Until Dawn (PlayStation 4) review "Wendigoing, going, gone..."

To quote Danny Glover: “I”m getting too old for this shit.”

I entered Until Dawn with the assumption that its content would offer more watching than playing. I was okay with that because interactive scary stuff is absolutely my wheelhouse. I figured it'd be low on action, and I'd be able to breeze through it like watching a film on Shudder, except with more button pressing. Boy, was I wrong...

Enter the Blackwood Mountains. A peaceful land filled with snow, wildlife, and evil spirits. A group of teenagers gather for the usual sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, and playing reprehensible pranks on their companions that humiliate them. That's where Hannah comes in. She's a shy, somewhat nerdy girl who's attracted to a boy named Mike, and she orchestrated this whole party as a means to get to him. Her friends, however, schemed up a prank they thought harmless, when in actuality it shattered Hannah's spirit by making her look like a fool in front of her crush. She storms off into the forbidding wilderness after dark, followed only by her concerned twin sister.

The game takes this opportunity to perfectly establish mechanics and ready your expectations for what's to come. Assailants rustle in the woods while you make hasty decisions, controlling Hannah's sister Beth in the hopes of getting to your sibling before trouble finds her. Obviously, time is not on your side, so you must be quick with your responses. Do you take the longer, safer path or the shorter, more dangerous one? Whatever you choose, you'll be in for some quick-time events, where you leap over trenches, duck under fallen tress, and climb icy, rocky walls.

The rest of the experience is quite like this, except you constantly feel like you're about to have a heart attack. Good luck!

At last, Beth catches up to Hannah, and tragedy strikes. The two of them tumble off a cliff, you watch as their limp frames crash against rocks and ice, finally twisting to the bottom of the ravine where they lie still, bloodied. Searchers never find them, and the friends who pranked them bear the hefty weight of guilt and shame. The twins' brother, Josh, carries an even bigger burden...

Josh sends a video out to his friends a year later, expressing that he wants them to come to the cabin where his sisters disappeared again in memory of them. Of course, they all oblige, not realizing what's waiting for them upon their return...

From this point, the campaign dips into segments intended to introduce and build its cast of characters. It starts with some basic qualities they possess, showing them as level-headed, impulsive, intelligent, or even insecure. However, further interactions add depth to each person that single-word descriptors could never accomplish. This one is neither exclusively “show” nor “tell,” but a mixture of the two. However, each teenager's development doesn't stop there. You, the player, add to their character arcs by choosing different actions. Do you snoop on your friend and look at his exposed phone, or zip it back up into his backpack as if you didn't notice? Do you confront your girlfriend's ex about a hug you just witnessed, or play it cool? Your choices impact how characters perceive each other, influencing future events.

I mean, one string of interactions ends with one character being locked out of a house while a monster bears down on him. Will the lady at the door leave it open or turn the lock? Choices don't merely change dialogue, and they can be a matter of life and death.

Here's the thing: the twins' horrible deaths at the beginning of this nightmare set grim standards. In other words, all bets are off, and anyone could croak in a completely awful way. You don't get retries, and wrong button presses or hesitations could mean lights out for whichever character you happen to be guiding. You don't get a choice to reload your save file or hit a previous part of the storyline, either. You get to watch as these young folk fall to their deaths, fail to save their sweethearts, get ripped apart by creatures, or find themselves strung up by their throats on meat hooks.

Oh, yeah, you can close the app out before it has a chance to save, but that doesn't help if you've made a lot of poor decisions early on that render your one of the teens untrustworthy, which results in the situation I mentioned earlier about someone not opening a door and leaving another one to be torn limb from limb.

That's why this game can be so maddening. You enter one segment where someone races after a beast, hoping to rescue his girlfriend. If you're too slow or you make too many mistakes, then you'll only reach her after her face gets mangled. From that point onward, you regularly get hit with QTE segments, your heart pounding in your ears, your nerves splitting because you're afraid you'll press a circle instead of a triangle climbing up a wall and watch someone's skull get splattered between the monster's mitts. And the experience doesn't let up. You get to the point where scenes like that crop up regularly and you dread what could be coming during the standard exploration segments.

So yeah, I thought I was going to keel over from a heart attack. Like I said, I'm getting too old for this shit.

It also doesn't help that some parts require you to hold still, and the controller's sensitivity during these scenes can be wonky. During my playthrough, I stood still for the duration of the event, the indicator staying perfectly centered. Hell, I even breathed shallowly so as not to move, and yet the sensor inexplicably popped up out of bounds and I lost. Yeah, this is how I found out about the whole “close the app out” trick...

But man, is it a blast. If you're into scary stuff, then this is precisely what you're looking for. Its tension rockets through the roof, always keeping you on your toes. To say it's minimally interactive because it's basically an interactive film isn't quite right. With as much as this title engages you and forces you to pay attention, it's hard to argue that it's not interactive. The story itself also takes a lot of decent turns, hitting you with a handful of revelations you probably didn't call right away. This is one of those horror titles that initially presents itself as a member of one sub-genre (slasher, in this case), but deviates into others as well. There's a bit of psychological horror, supernatural stuff, plus some torture porn, if you're into that.

Bottom line: Until Dawn is a horrifying playground, but one that might not be a good fit for those with heart issues...

Community review by JoeTheDestroyer (October 26, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.