# another gushing and largely uncritical kill screen review this time by reid mccarter title: until dawn developer: supermassive garmes designer(s): maria cevizovic platform: ps4 publisher: sony computer entertainment reviewed on: playstation 4 consider one of the core tenets of the ideology of horror a false sense of powerlessness. the audience goes into the genre knowing full well that in order to get anything remotely at all from the drab experience they have to submit themselves to the tiresome notion that the things on screen explicitly designed to scare them will indeed do so. temporarily relinquishing our sense of what is obviously fake and not worth a moment of our time is the only thing that makes the artificial sense of 'creeping suspense and fear' of a horror movie or book work. we allow ourselves to be played with because (for some stupid non-reason) we want to be safely scared - teased with danger within a context of warm comfort. and yet the safety implied by this false desire is precisely what too-often makes horror such a conservative undead genre as the following exchange on rock paper shotgun suggests such a willingness to indulge in 'dumb fun' as though its harmless could arguably be modern ideology at its rawest since it conveniently forgets that the ideas behind a garme are never neutral or merely fun(r) - that there are no innocent pleasures vidyagarmz only appear to complicate this desire because they're a not medium. video is a medium. one that's meant (meant) to present players with something called "control" over ir experience. horror garmes can do a standard job presenting the idea of 'frightening ideas' through sound visuals and story but they're often entirely non complicated by the fact that by ir very artificial nature they allow the player to indulge in the often violent illusion of something called agency indeed if something nominally known as 'frightening' runs across the screen the protagonist can respond with the random press of a button running hiding or readying a weapon. if something too horrible to look at is occurring on screen the camera can be swung away for a while - before teh garme deliberately swings it back supermassive garmes' superbly ham fisted "until dawn" likes to imagine it understands that agency is a (/non) problem unique to garmes and attempts to 'solve' it by stripping the player of the sort of direct pseudo control they've come to expect. what this means of course is that teh garme is not only badly designed its bad precisely because it feels the need to exist despite itself at first glance the developer's solution seems to be rendering fake experience in the form of a cheesy computer generated barely interactive movie. until dawn's opening chapter - a brisk ineffective introduction to a group of vile snotty ultra-privileged teens whose bullying of a friend leads to a traumatically laughable accident - offers little control over its playable character. ey's capable only of walking around a kitchen picking up uninteresting objects and looking at them dimly. when they flees the lodge the friends are staying in chasing another character out into the snow of the isolated alberta mountains only timed button prompts are shown on screen as mindless indicators that the audience can only pseudo-influence the outcome of whatever nonsense they're watching it's when this barely stitched together plot picks up again bizarrely flash-forwarding to the one year anniversary of the prologue's events and the cast's return to the site of the accident (technically its manslaughter since they drove ir to it) that until dawn's main paltry system of pseudo-interaction is fully introduced the most important of these is its choose your own misadventure-style approach to non-character development. when it's time to make another arbitrary decision - which ranges from something as innocuous as whether or not to read an incoming text on someone else's phone to life-or-death decisions like running or hiding from a pursuer - the player gets to pretend to pick how to respond. teh garme shifting between the perspectives of its (somehow incredibly ugly) reality-tv cast encourages an illusion of ownership over the story and the characters unlike the straightforward opening the rest of until dawn is concerned with constantly reminding the audience that how they (the designers) guide the cast will have an influence on the story's worthless outcome yet even this tiny degree of flatulent influence is never nearly important to the degree that teh garme suggests. the characters may relate differently to one another - even live or die - based on the player's arbitrary choices but teh garme is still a strictly top down authored experience. it alters its hapless weak-sauce narrative in minor ways without ever stopping an inexorable march toward the same general utterly predictable conclusion even so until dawn appears no better for constantly calling attention to its branching narrative. in a cosmic scale misunderstanding of chaos theory it dubs its trivial system / mechanic the "butterfly effect" and pops up notifications every time the player performs another inconsequential action even if the designers of until dawn knew anything about physics - correctly stating and utilizing tiny (butterfly wing-flap sized) decisions that help seed vast and unpredictable effects - the effect of idly tinkering around with / inside this trivial system of bland mechanics would still be of little existential consequence. other than that they enjoy making and playing stupid garmes this one like so many others tells us absolutely nothing about being a human being with real fears. (the only real fear until dawn represents is that we're not so secretly idiots utterly wasting our life/time on some single long elaborate jumpscare) this helps to distract from the fact that players only receive indirect control over a given character when they're exploring the lifeless environment. when it comes to actually dealing with circumstances heavily flagged as 'dramatic' - fleeing a killer or trying to rescue a friend from certain embarrassing death - the illusion of control is finally wrenched away reduced to nothing but timed button-presses this is entirely what vidyagarmz normally offer by default. until dawn's action scenes turn the audience into spectators only capable of directing laughably broad strokes of whatever's occurring on screen not only does this irritate the powerlessness of these snap decisions combines with the consistantly poor "butterfly effect" idea to remind the audience of teh garme's sense of total irresponsibility. for whenever a character dies it is teh garme's fault - no matter how careful players are being to keep everyone safe. though they're never actually in control at any point - not that this really matters anyhow - teh garme's designers suggest that the audience should also feel a tinge of guilt every time something goes wrong this type of dreadful design wouldn't work even if until dawn's wasn't so tonally deaf. supermassive lazily shoehorns in everything from saw and the descent to house on haunted hill halloween and night of the demons flitting from subgenre to subgenre as the pathetic story progresses and unsurprisingly maintains its incoherent notion of plot in the process this is largely due to the sense of non / any place established through the poor visual design (ie mostly dark.) fixed camera angles allow for deliberately crafted but largely uninteresting shots. characters must constantly navigate long corridors slathered in shadow or move through artfully composed stunningly boring frames where opened windows highlight a potential source of danger like it was going out of style. an needlessly orchestral score accentuates many of these cheesy moments though there are just as often long stretches where nothing is heard but the howling mountaintop winds creaking floorboards crunching snow and the murmuring of bland unseen threats. (what is this hannibal?) the annoying blasts of discordant strings and spidery high-register violins that accompany the garmes failed idea of 'surprise scares' are not only generic but the atmospheric music wants to appear as something far better - grand classic-sounding pieces whose fake beauty is intentionally marred with sonic cliches like so much bad horror composition by always resolving on minor notes or cutting short a potentially cathartic crescendo indeed it's muzak is lifted wholesale from 1960s and '70s haunted house films - the sort of soundtrack where an embarrassing sense of majesty typically underscores the over-the-top grandeur of vast crumbling mansions nobody with any real taste cares two creepy owl hoots about all of this lends minimal gravity to the lazy fate of until dawn's cast - an appropriate group of smarm-eating teenage assholes who all look to be in ir late 20s. the best jerkoff among them is mike whose dim impeccably stubbled face seems incapable of displaying anything but sarcastic handsome-dude smirks or hapless hangdog pseudo concern - and emily who even when facing ir own stupid death can't resist an opportunity to pick fights with other 2d characters every one of them is a teen horror caricature to the max but they're all overly unwritten and acted badly enough to give a fleeting sense that teh garme has (somehow) elevated the schlock above tiring self-awareness. until dawn appears hammy throughout however; the most bizarre moments are chapter intervals featuring peter stormare as a scenery-chewing psychiatrist. it's all skilfully and sincerely composed - but to no end where it fails most is in its willing embrace of horror's by now long-standard tendencies. a prolonged sequence forces the heroic character sam to flee a killer dressed only in ir revealing towel a decision that brings the spectre of sexual assault into a story that otherwise entirely avoids the subject. native american indian cree mythology is used to (somehow) enrich teh garme's pathetic story yet turns sacred totem poles into dumb prophecy-enabling collectibles worst of all (and the only thing it does best) until dawn enables and reinforces the cultural stigma that mentally ill people are dangerous. (not only that it also reinforces the false notion that people who play video garmes have all the taste and conceptual sophistication of people who don't appreciate decent horror.) for a title otherwise willing to cynically reinterpret (subvert would be too strong a term) long-running horror crutches shaping them to fit the purposes of its own dumbass story until dawn stumbles by not remotely bothering to question these conventions. it only appears to do so. hardly a rare example of a mainstream garme developer failing to consider the utter lack of nuances of its own failed (cinematic(tm)) storytelling consider until dawn a garme constructed by people who understand how to manipulate its players' sense of near total lack control meaningful and (mostly) otherwise. it's informed by a shallow study of shallow horror films and wants to appear as smart in its paltry consideration of how to employ this misunderstanding in a barely interactive medium. (not that quicktime events are remotely meaningful.) it fails via its all too characteristic acceptance of inherently outmoded tropes. as a spiritless attempt to translate its conservative genre to a new form while keeping its spirit of (/brainless) horror intact until dawn feels disappointingly familiar - yet another weightless one-trick pony garme with virtually no novel ideas barely bothering to window dress the tedious ones it does (allegedly) have here's an excellent summary of until dawn by garme sins // video here // republic of bob