Sunday, February 2, 2020

Video Game Review #217: Until Dawn

Until Dawn
PlayStation 4



Nostalgia Factor:

Nothing nostalgic to comment on here. This was the first time I had ever played Until Dawn. I’ve wanted to play it for a few years now, but I never had the chance to play it until I signed up for PS Now last month and saw that it was one of the games that the service had available.




Story:

Until Dawn begins with a circle of friends who are partying at an isolated ski lodge. A few of these friends decide to play a prank on a shy girl named Hannah, leading her to believe that handsome jock Mike has a crush on her. Hannah is led to a room to meet up with Mike, and as she is starting to remove her shirt, her “friends” pop out from hiding with their cell phones out. They had been recording the whole encounter.

An upset Hannah rushes outside in shame. When her sister Beth finds out about this prank, she hurries after her sister to console her. The two never return.

The game fast-forwards to one year later. Hannah and Beth are presumed dead. Their brother Josh invites the same group of friends back to the ski lodge on the one-year anniversary of his sisters' disappearance. After an hour or two of infighting between the party goers, everyone splits up since no one seems to be able to get along. This is where the shit starts to hit the fan.

Some of the party goers are attacked by monsters. Others are stalked by a mysterious masked figure. Others run into some “Saw”-like traps where life or death decisions have to be made. Basically every horror trope you can think of is pulled out for this game.

Decisions you make in the game affect how the story plays out, who lives and who dies. So aside from this basic setup, I can’t really give you anymore plot details. What happens for one player may not necessarily happen for the next. That said, things still follow the same basic path and wind up in the same general place in the end. Expect to experience some very interesting twists and turns along the way, however.




Gameplay:

Honestly, there isn’t much to write home about as far as Until Dawn’s gameplay. This is very much a story driven video game.

You’ll find yourself in control of pretty much every character in the game at some point. Controlling your character, you can walk around and examine stuff. That’s about it. Every once in a while a Quick Time Event (QTE) will pop up where you have to press the button on your controller that matches the one on the screen. Fail the QTE and it could have very dire consequences for your character. Not in every instance, though.

Combat consists of a cursor appearing on the screen. You have just a few seconds to move the cursor onto your enemy and press the action button. Basically a QTE with a cursor. Again, nothing groundbreaking in the gameplay department.

As you play you’ll find yourself presented with important decisions to make (for example: shoot your friend, who you think is infected, or let them live) and conversation choices to pick from. Again, what you select changes the outcome of the game. Your main goal is to keep everyone alive to the end of the game, but that can prove very challenging to do. Death is permanent in this game, so you have to proceed with extreme caution.




Graphics:

The game looks phenomenal, I can’t deny that. The interior and exterior of the ski lodge, the woods, the caves, every environment in this game looks like it could easily exist in the real world. Characters look fantastic too. All of the voice actors look just like their in-game counterparts. Some people’s faces can look a little terrifying up close, but that’s about my only complaint as far as the game’s graphics go.




Sound:

The game sounds just as good as it looks. The voice acting is solid. The music is nice and creepy. All the little environmental sound effects that you’d expect to be on-point in horror based video games are spot on. The presentation of this game on the whole is very slick, and I have to give the makers of the game kudos for doing such a great job with that.




Overall:

So far it seems like I’ve had nothing but glowing things to say about this game. That’s about to change.

For a story-based video game, you have to have characters that you can root for and relate to. Until Dawn has none. Almost all the characters were involved in the prank on Hannah at the beginning of the game, automatically setting themselves up as disgusting human beings. It seems like all they are capable of doing is bickering, fighting, making cruel or gross sexual jokes, and cheating on each other.

The only characters I didn’t hate were Ashley and Sam, and both of them were boring Mary Sue types. Matt isn’t bad either, but live or die he has little to no impact on the game. The rest of the characters: meh. Mike kind of redeems himself at the end, but his sexual predator-esque actions towards the beginning of the game put him in a hole that is very hard for him to dig out of, at least in my opinion.

The game itself is just kind of boring. I don’t know how else to say it. You walk around and look at stuff and perform QTEs. Woop-de-doo. Maybe if I had found the game to be scary or terrifying, I would have been able to excuse the lack of action. But I didn’t find it scary one bit.

It’s bad enough I didn’t have any characters I liked, but the game also jumps around constantly from character to character, disturbing any type of rhythm or momentum that the game had been building for itself. I also found that many choices did not seem have much of an impact on the direction of the game. Even after major characters die, the same basic things happen afterwards. They have short-term consequences, sure. But long-term? Ehhhhh…..

So the game isn’t scary. It doesn’t have any characters I like. The gameplay is very vanilla and bland. Your choices don’t make as big of an impact as the game leads you to believe. This all means Until Dawn sucks, right?

You’d think so, but I oddly had a pretty decent time playing the game. I enjoyed my second playthrough, once I knew what to expect, more than the first. But the fact that I played through it twice should tell you that I didn’t think the game was trash. I liked it, kind of in a “guilty pleasure” type of way.

I've played story-based titles like this that I've enjoyed more. I've played games like this that I've enjoyed less. I'd throw Until Dawn somewhere in the middle of the pack. Does it suck? No. Is it amazing? No. This game does get excellent reviews from other reviewers, and I can completely see why other people would like it. But like I said, it is not my favorite. And that's okay.




Final Score:
C+




If you liked my review of Until Dawn, check out some of my other video game reviews:







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