Until Dawn preview

Until Dawn is an ambitious, multi-character horror title which aims to combine 80s and 90s slasher movie tropes with the mechanics of Heavy Rain, or Clock Tower on PSOne. Its branching narrative means that characters can die and the story will still continue: like all those idiots in Scream or Friday the 13th eventually find out, your actions will have consequences. Usually ones that involve insides not being inside anymore.

It is also a game that, on this showing, hasn’t quite achieved its goal.

For a start, some elements of Until Dawn just don’t seem to make a lot of sense. Not that video games are known for their rationality, of course. Even then, this was something else. So much so that I had to ask a member of the development team whether it was a proof of concept, like Heavy Rain’s taxidermist episode. Perhaps it was a dream? Surely that was the only way to explain the fact that Hayden Panettiere, playing Sam, either the stupidest or hardest person in the world, didn’t notice the creepy masked man standing next to her in the bathroom? Or that there were loads of balloons in a ski lodge, with arrows drawn on them, that pointed the way towards the next objective?

It was not a dream, nor a proof of concept. Instead, I was told, it was from the middle of the game. The setup is that Sam and seven pals have gone to an old mountain lodge for an annual get together, and now everyone has gone missing while she’s been in the bath.

Climbing out of the tub, I discovered that Sam’s clothes had been taken, presumably as some sort of hilarious jape by her friends (ho ho: I often break into the bathroom while my mates are in there and steal their stuff). After that, I had to navigate Sam through the house, guiding her in the dark through the grand, open-plan old wooden building to its downstairs, thanks in part to the aforementioned balloons. I’ll give her credit: I can’t walk across my hallway to take a piss in the middle of the night without suspecting that someone will murder me, but she doesn’t seem bothered, instead thinking it’s a practical joke. Well done guys. You got me.

I then picked up a flashlight (directed with the SixAxis) and entered a cinema room, where a guy who sounded like Jigsaw showed me a video of one of my friends (no idea who – Dave?) getting sawed in half, before Creepy Dude burst in through the locked doors like a WWE Superstar. Again, no idea.

At this point, the game gives you choices. Do you throw a vase at your pursuer, or simply try and run? Pointing at the option you want by physically moving the pad and then pressing X chooses, but it’s a glorified QTE: wait too long and he gasses you. There was a sense of urgency, helped by the fact that Jigsaw voice man does look like a very unwell person, and so I threw the vase and ran.

From there on, players are given choices on how to proceed. Some of these are based on fight or flight, some on hiding versus pressing on. I reached a point where I needed a handle for a door, with the killer on my tail as I ran, slowly in my towel, through the basement. With no clue as to the handle’s whereabouts, I pulled down a wine rack, where it was hidden on top. Which was lucky.

I got through the door, bolting it with a swipe right of the controller, and pressed on. It wasn’t long until I met my demise, however: electing to run one last time rather than hide in a closet saw the clown dude jump out and get me. Obviously he’d been to Bad Guy Teleportation School with Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees.

After the demo had finished (and I ran through it a couple of times) I was struck by how odd the experience was. Referencing old horror movies is fine, of course, but regurgitating their worst moments – stupid characters, unrealistic decision-making, bad guys that don’t seem to adhere to the laws of time and space – isn’t exactly fun, and being dropped in halfway through made it an almost surreal experience. To reference Scream explicitly, and then to mimic the played-out slasher beats that film skewered, is baffling.

I expected it to play with convention, as it was so obviously dumb: perhaps something like the video for Aisha by Death in Vegas, or that old Levi’s advert where the guy with the chainsaw chases the screaming woman to what turns out to be his own birthday party: the saw being a gift from her. Maybe even something like the opening of the ninth Friday the 13th movie, Jason Goes To Hell, where a very, very similar setup (almost identical, in fact, including the scared woman in the towel and wooden lodge) is actually an elaborate attempt to kill Jason. Yes, that wasn’t exactly great cinema, but at least it attempted to do something a little different.

This didn’t appear to be the case with Until Dawn. There is every chance that this is a bad demo: context-free and as such not as impressive as it could have been. Graphically it creates mood well, using light and shadow to create a sense of fear. Perhaps the rest of the game isn’t as on the nose as this. I’m hopeful that the fact characters can die and the story still move on should generate sufficient tension over the hours, and that the choices you make actually mean something. So far, however, it’s more Halloween 4 than the original.