Supermassive Games

Until Dawn makes choices feel weighty without building endless branches. Supermassive used a Telltale-style system: false choices, branches that snap back to one central point, and some characters who can't die until the very end. A small indicator promises that a choice will matter somewhere down the line.

Mark Brown argues this is fine. These games are about making a choice, not about seeing unique results, and building a billion unique paths is too expensive.

Sepia flashbacks and trait meters make past choices visible. Sepia flashbacks recall the earlier choices that led to a scene, which Brown hadn't seen in this style of game. Detailed meters track each character's personality traits and relationships.

Brown calls these additions mostly for show, describing the meters as "smoke and mirrors".

Player choice can break the slasher formula that gives deaths meaning. Slashers kill for reasons: early films punished sex, drink and drugs and left one innocent Final Girl alive. In Until Dawn, Emily, a "monster bitch", can survive the whole night while her put-upon boyfriend Matt dies, and any mix of characters can reach the finale.

Without a director's hand the story can fall apart: Jess appears to die, returns hours later in the mines, walks a few paces and is killed at once. Most players end with several survivors, maybe all of them.

Game habits push players to save everyone, against the genre. Games teach players to pick smart dialogue, hit flashing buttons fast and solve systems like the death-warning totems, which show a clip of a character dying or surviving. As Brown puts it, "Until Dawn the movie wants everyone to die. But Until Dawn the game wants everyone to survive."

Many deaths are opaque: the flare gun choice gives little warning but has huge consequences for Emily and Matt. The game gives no instructions, and its trophies for certain endings are all hidden.

A large cast lets players act as the horror director. With eight playable characters, far more than Life is Strange, Tales from the Borderlands or Beyond: Two Souls, Brown played the jerks as jerks and saved favourites like Sam, Chris and Ashley. Players can also subvert tropes, letting the ditzy blonde live or the Final Girl die at the last moment.

This only works because deaths often follow internal logic: failed quick-time events, bad relationship meters and wandering off alone invite death.

Making the director role the explicit goal would resolve the conflict. Brown proposes telling players who must live and die, then making them cause it: doomed characters commit immoral acts so the killer delivers poetic justice, or get split from the group through horror cliches. The game would be shorter, built for replay with different instructions each time, with random elements to keep jump scares fresh.

Without that push and reliable mechanics, he argues, many players miss the game's best pleasure of playing Wes Craven or John Carpenter. He still enjoyed and recommends Until Dawn, and admits he may be trying to make it into something it's not.