Literally one of the first things Until Dawn had me do was plunge an axe into the face of a deer.
The demo dropped you right into a mid-game scenario where two horny teens, Ashley and Matt, are stuck in the woods fleeing a murderer who is seemingly picking the crew off one by one. When I was given control, the two were cornered on a cliff surrounded by deer, and after a short dialogue session between the two, the first quick time event reared it’s head, and the prompt more or less equated to “Place axe in deer head.”
The deer became frenzied and the two had to escape to a watch tower via a series of excruciatingly slow sections of walking around the environment and another handful of quick time events.
The controls felt slow and clunky in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. It was like I was slogging through mud at all times, and I wonder if that was an intended creative choice or if it just happened, because it really doesn’t fit in well. It’s serviceable, for sure, but it just doesn’t feel right. The much bigger offense is the manner in which you have to interact with objects in the world.
There’s nothing wrong with taking away player control for a second. When I walk up to a radio and there’s a button prompt to use it, I expect to hit that button and trigger whatever is that radio is going to do. I don’t need to hit the prompt only to have a zoomed in view of the radio with a hovering finger, with yet another button prompt to move that finger to the power button on the radio, and then even more prompts instructing me how to pull my finger away from the button.
The radio is just one example, there were a good dozen of interactions in my brief 15 minute demo where I had similar situations arise, and I found it a bit insulting. There are so many games out there vying for a player’s attention, and to literally waste their time with such mindless and unnecessary parts in your game just rubs me the wrong way.
I won’t spend too much time on the dialogue (which is atrocious), but I will share one bit that stuck out as being exceptionally bad. After saving Matt from a mildly dangerous situation, Ashley angrily asks “What? Not even a thank you?!” to which Matt responds by saying “Oh I’m going to thank you. I’m going to thank you so hard!”
For fucks sake, guys. No one talks like that, not even horny teens. Not even the most annoying horny teens, which they’ve managed to craft so well I feel like it’s Supermassive Games’ way of saying “Fuck you” to the world.
By the end of the demo I just wanted the two of them dead more than anything else in the world at that time, and I was in luck, as one found themselves crushed under a collapsing structure and the other ended up impaled on a meat hook.
When I hung up my headphones and went to walk away, a Sony representative came up to me and asked “So you couldn’t save either of them, huh?” to which I flat out told him that they were insufferable, and I wanted them gone. Apparently that was the general consensus, so it wasn’t not just me.
The thing that is still stuck in the back of my mind is that I can’t tell if Until Dawn is actively trying to be deliberately shitty to emulate that classic B-movie feel, or if there are a bunch of guys around a conference table going on about how dark and awesome it is. If the former is the case, then good on them, they nailed it. However, if they were trying to make a serious and scary game, man, did they miss the mark, at least from the brief slice I was shown.
Until Dawn is set to come out on PlayStation 4 later this year.
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