Until Dawn

While I don’t really play video games myself, I do enjoy watching them be played from time to time. I’m not talking about any game like Call of Duty or those types of games. I don’t like watching someone running around and shooting things. That’s boring (to watch – maybe it’s more fun to play). But those games that have stories to them, puzzles, intricate twists and turns, now those are fascinating – those are like watching a movie, a really, really long and interesting movie. By far, the game that I have been obsessed with pretty much since it came out is Until Dawn.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the game, it’s basically a horror-style video game that plays on all the horror cliches, but there’s a twist – you get to decide what happens. Your choices, your actions determine how the game unfolds. And I think this is absolutely genius.

I’ve seen other choose-your-own-adventure type games, but I think Until Dawn by far outshines them all in that what you do really does affect things later on in the game. Of course, with anything like that, there’s going to be the main plot points that have to happen regardless to keep the story moving, but the developers of Until Dawn did an amazing job at the detailing and the inclusion and tons of variety within those plot points.

Every player’s going to go from A to B to C, but how they get to those points can vary completely, down to which character survives to the end (if any). With other games that I’ve seen using this techniques, for example The Walking Dead, the choices you make don’t seem to actually have any affect on the overall game – the characters do the same thing, you end up in the same place, you might just have Character B with you instead of Character A. The Walking Dead is still an interesting game, but there’s far less variation in it, in my opinion.

I’ve seen three complete playthroughs of Until Dawn, all three of which I witnessed new things, and I know there’s still tons of gameplay that I have yet to witness. The concept of that is amazing to me! I want to see it all, but I don’t even know if that’s possible.

On top of that, it’s just a really good storyline. It is scary, despite purposefully playing up the cliches, and just when you think you’ve figured out what’s going on, they throw something else entirely at you. Like I said, I’m obsessed with this game. It’s just the right amount of creepy, unsettling, and terrifying.

There’s a rumour that there might be a sequel – not a sequel in the sense that it would continue the story with the same characters, because that might be impossible, depending how you ended things, but a sequel in the sense that they’ll take the same concept, the choose-your-own-adventure, and develop a brand-new story around it. I’d be ecstatic if they did. I need more. I need more mind-spins.

I could go on for ages fangirling this game. It’s so cool. But I’ll stop here. If you do play video games, and you haven’t played this one, I highly recommend it. And if you don’t play, why not watch it. It’ll be a lot of squealing fun.

If you do decide to play it, then my last words of advice are this: pay attention to EVERYTHING. You never know what you’ll need to survive.