Until Dawn Analysis

Drawing in this target audience, how well does the game stack up to horror films in the industry? In many ways, to say the least. A classic way to tell a story is by drawing ideas from real life legends. An example of this would be Bigfoot, Boogeyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, among others. The legend in which Until Dawn draws on is that of the Wendigo. The atmosphere created is also very important. An underlying atmosphere which creates a sense of dread is also present in both. Along with atmosphere, the unnerving feeling of suspense is present with techniques such as silence or a musical build up which causes the viewer or player to feel the intense emotions arise. This suspense may also lead to jump-scares – a traditional horror movie …show more content…
This is because Until Dawn by Supermassive Games is actually written by two indie film makers who in total put in 10,000 pages of dialogue for this game which has an average of 10 hours of gameplay. The writers wanted to create a story that is still stereotypically horror, but give that added twist of being able to make choices for the characters. When watching a movie, the viewer is more likely than not going to want to save the character they have grown to love, and care less about the stereotypical jerk on whether he dies or not. In this game, that choice is yours. You can save the characters you want to, whether it is all of them or only a handful, or kill the ones off you choose. While the choices don’t rewrite the story, it gives the player involved in the story of each of these characters and can play on each of the character’s personalities. One of the writers, Reznick, believes that this automatically makes the story even more scary because the player is “truly invested in the characters” (Barone). According to the writers, when they sat down to write it, they wrote it like a real movie script. The game includes multiple cut scenes and plays just like a movie. The player gains control between cut-scenes and can make decisions as well during the scenes. The actors involved in the game are motion captured. This creates another huge parallel to the film industry. The actors in the video game are well known actors such as Hayden Panettiere and Rami Malek, both well known for their parts in Nashville and Mr. Robot respectively. The PlayStation 4 platform allowed the developers and writers to create a narrative that fully captured movie-like scenes with ten episodes of the narrative with the actors being captured on screen and the player control during and between scenes. The line between movie and game have