butts.
the first mental note i made playing until dawn was "nice butt". game has some nice butts.
I sort of love the appeal, the concept, of these photorealistic story adventure games. like in theory they're the exact kind of game i'd like to make. perhaps because i'm lame and unimaginative and i need a "serious" game with a "serious" story to look "serious" and therefore real. this is maybe the first non-quantic dream one i've played though. i was partially lead to believe it was the antidote to david cage's ham-fisted narcissism. "it's a campy 80s thriller that doesn't take itself too seriously". but no, not really. it's almost a straight up, lame mid-2000s horror movie; a saw-like torture porn clone with an extra layer of unnecessary meta cheese on top.
i loathed, loathed the first half of this. mechanically clunky and banal to play. almost nothing to actually do or see. the characters all seemed like utterly awful human beings to be around too. smug, mean bullies. the game starts you off blind, as these teens play a prank on a girl that has almost no context behind it, and is not even a prank either really. like, make it a Carrie styled pig's blood act of absolute malevolence or make it a normal romantic rebuff gone awry or something small. it's a weird thing to get hung up on but it was just such a lame way to kick things off. the characters are made worse, too, by how the facial capture technology makes just about every one of their performances look like this in any given moment:
https://frinkiac.com/img/S06E06/379328.jpg
there's whole meta interstitial therapist gimmick in here too that's grating. I could kind of tell immediately which character is in the therapist chair as well. the game has no clever fake outs. it telegraphs every "twist" each step of the way for you. i kept feeling smart for clueing in as to what's going down but only because the game hangs each story beat on a giant glowing hook for you to discover.
things clicked a little more for me in the second half though, mostly because it vaguely cohered into the game i utterly wished it was: like a gossip girl/OC teen romance sim. okay, it never coheres into that, but this game gives the game's central bitch character, Emily, the line "understand the palm of my hand, bitch", and i was just like where has this attitude been all game, i could really use more of this. you isolate all these horny, mean teens in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, i was hoping in between the Scooby Doo of it all that they'd be more personal dynamics and capital-d Drama at play. but despite that being the game's biggest appeal, it winds up more of a dream or promise because the characters are separated for most of the game - first in pairs, and then the central three (Sam, Mike and Emily) by themselves.
some of these isolated sequences i liked quite a bit though. i can't deny i really dug Mike - the big dumb typical video game himbo, just kinda stumbling his way through various cliched horror setups. he gets a wolf companion at one point and i liked that level of unashamed pandering.
Emily, who until her sequence, spent most of the game shitting on others, stumbles her own way alone through a lame direct-to-DVD Descent movie, which i also have to admit i liked. it's shallow characterisation, the tortured femme who has to fight her solitary way though adversity, like the story is her trial. but i think that stuff works the same way bread and butter work as a snack.
and there's sam who spends 20 or 30 mins running through the lodge in only a towel, the closest to what my expectations for this game here were. i must confess i do find playing as female characters in games maybe the most freeing, so i'd be lying if i said i didn't enjoy playing as Sam in a towel 😔.
i think back to my initial mental note: butts. and i think part of the appeal of photorealistic graphics for me is the allure of equally realistic scenarios. but, until dawn, like all of quantic dreams' games, still couches itself in fantasy and video game make believe nonsense. these characters look real, they may even behave realistically and give the illusion of having real emotions but their still written into a set of very limiting video game constraints.
until dawn, for instance, is a game that has some of the most realistic, foul-looking gore but god forbid any of these characters get down and do something more common and real and bone. i am might not saying i necessarily want an awkward QTE sex scene or a gratuitous boob shot but i think it's a shame games are still more afraid of sex than violence (kind of funny for a game that's using a slasher motif that normally demonises sex) and that they don't/can't use these kinds of graphics to explore more, equally realistic acts of humanity.
i mean, it's a bit of tease to get behind the steering wheel and take control of some of the most realistic digital human avatars and instead of being able to explore what that means and feels like in any depth, you're stuck in a bad slasher movie.
anyway. i think on what games that look like until dawn could be versus what they actually are leaves a lot to be desired. i'd take even a proper catty drama, confines that these characters work well within. i am not even mentioning the breadth of choices games like this could present you with that could go beyond that of "save x or y or none".
the first mental note i made playing until dawn was "nice butt". game has some nice butts.
I sort of love the appeal, the concept, of these photorealistic story adventure games. like in theory they're the exact kind of game i'd like to make. perhaps because i'm lame and unimaginative and i need a "serious" game with a "serious" story to look "serious" and therefore real. this is maybe the first non-quantic dream one i've played though. i was partially lead to believe it was the antidote to david cage's ham-fisted narcissism. "it's a campy 80s thriller that doesn't take itself too seriously". but no, not really. it's almost a straight up, lame mid-2000s horror movie; a saw-like torture porn clone with an extra layer of unnecessary meta cheese on top.
i loathed, loathed the first half of this. mechanically clunky and banal to play. almost nothing to actually do or see. the characters all seemed like utterly awful human beings to be around too. smug, mean bullies. the game starts you off blind, as these teens play a prank on a girl that has almost no context behind it, and is not even a prank either really. like, make it a Carrie styled pig's blood act of absolute malevolence or make it a normal romantic rebuff gone awry or something small. it's a weird thing to get hung up on but it was just such a lame way to kick things off. the characters are made worse, too, by how the facial capture technology makes just about every one of their performances look like this in any given moment:
https://frinkiac.com/img/S06E06/379328.jpg
there's whole meta interstitial therapist gimmick in here too that's grating. I could kind of tell immediately which character is in the therapist chair as well. the game has no clever fake outs. it telegraphs every "twist" each step of the way for you. i kept feeling smart for clueing in as to what's going down but only because the game hangs each story beat on a giant glowing hook for you to discover.
things clicked a little more for me in the second half though, mostly because it vaguely cohered into the game i utterly wished it was: like a gossip girl/OC teen romance sim. okay, it never coheres into that, but this game gives the game's central bitch character, Emily, the line "understand the palm of my hand, bitch", and i was just like where has this attitude been all game, i could really use more of this. you isolate all these horny, mean teens in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, i was hoping in between the Scooby Doo of it all that they'd be more personal dynamics and capital-d Drama at play. but despite that being the game's biggest appeal, it winds up more of a dream or promise because the characters are separated for most of the game - first in pairs, and then the central three (Sam, Mike and Emily) by themselves.
some of these isolated sequences i liked quite a bit though. i can't deny i really dug Mike - the big dumb typical video game himbo, just kinda stumbling his way through various cliched horror setups. he gets a wolf companion at one point and i liked that level of unashamed pandering.
Emily, who until her sequence, spent most of the game shitting on others, stumbles her own way alone through a lame direct-to-DVD Descent movie, which i also have to admit i liked. it's shallow characterisation, the tortured femme who has to fight her solitary way though adversity, like the story is her trial. but i think that stuff works the same way bread and butter work as a snack.
and there's sam who spends 20 or 30 mins running through the lodge in only a towel, the closest to what my expectations for this game here were. i must confess i do find playing as female characters in games maybe the most freeing, so i'd be lying if i said i didn't enjoy playing as Sam in a towel 😔.
i think back to my initial mental note: butts. and i think part of the appeal of photorealistic graphics for me is the allure of equally realistic scenarios. but, until dawn, like all of quantic dreams' games, still couches itself in fantasy and video game make believe nonsense. these characters look real, they may even behave realistically and give the illusion of having real emotions but their still written into a set of very limiting video game constraints.
until dawn, for instance, is a game that has some of the most realistic, foul-looking gore but god forbid any of these characters get down and do something more common and real and bone. i am might not saying i necessarily want an awkward QTE sex scene or a gratuitous boob shot but i think it's a shame games are still more afraid of sex than violence (kind of funny for a game that's using a slasher motif that normally demonises sex) and that they don't/can't use these kinds of graphics to explore more, equally realistic acts of humanity.
i mean, it's a bit of tease to get behind the steering wheel and take control of some of the most realistic digital human avatars and instead of being able to explore what that means and feels like in any depth, you're stuck in a bad slasher movie.
anyway. i think on what games that look like until dawn could be versus what they actually are leaves a lot to be desired. i'd take even a proper catty drama, confines that these characters work well within. i am not even mentioning the breadth of choices games like this could present you with that could go beyond that of "save x or y or none".