Until Dawn is an interactive drama survival horror video game developed by Supermassive Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 4.[2] It was originally scheduled to be released on thePlayStation 3 and feature PlayStation Move support, but in August 2014, the game was reintroduced as a PlayStation 4 exclusive,[3] and was released worldwide in August 2015.[4]
Until Dawn was met with a positive critical response upon release, with praise directed at the visuals, choice mechanic, horror elements, music, characters, voice acting, and gameplay design. Most of the criticism the game drew was concerning the story, mostly the second half, camera angles, character movements, and partially linear plot.
Plot[edit]
On 2 February 2014, 10 friends, Sam (Hayden Panettiere), Mike (Brett Dalton), Josh (Rami Malek) and his twin sisters, Hannah and Beth (Ella Lentini), Chris (Noah Fleiss), Ashley (Galadriel Stineman), Emily (Nichole Bloom), Matt (Jordan Fisher), and Jessica (Meaghan Martin) are gathered together at the Blackwood Pines lodge on Mount Washington for their annual winter getaway. During their celebrations, all of the friends (Except Beth, Josh and Chris, who were unconscious, and Sam who tried to warn Hannah) decide to play a prank on Hannah, who is romantically interested in Mike. Humiliated, Hannah runs out of the cabin and into the snowy woods while a blizzard is going on. Beth, her sister, chases after Hannah. Beth locates Hannah crying in the middle of a small clearing and comforts her. Suddenly, they hear a violent noise and run from an unseen pursuer. As they're cornered at the edge of a cliff, Hannah slips and falls, grabbing onto Beth. With a stranger reaching his hand out to Beth, the branch Beth is hanging on eventually snaps regardless of her actions, resulting in both girls falling to their apparent deaths, never to be seen again.When eight friends become trapped on a remote mountain getaway gone wrong, things quickly turn sinister and they start to suspect they aren’t alone. Every choice the player makes while playing as each of the eight friends – even the seemingly trivial ones – will carve out a unique story. The player's actions alone determine who survives until dawn.[17]
On the one year anniversary of the disappearances of Hannah and Beth, the remaining eight friends accept Josh's invitation back to Blackwood Pines and make their way there. As the group separates to partake in their own festivities, their seemingly idyllic getaway begins to quickly turn sinister in more ways than one. Mike and Jessica head to a guest cabin for some alone time, but Jessica is kidnapped by an unknown creature. Mike chases after them in an attempt to save her. Depending on his choices during the chase, he either finds her dead or semi-conscious and gravely injured just before the elevator shaft that she's lying on falls with Jessica on it, leaving Mike worried about her. Mike then follows a stranger (Larry Fessenden) whom he believes killed Jessica to an abandoned sanatorium, in which he explores and discovers information about a mining accident in 1952, which resulted in miners being trapped following a cave-in; one was captured and tortured by doctors at the sanatorium while a reporter attempted to find out more on the cover-up that followed.
Ashley, Chris, and Josh use an ouija board to communicate with spirits, hoping to hear from Hannah or Beth. They receive words from Hannah. Josh, convinced that either Ashley or Chris are messing with him, storms off. Chris and Ashley investigate the clue that the spirit communicated, but they are knocked unconscious by a mask-wearing psychopath who then kidnaps Ashley. Chris tracks her down and finds Ashley and Josh on the deadly end of a Jigsaw-like trap. Chris must choose between saving one of them. Regardless of who Chris chooses, the saw turns to and kills Josh by shredding his body in half. After learning about the psychopath, Matt and Emily decide to locate a radio tower and call the mountain rangers for help. Along the way, they encounter a herd of deer; if Matt antagonizes them, he will fall off the same cliff that Hannah and Beth fell down, leading to his death. Emily and Matt, if he survived the deer encounter, reach the tower and contact the rangers, who inform them that assistance won't arrive until dawn at the earliest, as they are in the midst of a storm. An unknown creature then causes the tower to collapse by cutting one of its cables. In the chaos that follows, Emily and Matt are separated in the mines. Matt can be attacked by the unknown creature if he tries to save Emily as the tower falls, but escapes if he uses a flare gun Emily may have given to him while on the tower. Meanwhile, Sam, who has been taking a bath, is stalked by the psychopath, chased throughout the lodge, and possibly captured and knocked unconscious.
Ashley and Chris decide to go looking for Sam in the basement and encounter multiple supernatural occurrences along the way. They either find Sam while she is unconscious or a dummy wearing her clothes before the psychopath knocks both of them unconscious. They wake up strapped to chairs as a saw slowly lowers from the ceiling. The psychopath forces Chris to shoot either himself or Ashley with a gun, with the other being allowed to live. Mike then returns and regroups with Sam; the two walk in on Chris and Ashley, discovering the gun was filled with blanks. The psychopath reveals himself to be a clearly mentally damaged Josh, who was playing a prank on them the whole time. He also reveals that he faked all of the supernatural occurrences Chris and Ashley encountered, along with his own death. However, he denies any involvement in the attack on Jessica. Mike knocks him unconscious, brings him to the shed where Josh initially faked his death, and leaves him tied up. Meanwhile, in the abandoned mines, Emily finds Beth's head and some of her and Hannah's personal effects, learning that Hannah had actually survived the fall off the cliff and had buried Beth. She then encounters the stranger who had previously stalked Mike and Jessica. He saves Emily from the unknown creatures, who appear in the mines and begin to attack. Emily flees from the creatures and either escapes back to the lodge, is killed by one of the creatures, or accidentally falls into a grinder. During her escape, she may be bitten by one of the creatures.
The stranger who has been stalking the group, previously believed responsible for the deaths of Hannah and Beth, reveals himself at the lodge. He explains that the mountain is infested by Wendigos, former humans who are possessed by evil spirits after consuming human flesh, and that they will not be able to escape to safety until dawn, when the Wendigos cease their hunt. Chris and the stranger decide to head to the shed and rescue Josh, but discover that he has vanished; the stranger is decapitated by the Wendigos soon after. Chris flees back to the lodge and may either make it to safety, be killed by the Wendigos, or be locked out of the lodge and left to die by a vindictive Ashley if he attempted to sacrifice her to save Josh or himself previously. Sam, Mike, Ashley, and the remaining survivors flee to the lodge basement for safety. If Emily has been bitten, the other survivors discover this, causing Mike to consider shooting her under the belief that the bite could turn her into a Wendigo. After shooting or sparing Emily, Mike leaves for the sanatorium in an attempt to find Josh and retrieve the key to the cable car so they can all escape. Afterwards, Ashley reads the stranger's journal and finds out that the Wendigo bite is not infectious, and only the consumption of human flesh can possess someone with the Wendigo spirit.
In the sanatorium, Mike encounters dozens of Wendigos; he is forced to destroy the sanatorium in order to escape. Meanwhile, Sam discovers more information about the Wendigos and follows him along with the remaining survivors. As they traverse the tunnels, Ashley or Chris may hear Jessica's voice pleading for help and have the option to either try to find her or regroup with the others. If they attempt to search for her, they may be killed by a Wendigo who is mimicking Jessica's voice. Chris, Ashley, and Emily, if alive, are forced to return to the lodge by a rock wall that only Sam has the skills to traverse. Sam continues on and encounters Mike, possibly saving him from a Wendigo attack depending on choices he made in the sanatorium. While exploring the mines, they may find Beth's grave and Hannah's diary, revealing that Hannah was forced to resort to eating Beth's body when rescue did not come; she subsequently turned into a Wendigo. They eventually find Josh in the mines suffering from extreme hallucinations and get the key. Mike helps Sam reach the surface, but the Wendigo Hannah either drags Josh away (if the group figured out Hannah's fate and he recognizes her) or kills him, and Mike is forced to abandon him. Sam, Mike, and whoever is still alive between Chris, Ashley, and Emily flee from the Wendigos to the lodge only to encounter Hannah and several other Wendigos. The Wendigos begin to fight each other and cause damage to the lodge, resulting in gas being released from the fireplace into the room. The group uses the gas leak to destroy the lodge, killing all of the Wendigos inside just as dawn breaks and rescue helicopters arrive. Depending on the player's actions, not all of the characters who reached the lodge may escape in time to survive. Meanwhile, if Matt and/or Jessica have survived up to this point, they regroup and attempt to flee from the Wendigos in the mines.
Over the closing credits, the death scenes of Beth and any playable characters who did not survive the night are replayed, and the survivors conduct interviews at a police station where they explain their story. If Josh was not killed by Hannah, in a post-credits scene, two policemen exploring the mines discover that he has eaten the stranger's corpse and turned into a Wendigo; Josh then attacks them, the screen turning black, ending the game.
| Until Dawn | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Supermassive Games |
| Publisher(s) | Sony Computer Entertainment |
| Writer(s) | Graham Reznick Larry Fessenden |
| Composer(s) | Jason Graves[1] |
| Platform(s) | PlayStation 4 |
| Release date(s) | NA 25 August 2015 EU 26 August 2015 AUS 26 August 2015 UK 28 August 2015 |
| Genre(s) | Interactive drama, survival horror |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
