Until Dawn is an adventure survival horror game being developed by Supermassive Games and published by Sony as a Playstation exclusive. It was initially intended for the Playstation 3, with Move support, however it was then re-introduced to the world as a Playstation 4 exclusive.
Today, Sony’s youtube account released a new trailer for the game, complete with (finally) a release date; horror adventure fans can mark August 28th on their calenders!
If you have yet to view the trailer, you can do so right below;
The plot is that a group of friends go to spend the night in a log cabin in a mountainous area, and during this time they’re targeted by a serial killer who plans to pick them off one by one. The game will feature multiple different story lines, so it will take more than one play through to really understand what’s going on. Each characters story takes about nine hours to complete, and every choice you make could have disastrous consequences.
Honestly, I am really excited for this game; the cancellation of Silent Hills has left me a little lost for scary games I want to play this year, and I’m hoping this will scratch that itch. Granted, I know it’ll be an entire different game to Silent Hills and P.T., but really, I just need something that’ll freak me out and make me terrified to keep my console on.
My first impression of the trailer was “Wow. This is cheesy as hell.” The game takes place with a group of teenagers. In a cabin. Far away from help or civilization.
And they have to go fire up the boiler.
That is in the basement.
This whole thing is playing out rather like an R.L. Stine book I read back when I was twelve (not Goosebumps; he wrote some more mature horror based books, but I can’t remember what this one was called for the life of me.) when a group of kids gets stuck in a ski-cabin and they start to die one by one with no clue why they’re being killed. Even the game trailer looks more like a CGI horror movie trailer; I can’t think of a single horror based game where the trailer has been like this, but every horror movie trailer I’ve seen in my life looks like this, complete with a shot of the scene where the horror will take place, friends talking about some sort of context, then oh no scary noise! And then the flickering strobe effect before all the actiony scenes, featuring running, slamming doors, screaming and gross-gory quick cuts.
I love it.
I love that it’s playing out like a horror movie; it is going to be a multiple choice game, so chances are a lot of the game is going to be watching the consequences of your actions play out. The one thing that makes me wary, but that is sort of fair and makes the game more interesting (or frustrating, we’ll find out come August.) is that the game will have a strict Autosave feature, so you can’t reload from your last save if you make a decision you regret. This fascinates me a lot, especially as someone who really enjoyed both of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones Tell-Tale games and who often regretted decisions.
One thing that bothered me about the trailer, that I hope is just a trailer issue and will be fixed when the game gets released, is the lip-sync. The voices don’t really match up to the mouth movements on the screen, and if it took me a little out of the trailer in the beginning, there’s every chance it’ll bother me throughout the game. I’m just going to go on the assumption it’s just trailer footage, and when release day rolls around, all will be absolutely perfect. The graphics look fantastic, honestly, they’re so damn crisp and the faces are so realistic. It all reminds me very much of Heavy Rain, a game that was so amazing to look at that it was just a tonne of fun.
I think the whole, watching it as a horror movie and not being able to Take Backsies on bad choices will make the game all the more scary really; if they can build up a great villain, tonnes of tension and raise the stakes on your choices, then this game could be a massive success. I’m really, really eagerly anticipating the release of this game and I hope to God it’ll scare the living shit out of me.
If any of you have any other scary game news, or just wanna talk about this, leave a comment and we can chatter away!
Fare thee well,
Fran.
Fran's Mind Fell Over 