While the visually muted aesthetic and catchy character ensembles of these games remain as enticingly interesting as ever, this is unfortunately more of the same in basically every regard. Offering increased accessibility in its gameplay than Man of Medan with alerts for button prompts, I had hoped for more diversity and building of its usual formula however outside of slight adjustments such as that there was nothing much else of note. What's left is a rushed, self-important narrative containing jumbled timelines and a complete lack of genuine tension; the jump scares here are a complete joke and it is hard to tell if it's deliberately that way anymore. Any sense of ambition is swiftly choked out by the rigid and predictable structure of the story and for something that takes 4-5 hours to complete it nonetheless feels twice that long. It's everything we have seen before. Front to back like Man of Medan this exudes mediocrity in most aspects. It is a shame they won't just take the extra time to craft a truly fleshed out, imaginative sequel to Until Dawn. What we have now are these third-party seeming, churned out, hack rip offs of their own IP. Over time I do not imagine the novelty turnout for these games will last. Hopefully horror games will have moved on to greener pastures by then.