Until Dawn (2015)

What a fantastic game this turned out to be. The last time I did a "choose your adventure" type of thing was freaken Goosebumps book when I was maybe, 8!? Turns out, this type of thing transfers beautifully to the medium of video games. I must say, I did fantastically well on my first playthrough, only killing 2 teenagers.

Spoilers Ahead:

The teens I accidentally killed were Jessica and Josh. With regards to Jessica (who I killed in Episode 4), my screw-up was not taking all of the "shortcut" routes on the chase scene. I also missed a damn button press while climbing the wall! :( By the time I found Jessica, I was too late and she was all busted apart. RIP Jessica. I replayed this episode this morning and made a point to a) take all the shortcuts, and b) not screw up any button presses. I succeeded in getting to Jessica, and although she fell down the mineshaft anyway, she was still alive at the time - I'm curious to see how "successfully chasing after Jessica" on the Butterfly Effect screen will affect the story later. The other idiot I killed was Josh (which turned out to be an interesting, if totally unbelievable twist -- seriously, he seemed completely normal [given the circumstances] at the beginning of the game, then he just goes off the deep end!?). Apparently I missed some item that would have helped him identify his sister Hannah (before she kills him). This one will require a bit more investigation. Since I already saved Jessica, if I can pull off saving Josh that will mean I saved everyone, so I'd probably take a break on this playthrough, or... do a hard reset of the story and go on to playthrough #2, which I will call: Awful Teenagers: The Game. In AT:TG, the goal is simple - to destroy all relationships, while still attempting to keep everyone (clinically) alive. Odds are, choosing the "worst" conversation options will result in the most death, so we'll see how interesting the story will get when I abandon being a "people pleaser" and turn everyone into monsters.

This game rocks. I never get into story-focused games but this is just perfect entertainment for a maniac like myself.

I played this with my non-gaming spouse, which was a fun deviation from my normally solitary experience. The writing and acting started off pretty rough, but we were drawn in over the course of the story. We watch a lot of horror movies together and this was a fun and novel spin on that experience.

Once we finished the main story, however, we were both pretty disappointed at the lack of replayability given how little your choices in the story really seem to matter. The story beats are the same regardless. That was kind of a downer.

And once again we can thank Shenmue for QTE being the default choice when the story needed kind of a gameplay element. It's frustrating because the interactive story genre is a perfect gateway to people like my spouse who don't normally play, but these gameplay-lite sections rely on the player's familiarity with the controller buttons and are consequently frustrating to that exact subset of people who don't play games... Should have tried the motion controls instead.

Conceptually I like horror games but I cannot seem to get through them anymore. The tension just gets to me, even if I pause and take breaks. And yet I am still interested in the story and try to come back to them. This was the case for both Resident Evil 7 and Until Dawn. Anyone else have this problem?

I made it through a number of previous Resident Evil games, but maybe these modern ones have much higher fidelity graphics and are just better at presenting horror as more than just jump scares.