Until Dawn is the Heavy Rain of horror you didn’t know you craved

Here’s a hot tip for you: if you’re ever invited you to a cabin in woods, do not go.

That advice would have saved the cast of Supermassive Game’s upcoming title, Until Dawn, a lot of trouble. The game is set in the lazily-named Blackwood, and revolves around a cast of eight characters as they try to survive a night of horrors. And I do mean horrors, plural.

Supermassive Games clearly couldn’t decide which horror genre they wanted to go with, so decided to simply use them all. In less than ten minutes of Until Dawn footage, I saw a Ring-style ghost, a masked psychopath, a collection of creepy dolls, and machinery borrowed straight from the Saw franchise. Sure it’s an eclectic collection of genres, but you know else Until Dawn did? It scared me! Check out the video below for my manly screeches:

[fve]http://youtu.be/62Fe5StwOiU[/fve]

The developer describes Until Dawn as survival horror, but the gameplay reminds me more of the interactive dramas Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. The developer made it clear that story would be the focus of Until Dawn, so Resident Evil fans may need to get their kicks elsewhere. But don’t worry, there’s Psychobreak for you guys.

The first thing you’ll notice about Until Dawn is that it is very, very pretty. The game uses the Killzone: Shadow Fall engine and pushes the Playstation 4 (PS4) as far as I’ve seen it go. The graphics are crisp and realistic, and the lighting is incredible. It’s a great looking game, but it’s going to take more than looks to win over gamers to the interactive drama genre.

The developer pushed the inclusion of face mapping, and hollywood actors too; however this hasn’t necessarily pushed the genre forward in the past. If Ellen Page couldn’t make Beyond: Two Souls profitable, then I doubt the cheerleader from Heroes is going to be a strong selling point. That being said, the voice acting was pretty good, and the actors certainly did add some serious drama to the sections I saw.

Until Dawn is a game of choices, and the decisions you make have a direct impact on who survives and who dies during the night. It is possible to complete the game with everyone surviving, and of course, everyone can die horribly. The game uses the“Butterfly Effect” system, which allows players to monitor the choices they make, and how the plot develops. This is going to be useful as the game contains over 1000 branching paths and hundreds of unique endings. That’s right, hundreds!

Until Dawn is going for replayability—every character is playable, and every character is mortal. One slip up, one bad decision, and they are dead. And they never come back. A horror game is perfect for this scenario. I rarely replay horror games, at least in the same decade, because games are rarely scary the second time around. A horror game with massive and numerous variations holds a lot of promise, and if it’s handled well, it could provide a lot of horror for a long time.