Spoiler alert! If you plan on still playing the game, don't read on! Also, this is horror, so if you're not into that, I'd advise you not to read on as well.
"Detroit: Become Human" recently came out and was a massive success due to its storytelling and gameplay choices. However, long before, Supermassive Games released the gripping storytelling horror game, "Until Dawn."
As soon as I heard that some of my favorite YouTube gamers were playing it, I immediately went to check it out on their channel. Since then, I've learned a few things about the story, the game itself, and the making of everything.
First, I noticed that it resembled "Beyond Two Souls" and "Heavy Rain" to an extraordinary degree. I love games that give you the feeling of autonomy and control of the outcomes. In "Until Dawn," the beginning specifically mentions the butterfly effect to once again let the player know about the significance and the impact of the choices they make. For example, locating a weapon early on can allow the player to pick it up while in the middle of a chase scene.
I also love how the game forces you into many moral dilemmas in which you must make a decision for either your own well being or the well being another. These include moments such as being chained in a room with your lover with a saw swinging in the sky slowly descending towards you both and having one bullet stored in the gun. Other moments include being the arbiter of whose life you should save.
The game includes many flashback and flash-forward scenes that may determine the future and consequences of your gameplay later on in the story. These flashbacks are usually a bad omen and rarely bring good news.
In some aspects, the story does follow the traditional route. We start off with the backstory of the death of the two sisters from a messed up prank by their friends. This leads to the psychological trauma for Josh, the main "antagonist" who then plots an intricate plan of revenge. The story starts off with the light and happy mood but slowly descends into a dark and chilling mode.
On the one year anniversary of his sisters' death, Josh invites everyone back to the lodge. Just like every mistake in horror movies, everyone splits up to do their own things. However, what I like about this story is that it involves a second, more hidden plot to unravel. When Jessica is dragged away by the mysterious creature, we get a hint at what we're dealing with. Slowly, the characters begin to learn more about the towering, hideous, deathly, human-like creatures that come with remarkable speed and acute sense detection.
The plot twist in this game was really good. After Josh was killed in the lab that the psycho made, no one expected him to come back. In fact, the purpose of the game then became to escape the area. When they tried calling for help, the radio station would arrive at Dawn, thus the name—Until Dawn.
Another small plot twist happened to be that early on when Hannah and Beth fell, Hannah had actually survived the fall and ate Beth's flesh to survive. This was what turned her into a Wendigo—the tall, wickedly quick and terrifying beast. A stranger told the group that the mountain was inhabited by Wendigos, who were humans that were possessed by evil spirits after engaging in cannibalism. The stranger was one of my favorite characters because he was so sweet and all he wanted to do was help the floundering kids, but as the horror movie trope goes, he was killed early on.
I find the ending to be the most fascinating because we get to have actual interactions with the Wendigo and we get to hide and run from them like in classic horror games. We don't have any power against them but we can deter them from killing the characters. Sadly, Josh, who's been locked up by the group after they discovered he was playing the sick prank on them, either turns into a Wendigo from eating flesh or gets killed by his sister (who's also a Wendigo.)
I like how in the end, it's possible to get so many choices. You could go from everyone living to no one living. Josh, however, is stuck with the tragic end. Throughout the game, you even see him talking with Dr. Hill, his therapist, but you don't know the doctor is talking with Josh until much later on. It's these small hidden clues that make the game go a long way in my opinion. Personally, I felt like this was one of the strongest horror games I've watched because no other horror game has been as invested in their storytelling.
