top of page
imitbinityvin

Until Dawn Game PC: Experience the Butterfly Effect in this Choice-Based Thriller



Until Dawn is a 2015 interactive drama horror video game developed by Supermassive Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 4. Players assume control of eight young adults who have to survive on Blackwood Mountain when their lives are threatened. The game features a butterfly effect system in which players must make choices that may change the story. All playable characters can survive or die, depending on the choices made. Players explore the environment from a third-person perspective and find clues that may help solve the mystery.




until dawn game pc




The game was originally planned as a first-person game for the PlayStation 3's motion controller PlayStation Move. The motion controls were dropped when it became a PlayStation 4 game. The story was written by Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick, who sought to create the video game equivalent of a slasher film. The development team took inspiration from various sources. These include the movies Evil Dead II and Poltergeist, and video games Heavy Rain, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill. To ensure the game was scary, the team used a galvanic skin response test to measure playtesters' fear levels when playing it. Jason Graves composed the soundtrack and Guerrilla Games' Decima game engine was used for the graphics. Several noted actors, including Rami Malek, Hayden Panettiere, Meaghan Martin, Brett Dalton, Jordan Fisher, Nichole Bloom, and Peter Stormare, provided motion capture and voice acting.


Until Dawn was announced at Gamescom 2012 and released in August 2015. Although there was little marketing effort from Sony, its sales surpassed expectations. The game received generally positive reviews, and was nominated for multiple year-end accolades. Critics praised the branching nature of the story, butterfly effect system, world building, characters, and use of quick time events, but criticised the controls. Supermassive followed the game with a virtual reality spin-off, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood (2016), and a prequel, The Inpatient (2018), while a spiritual successor, The Quarry, was released in 2022.


Until Dawn is an interactive drama in which players primarily assume control of eight young adults who have to survive on Blackwood Mountain until they are rescued at dawn.[3][4] The gameplay is mainly a combination of cutscenes and third-person exploration.[5] Players control the characters in a linear environment and find clues and items.[6] Players can also collect totems, which give players a precognition of what may happen in the game's narrative. An in-game system keeps track of all of the story clues and secrets that players have discovered, even across multiple playthroughs.[7] Action sequences feature mostly quick time events (QTE).[8] One type of QTE involves hiding from a threat by holding the controller as still as possible when a "Don't Move" prompt appears.[9]


The game features a butterfly effect system, in which players have to make choices. These range from small decisions like picking up a book to moral choices that involve the fates of other characters.[10] Some decisions are timed.[11] Certain choices may unlock a new sequence of events and cause unforeseen consequences.[3] These choices also influence the story's tone and relationships between characters.[12] Players can view the personality and details of the character they are controlling, and his or her relationships with other characters.[11] All eight characters may die by the end of the story, depending on the player's decisions.[13] Deaths are permanent; the game's narrative will adapt to these changes and continue forward without them.[12] The strict auto-save system prevents players from reloading a previously saved file to prevent cheating. This makes it impossible to revert choices with unfavorable outcomes. The only ways to change the player's choice are to restart the game or to continue to the end and start a new game.[14] There are hundreds of endings,[15] which are the outcomes of 22 critical choices players can make in the game.[11]


The game is divided into 10 chapters.[16] There is an intermission between each chapter in which a psychiatrist, Dr. Hill (Peter Stormare),[17] addresses the player directly (seemingly breaking the fourth wall). He analyses the player's fears along with choices they have made.[18] Intermissions with narrators similar to Dr. Hill have since become a tradition with many other Supermassive Games horror games, continuing also with The Dark Pictures Anthology and The Quarry.


As the night progresses, Mike and Jessica tryst at a guest cabin, where she is abducted by an unseen figure. Mike's pursuit of her attacker leads him to an abandoned sanatorium, which contains information about a 1952 cave-in on the mountain that trapped a group of miners. Mike will either find Jessica dead or alive, but the elevator she is found in will fall, convincing Mike she is dead. Meanwhile, Josh, Ashley, Chris, and Sam find themselves terrorized by a masked man in the lodge. Josh is bisected in a torture device set up by the masked man, who then pursues Sam through the building's lower levels. The masked man's torment of the friends culminates with Chris being ordered to shoot Ashley or himself under the threat of them both being killed by giant saw blades. Matt and Emily, having been alerted to the masked man's presence, discover that the cable car has been locked; instead, the two head to a radio tower to request help. The request is successfully received, but the responder states that the group will not be rescued until dawn due to a storm. An unknown creature causes the radio tower to collapse into the mines, separating Matt and Emily. Looking for a way out, Emily stumbles upon the location where Beth and Hannah fell, with Beth's severed head located nearby. She later is chased by the creature on her way out of the mines.


Mike reunites with Sam just as the masked man appears before them and Ashley and Chris. The masked man reveals himself as Josh, who orchestrated the events at the lodge as revenge for his sisters' presumed deaths. He disclaims any responsibility for Jessica's death, but Mike has him bound in a shed to remain until the police arrive. At the lodge, Sam, Mike, Chris, Ashley, and, if she escaped the mines, Emily are confronted by the Stranger. The Stranger reveals that the creatures who kidnapped Jessica and attacked Matt and Emily are wendigos, former humans who became feral creatures after resorting to cannibalism during the 1952 cave-in. Chris and the Stranger travel to the shed to rescue Josh, but discover him missing, and the Stranger and possibly Chris are killed by a wendigo while attempting to return to the lodge. While perusing the Stranger's files, if Emily was bitten in her escape, she will admit to it, and Mike may choose to kill her to avoid contagion. Finally, Mike sets out for the sanatorium, believing the cable car key to be in Josh's possession; the others scramble after him, with Ashley and Chris possibly falling victim to a wendigo trap en route.


Sam and Mike discover Josh in the mines; his weakened mental state has caused him to hallucinate his sisters and his psychiatrist Dr. Alan Hill (Peter Stormare). Mike tries to lead Josh to safety, but they are separated when Josh is attacked by the wendigo. He is slain outright unless Sam discovered enough clues to determine the truth: the lead wendigo is Hannah, who turned after consuming Beth's corpse. If Jessica and/or Matt are still alive, they link up and attempt to escape through the mines while evading Hannah. Finally, Mike and Sam return to the lodge to seek refuge in the basement with the rest of the survivors, only to find it overrun by wendigos, including Hannah. When a fight between the wendigos causes a gas leak, Mike and Sam work together to destroy the lodge, leading to an explosion that kills Hannah, the remaining wendigos, and possibly some of the survivors. Following the explosion, rescue helicopters arrive to retrieve whoever has survived until dawn.


British developer Supermassive Games led the game's development, which began in 2010.[21][22] Its existence was revealed after a trademark for Until Dawn was discovered.[23] The game's creative director was Will Byles, who joined the studio in the same year. The studio began discussing an idea for a new game for the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Move accessory, which had a greater emphasis on narrative than Supermassive's previous games, such as Start the Party!. The proposed game would be a horror game that resembled a slasher film and it would be designed for a younger audience that publisher Sony Computer Entertainment had courted with the Move.[24] Supermassive hired American writers Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick, both of whom had worked on horror movies,[25] to write the game's script. They were hired because Byles felt the company's British writers wrote in a "parochial" way that is inappropriate for the horror genre.[24]


The game was initially exclusive to PlayStation Move, meaning players needed to buy the Move controller to functionally play the game. In this version of the game, the only way to navigate and progress the game is by moving the motion controller. Moving the wand guides the movement of the flashlight held by the characters as players explore the location from a first-person perspective. The wand can also be used to interact with objects and solve puzzles.[26] In this version of the game, players can occasionally wield a firearm.[27]


A segment of the game shown at Gamescom 2012 received positive comments from the gaming community. Byles said the enthusiastic response was due to the game's unique tone, which was thought to be "fresh" compared with that of its competitors. One of the most common complaints received was the game's status as a Move exclusive; most people did not want to purchase a controller for the game.[24] At that time, the game had reached the alpha development stage.[28] Byles experimented with the game's debug camera and realized the potential of changing the perspective to third-person. This would change the game from a first-person adventure game to a more "cinematic" experience. The game also switched platform from PlayStation 3 to the PlayStation 4 and expanded the game's scope to include more mature content. Sony approved the idea and allowed the team to develop for the PS4 and changed the game's genre.[24] According to Ashley Reed of GamesRadar, the changes in gameplay gave more "space to let the score, character personalities, camera work, and settings shine through".[29] Most characters were also recast; Brett Dalton, one of the actors retained from the PlayStation 3 version, said he believed that the recasting was performed to hire better-known actors.[30] 2ff7e9595c


0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page