Originally Posted by IGN
When I stood and watched parts of a lengthy demo of the upcoming PlayStation 3 exclusive Until Dawn, I couldn’t help but think of the PSN game Datura. I pondered back on how amazing Datura looked, how fluid the experience seemed, how its purported mastery of the PlayStation Move would set adventure gaming and exploration forward. And I cringed as I remembered playing it for review, let down by an experience marred by its subpar controls and gameplay that didn’t nearly live up to its amazing ambiance and potential.
Will Until Dawn suffer the same fate? Maybe so. But watching the demo and speaking at length with Will Byles, the game’s director, put me at ease. His studio, Supermassive Games, has been toiling away on Until Dawn for nearly two years, attempting to construct a teen horror movie in video game form. The result, at least from what I saw, is something dynamic, visually pleasing and fun for those that may be watching.
As Byles explained, Until Dawn revolves around the conventions of the teen horror flicks we all know and love: an “isolated location” with “no phone,” occasionally accompanied by “inappropriate sex.” A killer stalks eight helpless teens out in a heavily wooded, snow-covered locale, and it’s up to the gamer to see the story through, no matter what twists and turns it happens to take.
These twists and turns rest at the heart of Until Dawn, because – heavily and admittedly influenced by Quantic Dream’s masterpiece Heavy Rain – Until Dawn doesn’t stop no matter what happens to any of the characters in the story. If someone dies, that person remains dead and the plot trucks along, altered but unabated. The result is an adventure that may take players only five or six hours to see through, but an adventure that happens to conclude with one of about 30 endings. Some of these endings are radically different from one another, and others are more about slight, subtle differences, but whatever you see at the end is a direct result of what happened in-game, from choices you made to those you let live and others you saw perish.
Byles admits that his studio’s approach to Until Dawn is “very filmy,” right on down to what can only be described as the kill cam (or perhaps the near death cam), representing the viewpoint of the murderer moving about the forest. He used words like “glib” and “cheesy” to describe the game, yet emphasized the story’s up-and-down arc that constantly puts players at ease, only to raise the tension to absurd heights. Supermassive Games is so serious about the cadence the game develops that it actually runs specialized tests on people playing Until Dawn or watching it in action to garner empirical data on how it’s received. They don’t want the game to be too scary or too mundane; they want to strike just the right balance, and they’ve adjusted the game as they’ve gone along, finding out that they were “overdoing it” with the frights at first.
Something else Byles discussed was the studio’s insistence on using American film writers with experience in the horror genre to pen the game’s dialogue. He laughed as he talked about how ridiculous the dialogue would have been if it was written by British guys like himself, noting that the horror genre is largely American in origin, and that they wanted their game to stay true to what people know and love about those kinds of movies.
Regardless of its true-to-form style, its plot and its rather stunningly dire setting (what’s scarier than nighttime in a wintery forest?), the one thing I wanted to press Byles on most is the game’s control scheme. He emphasized that it’s built for PlayStation Move, and for the time being, that’s what you need to play the game with. But this is where lingering fears of a Datura-like experience came into play. While the game seemed to control fluidly, I wasn’t allowed to play it for myself, so the promise of expertly crafted 1-to-1 Move controls only goes so far.
The good news for those wary of a motion-only experience, however, is that Supermassive Games is looking into the possibility of incorporating DualShock controls. Such a move didn’t save Datura, and Until Dawn might not need this option at all, but at the very least it will open it up to a much bigger audience of PS3 owners that don’t own the Move peripheral. The studio is currently testing how to best use the DualShock controller while staying true to the experience they crafted around motion. Hopefully, for those that like options, their experiments work out.
With Until Dawn’s potential etched in my mind, I’ll eagerly await its inexact 2013 release date. Built on the same engine used to create Killzone 2, Until Dawn is pretty. Its Heavy Rain-influenced narrative arcs promise non-linearity and replayability. And its teen horror movie premise is certainly something novel in the realm of gaming. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that when I play it for myself, it’s as good as it looks, and not another Datura-like, PlayStation Move-driven letdown.
