Nine years ago, Until Dawn offered a unique blend of choose-your-own-adventure storytelling and cheesy teen horror. The PlayStation 4 exclusive captivated audiences with its branching narrative and the constant threat of losing your favorite (or least favorite) character to a gruesome demise. Now, in 2024, developer Ballistic Moon takes over for Supermassive Games to revisit the game in a remake for the current generation. Unfortunately, Until Dawn (2024) doesn’t justify its own existence over the unarguably superior Until Dawn (2015).
The story of eight friends trapped on a snowy mountain, stalked by a mysterious killer, offered a fresh take on the choose-your-own-adventure genre. Those visiting for the first time or returning to Blackwood Mountain will experience a complete visual overhaul and a revamped control scheme. The game is played from the third-person perspective, and at key moments you’ll be asked to make key decisions that will alter the course of the game (more on that later). The majority of the game doesn’t involve actual gameplay, which makes for fun social gatherings with gamers and non-gamers to pick up the controller and work through the game.
The most immediate improvement in the remake is the graphical fidelity. Blackwood Mountain is rendered in stunning detail, with snow-capped peaks glistening under the moonlight and the decaying Blackwood Pines sanatorium creating a genuinely unsettling atmosphere. Character models capture the actors’ likenesses with impressive accuracy, and the improved facial animation breathes life into their performances. Now running in Unreal Engine 5, the rebuilt game reuses their motion capture in stunning environments and character detail. The soundtrack has also received a welcome upgrade, with a richer and more immersive soundscape that perfectly complements the on-screen tension. Occasional frame rate drops mar the experience, particularly during more action-heavy sequences. This is in contrast to the original game, which can still be played on PlayStation 5 via backwards compatibility at 60fps. Until Dawn (2024) can only muster 30fps in most scenarios.
The original Until Dawn‘s control scheme felt clunky at times, hindering the experience. Thankfully, the remake addresses this issue with a more responsive and fluid control system. The use of the controller is improved this time around with the inventive “don’t move” sections, where you can’t move the controller outside of the bounds of the on-screen border or risk being killed. Some areas put you in quick-time events (QTEs) where proper timing and correct actions can avoid certain death. All of this makes for the eight or nine hours it takes to complete the game feel just long enough while wanting to replay the game again and again to see all the different endings.
There’s a new camera that makes it more like a traditional third-person game, but the tight camera keeps the tension and scares at their height. The camera can now be swung around characters to better take in the environment and help find clues and items. Oddly, with an improved camera we lose the faster movement characters had in the 2015 game, which hinders more than it helps. Lastly, there are new locations to explore, which are start with an expanded prologue and other environments throughout the game. They don’t add much to the experience, but are nice to see some inspired places we haven’t seen before.
One of Until Dawn’s core mechanics was the “Butterfly Effect,” a system where seemingly inconsequential choices could have significant consequences later in the story. This system offered a sense of agency and replayability, enticing players to see how their decisions impacted the narrative. However, the remake doesn’t significantly expand on this aspect. While some minor variations exist, the overall story beats and character fates remain largely unchanged. This predictability undermines the replay value for those familiar with the original, leaving little new to experience.
There’s also a bizarre change to the way totems work. In the original game, finding a totem would give you a glimpse into the potential death of a character as soon as you touch it. In Until Dawn (2024), you must pick it up, rotate it around and up & down, and find the right spot to view the fate of someone. The way it works now takes longer than the little cutscene than the premonition takes, taking away their unique value as gameplay insight and collectible. Why Ballistic Moon felt the need to change this is beyond me.
Until Dawn (2024) is a visually stunning remake that certainly has its merits of being on PlayStation 5, but it is also the least necessary and important remake yet. The gameplay was never groundbreaking, but it gave way to a genre of interactive horror movie that elevated it for a unique social experience. Some of the changes are rather quizzical and inexplicable like removing the faster player movement, overcomplicating totems, and having subpar performance. When the original runs better and doesn’t look too worse off, you can save money here. At best, Until Dawn (2024) should have been a remaster like the upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. There’s still a good game here, but it’s impossible not to compare it to the original that’s simply better in almost every way.
A PlayStation 5 code was provided by the publisher for review purposes
