such a weird game
it‘s a fun interactive play on your average teen horror movie with pretty intruiguing character stereotypes even if just because you‘re able to play as them. I doubt I‘d really care for most of them if this had been a movie.
Okay so anyway, the game is really gorgeous, but its animations make it look a thousand times cheaper than its visuals.
The really big problem, if perhaps only problem here, is that some of the character deaths are just unnecessarily railroaded which just feels both unsatisfying narratively as well as from a game design standpoint. Of course the point of the game is to have characters die and it‘s hard to write a satisfying narrative around that, but just the possibility of a character dying solely based on one choice instead of a chain of bad decisions or failing quick time events is ultimately a letdown. We played the game over a course of two days at a birthday hangout weekend, the guy who played it had never really came into contact with the game before. Watching him kill off Matt because he wanted to save Emily and being placed in a railroaded segment with no way of getting out is just… bad. There’s no way for the player to gauge the effects of his decisions beforehand and the lack of communication about how dire the situation was really lacks any kind of
pay off to make the death feel earned in any sense of the word. Ashley‘s death was similar, though at the very least it could be argued that making the decision to split off the group is foreshadowed to be wrong by the weird mountain man‘s book. Still, not even getting the option to return to the other characters, having some kind of quicktime event to not make the entire sequence that railroaded or maybe having Chris come looking for her if they‘re in a relationship by that point. Her death isn‘t even acknowledged by neither Chris, her lover, nor Sam and Mike who pass by her seperated head. Just makes it feel sooo meaningless.
Just odd. It‘s fun as an interactive game but the gameplay in terms of having the deaths really feel like actual consequences of the player is really undercooked.
Would still recommend Until Dawn to just about everyone, it‘s been dear to me ever since watching thousands of let‘s plays on it back in 2015.
it‘s a fun interactive play on your average teen horror movie with pretty intruiguing character stereotypes even if just because you‘re able to play as them. I doubt I‘d really care for most of them if this had been a movie.
Okay so anyway, the game is really gorgeous, but its animations make it look a thousand times cheaper than its visuals.
The really big problem, if perhaps only problem here, is that some of the character deaths are just unnecessarily railroaded which just feels both unsatisfying narratively as well as from a game design standpoint. Of course the point of the game is to have characters die and it‘s hard to write a satisfying narrative around that, but just the possibility of a character dying solely based on one choice instead of a chain of bad decisions or failing quick time events is ultimately a letdown. We played the game over a course of two days at a birthday hangout weekend, the guy who played it had never really came into contact with the game before. Watching him kill off Matt because he wanted to save Emily and being placed in a railroaded segment with no way of getting out is just… bad. There’s no way for the player to gauge the effects of his decisions beforehand and the lack of communication about how dire the situation was really lacks any kind of
pay off to make the death feel earned in any sense of the word. Ashley‘s death was similar, though at the very least it could be argued that making the decision to split off the group is foreshadowed to be wrong by the weird mountain man‘s book. Still, not even getting the option to return to the other characters, having some kind of quicktime event to not make the entire sequence that railroaded or maybe having Chris come looking for her if they‘re in a relationship by that point. Her death isn‘t even acknowledged by neither Chris, her lover, nor Sam and Mike who pass by her seperated head. Just makes it feel sooo meaningless.
Just odd. It‘s fun as an interactive game but the gameplay in terms of having the deaths really feel like actual consequences of the player is really undercooked.
Would still recommend Until Dawn to just about everyone, it‘s been dear to me ever since watching thousands of let‘s plays on it back in 2015.