Until Dawn — Who Will You Save?
Until Dawn is a Playstation 4, decision based horror game that follows the story of 8 friends that decide to get together at the same cabin one year after the disappearance of their two friends, who are twins of one of the main characters in the game.
Throughout the game, as a player, you get to play as all the characters and experience their point of view and make decisions for them in different scenarios. The personalities in the game are built up over time, but you start to learn who you do and do not like just based on dialogue and body language that each character presents.
A neat game mechanic that gets utilizes to the fullest extent and is extremely consistent throughout is the “butterfly effect”, which means that every choice the player makes in the game whether that’s making the decision to go left or to go right, have an unforeseen consequence that later affects the events later in the story. Because of this mechanic, the game has more than one ending and requires more than one play through (which is roughly 9 hours each play through).
With this “butterfly effect” mechanic going around, I’d also like to inform you that at the end of each chapter, you can compare your decision making with your friends or the rest of the online community to see which decision was more favored of the other. It’s actually a pretty neat aspect that *most* decision based games utilize which I appreciated a lot, especially when you’re trying to go through perfect runs or..not-so perfect runs.


Each decision also affects character traits and the relationship that each character has with one another. So, depending on whether or not your character that you’re playing at the time is paired up with another character during your part of the story-line, the decisions you make while with that character could either hurt or help your relationship with them.
Along with helping your relationship status, the decisions you make could possibly affect the traits of your character. If you make a life-altering decision such as choosing to help your friends get out of the house while you stay distracting the Wendigo’s, your “brave” trait will increase.

Other neat mechanics that the game uses is the motion sensor that the Playstation 4 offers on the control. There are some scenarios which involve you (your character) to not move. I’ve never experienced this in a game before, so it was pretty neat to see how still I could be and how fast I could react to the “Don’t Move!” alert when it got shown. Most of the time, to be honest, I just threw my controller on my desk to prevent myself from making any mistakes as I was working towards a perfect run through.

An aspect that I really enjoyed throughout the game was the ability to collect and hunt for clues and totems. Although, this can be extremely time consuming and result in the play through being longer than expected, it allowed me to have some sense of accomplishment even if I wasn’t able to save everyone at the end.
Each clue foreshadowed what happened to the twin sisters, what’s haunting the mines and lodge in the mountains, and each totem gave some sense of hint of what’s to happen next but never gave you an indication on whether or not it would happen (my guess is due to it all depending on whatever decision you made at certain times).


Each totem has a color that gives an indication of what it means. Black totems mean death which can result, depending on the decisions made, in someone losing their life. Red totems mean danger which foreshadows events that will happen to the character. Brown totems mean loss which means that tragedies will happen to whatever character is shown, but since you don’t know which one you’ll play next, you need to keep these in mind. Yellow totems offer guidance in which it helps you in helping other characters throughout the story line. Finally, white totems mean fortune which allows you to learn more about the character as time passes on.
Clues allow you to figure out who the killer might be as well as learning about what happened to the twin sisters, as stated before. The more clues, the more you know and learn about what’s going on which, in my opinion, is better. They’re hard to find and get boring to track down, but it’s worth it.

All in all, this game was by far one of my favorite decision based games that I’ve ever personally played. Although, I’m not really much of a horror fan myself, this is definitely a game that I continue to go back and reminisce in the clips that my community decided to clip from my live play through of it.
The graphics, the game mechanics, the soundtrack, dialogue, the storyline, was worth risking my non-horror playing self.
Side-note (includes a little spoiler): I saved everyone, but I cried about possibly not being able to save a dog that you come across in the end, but ended up saving him, too. So, in your face Supermassive Games, I win this play through (but maybe not a future play through..)!
