Until Dawn

The game's win instinct fights the horror genre it borrows from. Games teach players to pick smart dialogue, hit flashing buttons fast and solve warning systems, so players try to keep all eight teens alive. A slasher story needs victims, so that instinct works against the drama.

Mark Brown's summary: "Until Dawn the movie wants everyone to die. But Until Dawn the game wants everyone to survive. Something's gotta give."

Letting any character live breaks the slasher rules for who dies. Slashers kill for reasons: early films punished sex, drink and drugs and left one innocent Final Girl. In Until Dawn the cruel Emily can survive while her put-upon boyfriend Matt dies, and any mix of characters can reach the finale.

Most players end with several survivors, maybe all of them, which breaks the one-survivor ending. In drama a death is a sacrifice, vengeance or motivation for another character; in horror it can be as small as smoking pot or bullying.

Without a script editor, player-driven stories lose pacing and arcs. In Brown's playthrough Jess apparently died, returned hours later in the mines, walked a few paces and was killed at once. A script editor would have circled that scene.

Player-driven narratives can be more personal and surprising, but they risk losing character arcs, poetic justice and pacing.

Eight playable characters let players sacrifice some for drama. With eight characters, Brown played the jerks as jerks and let them die while protecting favourites like Sam, Chris and Ashley. The horror rules fell back into place and the story felt less disconnected.

Life is Strange, Tales from the Borderlands and Beyond: Two Souls have far fewer characters. Players can also subvert tropes: let the ditzy blonde live, save the black guy from dying first, or kill the Final Girl at the last moment. "I realised that I wasn't really playing as the characters, but the as the director."

Hidden goals mean most players never find the director role. Until Dawn gives no instructions on what outcome to chase, and its trophies for specific survivor combinations are all hidden. Players not trying to tell a specific story miss the dramatic shape the game could have.

Make directing the explicit goal: assign who must live and die. Brown proposes telling the player who must live and die, perhaps in what order, then having them push doomed characters into immoral acts, nasty words or horror cliches so the killer delivers poetic justice.

The game would be shorter and built for replay with different instructions each time, plus random elements so jump scares don't go blasé. Brown admits he may be trying to make it something it's not, and still recommends the game.

Deaths follow readable rules players can learn and steer. Characters die from failed quick-time events, damaged relationship meters, or ignoring genre tropes like wandering off alone to investigate a noise. Readable rules make deaths feel deserved and let players choose who falls.

"perhaps that character deserves to get killed for not watching enough horror movies."

Totems give vague foresight that builds dread and guides choices. Picking up a totem shows a short clip of a character dying or surviving an attack. The clips are vague but inform later decisions, giving players a system to solve while keeping surprise.

Opaque choices keep surprise but stop players steering the story. The flare gun decision is almost entirely opaque yet decides much of Emily's and Matt's fates. That protects surprise for first-time players and YouTubers, at the cost of intentional storytelling.

Meters and consequence indicators can be theatre, not real simulation. Until Dawn's butterfly effect indicator and detailed personality and relationship meters are partly smoke and mirrors. Like Telltale and Quantic Dream games, it has false choices, characters who can't die until the end and branches that snap back.

Brown thinks that's fine: building a billion unique paths is too expensive, and "simply making choices is often more fulfilling than seeing wildly unique consequences play out."

Sepia flashbacks show which past choices led to this scene. When a consequence plays out, a sepia-tinged flashback recalls the decisions that caused it, helping players connect choices to outcomes.

Brown hadn't seen this idea in the genre before.