Once every console generation, someone reinvents Dragon Lair with better graphics and various levels of pretentiousness.
This time around Supermassive Games did, propelled by the popularity of the garbage David “EMOTIONS” Cage/Quantic Dream peddled to a fairly ignorant audience, with Until Dawn, followed by The Impatient and then The Quarry, which i feel also inspired Namco Bandai to get a slice of this with their The Dark Pictures series.
Looking at the original PS4 game because at the time of writing (and most likely posting as well) i don’t have a PS5 hence i can’t play the remake/remaster they did for it, and honestly i stopped to try tracking down the “Extended Edition” since – apparently – it had just a couple of very minor, inconsequiential scenes as DLC content to redeem via a code on a voucher that has by now expired, and you can’t even buy it on PSN, so sod it.
Also, this review was originally meant to come out around the time the movie adaptation came out (late April), but i did “have” to push it back because of time costraints, and while i could push it back undefinitely to when i could have 100 % the game… i decided not to, to trust my instinct (and annedoctal info-spoilers i received almost against my will) that my opinion wouldn’t drastically change for the better or worse if i went for full completition.
Mind you, i have nothing against this kind of game itself (David Cage is another story, but we can always slander him another day), just keep in mind that these are basically “choose your own adventure books” but presented as movies, interactive movies with gameplay limited to some QTEs and varied ending depending on what decisions you made, stuff point n click adventures and visual novel were already doing decades ago.
That said, i’m a big horror fan, so the proposal of a potentially not-shitty videogame tribute to (mostly) teen slashers of yore was/is quite appealing to me.
The plot is indeed very familiar territory: after a prequel sequence of teens having a party in a cabin in the woods, eventually leading to the death of two twin sisters, we have the survivors of that night come back to the lodge/cabin to meet back and bond over their shared grief, but there’s a shadowy figure with a blade that’s stalking them, probably the same that was there that fateful night, so who knows how many will be alive at daybreak..
Teens, a secluded cabin in the mountains, them returning to the place where a murder happened before and being directly related to that event of the past, the hooded slasher figure lurking outside of the house and spying in… there’s definitely all the genre pivotal/classic elements, all it’s missing it’s a twist, which it does have but i won’t spoil.
actually, while it’s clearly made by people that love slashers and have actual grasp on the term “cinematic”, i feel the story would be better if it was more focused, it starts off like Iced, with some My Bloody Valentine vibes (due to a mine setpieces location and a killer with goggles, oe), more on the grounded side of things, then just veers directly into Evil Dead territory, filtered by a now mostly extinct genre cliche of the “Native American/First Nation burial grounds”, with spirits existing, ouja board scenes, and so on… well, not too overtrodden, in a way, i’ll say this because otherwise i’ll just have to spoil the whole thing, which i prefer not to.
I’m not TOO unhappy about it since plenty of the slasher of the 80s and 90s did have supernatural elements, often shoerhorned and-or badly explained but done anyway because Evil Dead was a success, so whatever, it makes for a more varied “chocolate box” sort of deal, since we also get Saw style sequences and one of the plot twists that’s a combination of both 80s and 2000s sensibilities, somewhere in between like the 2000s/2010s remakes of 70 or 80s slasher.
I could be more specific but then i would just be indirectly give too many hints.
It still looks quite good, the mocap work is excellent, though in some istances there are some small but notable framerate drops, which are even more noticeable since it runs quite smooth 99% of the times, then the engine could have a seizure and basically freeze for some seconds then resume like that didn’t actually happened (it still did).
There are actual systems since this wants to be a videogame and its made as such, the main one being the “butterfly effect”, aka a fancy way to say that your choices will have consequences, but this time around it’s actually a real thing and not just smoke n mirrors where you simply can’t fail most of the times even if you try, as there are various totems that can show you brief glimpses of potential future events, be they graphic deaths, warnings, ominous vague hints, or otherwise.
It’s actually built on the idea that you will inevitably fail to reach some specific set of events due to the choices you are constantly making, and so you’ll need different playthroughs to eventually uncover all the info and piece together the whole plot, plus there’s also a relationship/affinity system relating how the various characters might interact or lean towards, with a fixed number of actual different endings but a decent number of variations possible, since the outcome also depends on which and how many character survive till the end, and what they discover/learn.
The actual different outcomes aren’t that many, but there are indeed 250 something small variations/combinations possible due to the choices and the developers having the good sense to make the game autosave your choices so to avoid savescumming your way out of a decision after seeing it play it out.
Regardless, the first run does feel satisfactory, but most likely you’re gonna regret having made specific choices, so you can either revisit the episodes, as you simply can’t collect all the info pieces, lore collectables or totem to completely get a precise picture of the various plotlines in one go, you simply can’t, this without the first run feeling like a waste due to the ending, but you do get the feel there’s a better/good ending possible..
… which i didn’t bother with because i had other games to play, but i can see myself coming back to see the supergood ending or the super bad one and the relative trophies, i honestly was okay with what i assume it’s the normal ending you get for saving some but not all of the characters.
There are options for motion controls and for the PS Move, which i do have, but i went with the ol’ DualShock 4 because i don’t wanna have to search for that peripheral.
Not much to explain in terms of gameplay and controls: you can move the characters about, look around, run faster, interact with characters and items that have a “shinningh”, there are QTEs (which also use gyro and the PS4 touchpad), timed choices to select from with the right stick.
Honestly, i do see why it was so successful, because people did like these interactive choose your own adventure type of games, even more when they were not written by a failed film director hiding in a medium where the standards for writing were/are lower, but by competent people that actually love and know quite well this subset of horror movies, huge buffs of slasher films through and through, with the needed high quality production values.
Maybe the plot is too overstuffed, in a sense, but it makes for a fun narrative and a great experience that is meant to be played and replayed in order to get the full picture, making for replay value and taking advantage of being a videogame.
A cinematic one that’s also a long interactive film, but a videogame still.
On the flipside, this “cinematic adventure” approach also means that sequential playthroughs will eventually have you resort to a guide because there’s some event version or scenario you can’t organically guess the “right outcome” until you exhaust the many variables by trial and error. Or indeed look up what the game wants from you to specifically get that outcome.
It’s not a dealbreaker, it’s just the expected limitation of these systems, but even so, i do look forward to play finally the other games by Supermassive, and eventually (when i will get around to get a PSVR, which is on the to do list… eventually) the PSVR exclusive on rail shooter spin-off, Until Dawn; Rush Of Blood.
Maybe when i get a PS5 i will get around to play the remake/remastered. Maybe.
Still, it won’t hurt to see the movie first and then come to this, as they do not spoil much and are mostly different iterations of the same scenario (since the movie has a specific, unique twist i won’t spoil), so they can be enjoyed on their own without “hurting” each other, so to speak.
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