Until Dawn (2015)

I finally got to play Until Dawn! QTE Story Games (= everything by Quantic Dream) is my absolute favorite genre so this game had been on my radar for quite some time. I don't have a PS4, so I had to implement a cunning strategy to be able to play the game. Like a genius puppetmaster I made sure my man and his best friend (who has a PS4) would go do a pub crawl while I stayed over at said friends' house, closed all the curtains and played Until Dawn in the dark. Winning!

Sadly, teen slasher flicks are my least favorite movie genre - I'm far more into the pretentious stories that QD uses to fuel their games. Fortunately, teen slashers are a lot more fun to play than to watch, and there some mysterious plot threads (The deeply creepy Dr. Hill) that kept me wondering how all the story threads were going to come together.

Pro's

- The teen characters are perfect.They're annoying, bitchy, whiny and unreasonable. You instantly loathe or adore them, and throughout the course of the game most of them turn your expectations around. They create drama wherever they go, and it's both fun to play them as self-destructively as possible or try to play them as the best person they can be.

- Like QD, they keep hitting you over the head with the "your choices matter" thing or as they call it here: The Butterfly effect. They do a fairly convincing job - there's an entire screen dedicated to things that will go differently through your choices and it can be fairly substantial stuff. I look forward to pulling up a GameFaqs and seeing exactly how much difference it makes. I'm sure it's still an illusion, but I could believe in it and that's all that's necessary.

- There was so much stuff here! There's different mysteries to unravel and tons of clues to find. There's an interesting totem system that gives you flashes of possible futures: deaths, threats, fortunes, etc. The most useful totems are the 'guidance' totems that give you a hint towards an action that you can take that has beneficial results.

- The story is certainly weird and over the top, but that's totally allowed in its genre and near the end everything does tie together very well. It's a cool touch that after a plot twist all the clues in your 'clue screen' are adjusted to tie into the new revelations.

Cons

- Not enough QTE! There was quite a lot of action that was not dictated by my furious button-mashing. I generally need to charge up my QTE reflexes with some practice, so I really wanted to press X not to die some more. Thankfully there were a bunch of optional challenges ('take the fast route','jump for the ledge') that you could take for more action excitement.

- I don't want to spoil anything about the story so I'll try to be vague here. The first two thirds of the game there is a ton of stuff happening, you're bouncing around a lot of different story threads and themes and things don't quite add up. You keep wondering where this is going. Near the 2/3rd of the game, you find out where it's all going and from then on the story is... kind of singular. Without the mystery, and with long focuses on one character at the time, the last part was a bit of a slog. A shame!

- Some of the deaths are very "gotcha!". Which is fine in a teen slasher flick, but kind of sucks near the end of the game when you have invested a lot of work into keeping these guys alive. But I read that after your first runthough you can replay different chapters, so it's not such a big problem.

All in all, I really liked the game and I'm very happy I finally got to play it! It wasn't a life changing experience, but it's a soild game, and a few scenes will still stick with me. I loved the scene where you encounter a herd of animals and just when it seems like the entire mountain is set against you, you discover that it's really on your side if you let it. And then you realise that theme was running through the game all along. I also quite liked Dr. Hill. Whereas most characters in these 'movie like' games still suffer from 'uncanny valley' syndrome, the same syndrome really worked in his favor to make him even more creepy than he already is :-)

I think it was a good call to be a little less ambitious than Quantic Dream. Doing a smart and solid interpretation of a teen slasher flick and succeeding is a better idea than aiming for a philosophical sci-fi story and missing the mark. (Though in my heart of hearts, Indigo Prophecy remains my favorite game of all time).