A teen slasher type horror movie in video game form.

I wasn't too sure about this game originally as it's more a narrative adventure than a traditional game and regret my hesitation in picking it up because it's a fantastic little horror title. The story is simple, a year after two friends of a group go missing under mysterious circumstances, eight teenagers return to Blackwood Mountain to stay in the same cabin to honour their memory. Inevitably things don't go smoothly.

You control all eight of the teenagers over the course of the story and your choices and actions dictate which of them will survive to the end of the game, if any of them. It's a nice feature that logs key decisions you make as butterfly effect actions because what you decide will have consequences later. It adds some nice replay value to the title, I played through it a couple of times to try and save them all and realized on my first playthrough I missed a section of the game because the related characters were already dead ha ha.

The characters are all tropes of the teen horror genre like the jock, the spoilt girl, the geek etc. Though I think this actually works in this games favor as that is exactly what they were going for. Though serious it feels like a parody at times. The story is actually really well told, with key pieces of evidence to find that unravel exactly what is going on up in the mountain. I don't want to spoil anything but it follows different threads that all eventually link up towards the end.

The gameplay itself centers around exploration. Each chapter you are given a different character or more to play as and usually an objective which involves taking the teenagers to inevitably pretty foreboding looking places. I will say I play with headphones on generally cut off from the world and this game my first time through really scared the hell out of me. I jumped several times much to my girlfriend's amusement.

The atmosphere is fantastic, great art design. The graphics are superb in all aspects, the characters face models are especially impressive, incredibly detailed and the game uses lighting to great effect. The voice acting and sound effects are equally impressive. It's a well made game all round. My only complaint is that sometimes the camera angles are not very good. They have been placed to be intentionally freaky which at times works incredibly effectively but at other times simply hinders exploring and movement.

One playthrough lasts about 9-10 hours depending on how thorough you are in exploring for clues on the way. It's likely though you won't save everyone and there are a lot of little scenes that change depending on choices you make so it's worth playing through a couple of times so for that alone it's got surprisingly good value. All in all Until Dawn was a really pleasant surprise for me. It looks fantastic, has a great atmosphere, and does some things I haven't seen in a game before.

Recommended.

+ Butterfly effect feature is a great idea.
+ Has a great atmosphere.
+ Superb presentation.

- Camera angles at times aren't great.