Until Dawn

Written by Nathan Carter on 10/18/2024 for PS5  

I don't think I have seen something quite like this happen before in the gaming industry. Sure, we have had plenty of remakes of older games before. We just had the incredible Silent Hill 2 remake, along with other remakes like the Resident Evil series. Those games perfectly captured the look, feel and atmosphere of the original while modernizing the gameplay for a new audience and to make the game new and fresh for fans of the original. Then we have the Until Dawn remake. The difference between Until Dawn and those other games I mentioned is that the selling point of Until Dawn is that it's basically an interactive movie where your choices shape the story. We see remakes happening all the time in Hollywood and a lot of times it feels like the remake is inferior to the original for missing the point, and I feel that's what happened with Until Dawn. The game got a full remake with new camera angles, a new score, and prettier graphics. But aside from some additional scenes, the game remains pretty much exactly the same. So I'm wondering, what on earth was the point of this?

For those who didn't play the original, Until Dawn tells story of a group of friends who are spending the weekend at their friends house on top of the mountains in the dead of winter. The group of friends decide to play a horrible humiliating prank on one of their number, which causes her to run out of the house in embarrassment while her twin sister chases after her. A tragedy unfolds and the sisters go missing. The game jumps ahead a year in time. The friends decide to gather once more as it would mean a lot to Josh, brother of the missing sisters, for the group to have one last get together in memory of his sisters. The game swaps between multiple playable characters, some of them big time Hollywood actors like Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere. Peter Stormare also makes an appearance, but not as a playable character.

With each character you will walk around the environment, and there will usually be choices you have to make. Some of them can be choosing whether or not to snoop through someone else's phone or unlocking certain doors, or even if certain characters get into an argument with each other. These small actions can have big consequences, as you can see the ripple effect these choices have with the Butterfly Effect menu - a list of all the choices you made that updates over the course of the game. That is part of the fun of this game, the many times you will probably saying "crap" because a small decision you made back at the beginning of the game ends up getting a character killed somewhere down the line.

Without giving much away, the story is pretty great, with an intriguing mystery that keeps you guessing. While you think you may know what is going on as a masked murderer is chasing the characters down on the mountain, you'll find various items, notes, newspaper clippings, photos and more which start to fill out the story, giving you the whole backstory of the mountain itself, what happened to the sisters, and a mysterious man that is seen walking around the mountain at various points in the game. My only issue is that while the game wears it's horror movie tropes on it's sleeve with pride, there is one trope that really drives me up the wall, not just in this game, but in Supermassive's The Quarry as well. There is one character in the game that knows exactly what's going on and could end this whole thing in seconds if they simply just told the characters what's going on, but of course they have to be shady and suspect as all hell and don't actually reveal what they know until the end. 

This remake of Until Dawn pretty much remains the same in terms of the main story, with a new prologue, a couple of added scenes, and a new ending, depending on the choices you made through the game. In terms of updates, the game does look a lot better. The whole game got a new coat of paint with updated graphics making the characters look a lot better than they did on the PS4. The lighting in the game also got reworked. For the most part this is one update that I did like. It didn't look bad in the original game, but some areas were way too dark, so unless you cranked the brightness levels up it would be hard to see what was happening. The new lighting makes navigating areas much easer. There is also a nice new selection of accessibility settings to fine tune the game to your liking by extending the time to make choices, changing the button presses for QTEs, and being able to auto succeed the "don't move" sections and turning the sensitivity for the DualSense controller up and down for those sections, which is important because - my God - you could freeze your controller in dry ice, and it would still fail those sequences on the default settings. 

The biggest change however, and one that I am really on the fence about, is that the game got a new third person, over the shoulder camera. In the original game, the camera was mostly fixed to certain areas and you didn't control it. In the remake the camera stays behind your character in a third person view, and you have full control over the camera now. Here is why I am conflicted on this. This does give you more control over the movement and traversing the area, but in the original game the fixed camera was there for a reason. It's like playing the original Resident Evil. The camera angles they used were there to create tension and anxiety among the player. This is a horror game, after all. With those fixed camera angles, they could do things like make you focus on certain things when the angle would change, especially if they wanted to scare you. If the camera changes, and it is focused on window shutters clattering, something simple like having a bear head on a wall in your face as soon as the angle changes can really freak you out. Since this is also basically an interactive movie, the fixed camera made the game feel more cinematic. So while the game controls better now, it really feels like the atmosphere and one of the things that made the original unique is gone. Another thing that has been changed is the entire game has a new soundtrack. Most of it I don't think people will realize was changed, like the music that plays during chase and action sequences, though I certainly did. The biggest crime is that the iconic opening credits sequence from the original game with "O'Death" has been completely changed, and now sounds like the most generic streamer mode royalty free music ever. The whole tone, atmosphere, and quite frankly the soul of the original just feel gone now with most of these changes. 

But one of things that just kills me about this is that with all the upgrades they gave the game, they didn't add the most obvious quality of life feature that would have made this game more enjoyable, and that is a sprint button. One of the selling points of this game is how your actions shape the story, so you are probably going to want to play through it multiple times. The biggest issue is that you don't have any sort of run button or even a button to walk a little faster, so playing through this game a second time is a complete slog as your playable character slowly walks around each area. What's worse is that there are times when you will see your character start to run for like 2 seconds, and then they stop running, so the animations are in there. Please just let us run. There is also the fact that they changed how you view the totem premonitions. In the original game you just pick up the totem, turn it over, and view the premonition. In the remake, for whatever reason they changed it so you need to twist and turn and move up and down on the totem until you find the exact right spot to view the premonition. This was so ridiculous and completely unnecessary, and became tedious and a huge waste of time as the game went on. 

At the end of the day, it's Until Dawn. For anyone that never played the original they probably won't notice or care about most of the things I mentioned here. It would be like seeing the remake of a movie before seeing the original. It's still a good movie for those people. For those who did play the original and are fans of the game, I can't really see any reason to play this over the original as it feels like the American remake of a Japanese horror film. It's good, but it's inferior to the original, especially for the price they are asking. It's not a bad game because well... it's Until Dawn, but I feel like all that was needed for this was a simple HD remaster instead of a full blown remake that barely changed anything and feels inferior to the original.