By using Until Dawn's system, I was able to figure out that who I gave a gun to in chapter three would determine who got hurt in chapter eight, and how others would react to the attack. And when an event happens as a result of that action, the game tells you.
When a big choice is made, the screen will display a "butterfly status update." Digging into the menu, you can find which actions will come back to haunt you later. The game expertly keeps track of and broadcasts these decisions, too. By attaching the branching narrative to not one but eight separate characters, you have a massive playground on which to control your own horror story. I played through Until Dawn multiple times, and I saw new scenes and learned new things the second and third time around. Choices made in chapter one determine events that branch with the next decision and again with the next, creating a large number of narrative paths and outcome. They aren't one-offs, either: a choice you make in chapter one presents a difficulty in chapter two, and depending how you solve that difficulty, further chapters will offer you different tools or different interpersonal conflicts. Small choices will have major consequences in future events. These psychiatrist visits are the most obvious examples of Until Dawn's biggest feature: the butterfly effect. Until Dawn's setup is wonderful enough to overlook it. It feels a little too out in the open for a game that so subtly weaves your choices into the narrative, but I didn't mind this forwardness in the grand scheme of things. This is the game's way of setting up the horror story you'll experience, placing needles or knives in the hands of attackers and throwing out elements the program knows you're frightened by. You'll be asked to choose between spiders and snakes, needles and gore, ghosts and zombies. You, controlling an unknown person, answer the analyst's questions, all of which revolve around what scares you and how you feel about the characters. But we all know what happens to groups that split up in horror movies within an hour, everything goes to hell as a feral creature and a masked madman begin terrorizing the teens.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot'sīetween each in-game chapter, you visit a mysterious psychiatrist in an office. The group's clashing personalities force them to break off in couples to do their own thing. The get-together falls on the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of their two friends-twins Hannah and Beth-and the makeout party soon turns into a complete disaster.
The game's plot follows the classic slasher film recipe: eight teenagers get together on a snowy mountain far away from their parents and civilization. Until Dawn is a thoughtful experiment in how far you can go with multilayered player-driven narrative games, and despite some ugly visuals, delivers an engaging experience where story and controls meld for powerful meaning. Couple this system with the game's tongue-in-cheek exploitation of slasher film tropes-including over-the-top gore and flirty teenagers-and you have an enjoyable experience controlling you own '80s horror film parody. The choices you make in Until Dawn have more far-reaching consequences than in most other survival horror games: the butterfly effect feature it so heavily relies on is highly effective, adding weight to seemingly innocuous choices and creating a game that feeds deeply into player paranoia of making the wrong choice.