Until Dawn
Until Dawn is a 2015 interactive drama survival horror game developed by Supermassive Games and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. 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 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 script 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 Sakura, and Peter Stormare provided motion capture and voice acting.
Until Dawn was announced at Gamescom 2012 and released for the PlayStation 4 in August 2015. Although there was little marketing effort from Sony, its sales surpassed expectations. The game received generally positive reviews from critics, 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, and a prequel, The Inpatient, while a spiritual successor, The Quarry, was released in 2022. A remake for PlayStation 5 and Windows was released on 4 October 2024. A film adaptation of the game was released in April 2025.
Gameplay
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. The gameplay is mainly a combination of cutscenes and third-person exploration. Players control the characters in a linear environment and find clues and items. 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. Action sequences feature mostly quick time events. One type of QTE involves hiding from a threat by holding the controller as still as possible when a "Don't Move" prompt appears.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. Some decisions are timed. Certain choices may unlock a new sequence of events and cause unforeseen consequences. These choices also influence the story's tone and relationships between characters. Players can view the personality and details of the character they are controlling, and his or her relationships with other characters. All eight characters may die by the end of the story, depending on the player's decisions. Deaths are permanent; the game's narrative will adapt to these changes and continue forward without them. 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. There are hundreds of endings, which are the outcomes of 22 critical choices players can make in the game.
The game is divided into 10 chapters. There is an intermission between each chapter in which a psychiatrist, Dr. Hill, addresses the player directly. He analyses the player's fears along with choices they have made.
Plot
During a party at her family's lodge on Blackwood Mountain, a cruel prank causes Hannah Washington to flee into the woods. Hannah's twin sister Beth finds her, but the two are pursued by a flamethrower-wielding stranger, resulting in them falling off a cliff. Despite a search, their bodies are never found and they are declared missing.A year later, Hannah and Beth's brother Josh invites the group from the previous party—Hannah's friend Sam Giddings, Josh's friend Chris Hartley, Chris' crush Ashley Brown, couple Emily Davis and Matt Taylor, Emily's ex-boyfriend Mike Munroe, and Mike's new girlfriend Jessica Riley —back to the lodge. Despite tensions between members of the group and reservations about returning after the previous year's events, all seven accept Josh's invitation. Each member of the group arrives at the lodge via cable car before engaging in separate activities on the mountain.
As the night progresses, Mike and Jessica tryst at a guest cabin, where Jessica is abducted by an unseen figure. Mike pursues her captor to an abandoned sanatorium, where he uncovers documents detailing a 1952 cave-in that trapped a group of miners. Mike finds Jessica either dead or alive, but the elevator she is in plummets, leading him to believe she has died. Meanwhile, Josh, Ashley, Chris, and Sam find themselves terrorized by a masked man in the lodge. Josh is seemingly killed after being bisected in a torture device set up by the masked man, who then pursues Sam through the lodge's lower levels. The man later orders Chris to shoot Ashley or himself under the threat of both of them being killed by large saw blades. Matt and Emily, having been alerted to the masked man's attack, discover that the cable car has been locked; instead, the two head to a radio tower to request help. Although their signal is received, they are informed that no rescue can occur until dawn due to a storm. An unknown creature causes the radio tower to collapse into the mines, separating Matt and Emily. Emily stumbles across the site where Hannah and Beth fell the previous year, and, to her horror, finds Beth's severed head nearby. She is later chased by the creature out of the mines.
Mike reunites with Sam just as the masked man reappears and reveals himself to be Josh, who orchestrated the events at the lodge as a revenge prank for his sisters' presumed deaths. Josh denies any involvement in Jessica's death, but Mike restrains him in a shed to await the police. Later, Sam, Mike, Chris, Ashley, and—if she survived her escape from the mines—Emily are confronted at the lodge by the Stranger. The Stranger reveals the creatures that abducted Jessica and attacked Matt and Emily are wendigos, former humans who became feral after resorting to cannibalism during the 1952 cave-in. Chris and the Stranger head to the shed to retrieve Josh but find him missing. On the way back, the Stranger, and potentially Chris, are killed by a wendigo. While perusing the Stranger's research, Emily—if she was bitten during her escape—reveals the injury; Mike may shoot her out of fear of infection. Believing Josh holds the key to the cable car, Mike heads to the sanatorium to retrieve it. The others follow, though Ashley and Chris may fall victim to a wendigo attack along the way.
Sam and Mike find Josh in the mines, whose deteriorating mental state causes him to hallucinate his sisters and his psychiatrist, Dr. Alan Hill. Mike attempts to guide him to safety, but they are separated when a wendigo attacks Josh. He is killed unless Sam has uncovered enough clues to reveal the truth: the lead wendigo is Hannah, who survived her fall but transformed after consuming Beth's remains. If Jessica and/or Matt have survived, they regroup and attempt to escape the mines while evading Hannah. Mike and Sam return to the lodge and join the remaining survivors in the basement, but find it overrun by wendigos, including Hannah. When a fight between the wendigos causes a gas leak, Mike and Sam work together to ignite an explosion that destroys the lodge, killing Hannah, the other wendigos, and possibly some of the group. Following the explosion, rescue helicopters arrive to retrieve whoever has survived until dawn.
In the ending credits, any surviving characters, excluding Josh, are interviewed by the police about the events on the mountain; at least one survivor will urge the police to search the mines. If Josh survives Hannah's attack, the police later discover him eating the Stranger's head and transforming into a wendigo. In the remake, players can unlock two post-credits scenes depending on their choices. In the first, Josh, stuck in the mines but still human, hears Dr. Hill's voice saying he hopes Josh finds redemption. The second scene, set years later in Los Angeles, follows a medicated Sam as she struggles to move on from the trauma, showing a bleeding scar on her arm and ending with an unknown voice at her door.
Development and release
As a PlayStation Move game
British developer Supermassive Games served as the game's developer. Its existence was revealed after a trademark for Until Dawn was discovered. 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. Supermassive hired American writers Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick, both of whom had worked on horror movies, to write the game's script. They were hired because the team felt the company's British writers wrote in a "parochial" way that is inappropriate for the horror genre. In 2024, it was revealed that London Studio worked on the title from 2008 to 2010 until Supermassive took over the game's development.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. In this version of the game, players can occasionally wield a firearm. An early version of the game also supported two-player cooperative multiplayer, with the studio targeting young couples in their twenties. A segment of the game shown at Gamescom 2012 received positive comments from the gaming community, but 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. At that time, the game had reached the alpha development stage. 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, targeting an older demographic. 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.
With these changes, the team partnered with Cubic Motion and 3Lateral to motion capture the actors' performances. The team also needed to change the game's graphics. They used the Decima engine created by Guerrilla Games and had to rework the lighting system. The team also extensively used particle effects and volumetric lighting to light up the game's environments. Despite the third-person perspective, the game adopted a static camera angle in a way similar to early Resident Evil games. The approach was initially resisted by the development team because the designers considered the camera "archaic". Byles and the game's production designer Lee Robinson, however, drew storyboards to ensure each camera angle had narrative motivations and prove their placements were not random. Initially, quality assurance testers were frustrated with the camera angle; Supermassive resolved this complaint by ensuring drastic camera transitions would not occur at thresholds like doors but the team had to remove some scenes to satisfy this design philosophy.