall’s engine, the game’s quite a looker. That engine’s rendering smaller areas than those in KZ, but they’re enriched by shadows, dust specs in the air, fine splinters on wooden surfaces and the like. There are recognisable names in the voice cast such as Hayden Panettiere and Need For Speed’s Rami Malek. Clearly Until Dawn has come a long way from the PS3 Move game that in your heart of hearts you didn’t care about.
The big idea here is nonlinearity. The fate of every character rests on your decisions, and developer Supermassive Games promises that even trivial actions reveal dramatic consequences down the line. It even calls this system ‘Butterfly Effect’ – that’s how deep the aforementioned era of cinema runs in Until Dawn’s genetic makeup. As Ashton Kutcher found out to his horror (though, to be honest, his acting leaves this wide open to interpretation), seemingly insignificant actions can determine whether an individual lives or dies.
Over the 20 minutes we spend going hands-on with the game there isn’t much evidence of the Butterfly Effect, but you’d expect that. We are faced with a binary kill/spare decision though – two teens tied to chairs, a circular saw descending on one of them, a pistol with one round on the table. A deep voice on the loud-speaker offering a way out of this… for one of them. Seen Saw? You know the shtick. Perhaps owing to the game’s PS Move origins, making decisions such as this falls to your DualShock 4’s Sixaxis control, so rather than swinging the analog stick one way or another to decide someone’s fate you find yourself waggling the controller to and fro like an inebriated Roman emperor deciding fates at the Coliseum.
In fact, the game pad is made to work at the limits of its capacity by Until Dawn. The gyroscope controls the direction of your character’s torch in-game, while the more traditional analogue stick mappings dictate movement and the camera. A nice idea that doesn’t quite work in execution – at least, not over the course of the 20 minutes we spend with the game. Perhaps that amount of time simply isn’t enough to reach the crest of the intuitiveness curve.
At face value, it plays a little like Resident Evils of old. Camera angles aren’t static but do reside at jaunty angles in the corners of rooms rather than directly over your shoulder, and the time-honoured gameplay loop involving walking a corridor, being scared by something behind/coming out of a door then running off is alive and kicking.
The big difference? No guns. These kids aren’t packing heat. The best they have are Maglites, and since it appears their enemies are both human and supernatural, they’re essentially defenceless to both (unless the former are nursing migraines, but that seems unlikely). It all adds up to neat, well-worn setup in movie terms, bolstered by the chance to call the shots and decide who’s still standing just before the credits roll. The jump-scares certainly aren’t cerebral, but that doesn’t mean they’re not scary.
Format PS4
ETA 2015
Pub Sony
Dev Supermassive Games