Hacker Cinema
Until Dawn
2025 · Film · 103 min
Directed by David F. Sandberg
One year after her sister Melanie mysteriously disappeared, Clover and her friends head into the remote valley where she vanished in search of answers. Exploring an abandoned visitor center, they find themselves stalked by a masked killer and horrifically murdered one by one...only to wake up and find themselves back at the beginning of the same evening.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
Playing Until Dawn with my colleagues at lunch was awesome.
I think there is definitely a space for interactive movie style games.
I want Man of Medan on Stadia!
If there's anything that Detroit: Become Human does well, it's branching narrative. Does it approach true freedom? Not at all. But compared to, say, Telltale games or something like Until Dawn, it's pretty impressively open ended[0].
Now, do I recommend it? Absolutely not. It starts off really good, especially if you're already expecting another Heavy Rain or Beyond Two Souls. But after a few hours (maybe just one?) it gets heavier and heavier handed. It's impressive how quickly it turns from an interesting story about both intolerance and what it means to be human, and just becomes a series of scenes that practically scream "DO YOU GET IT YET? DO YOU?".
Probably still the best David Cage game I've seen, mostly for the strong intro and branching narrative, but that's like picking your favorite Uwe Boll movie. If you want to play one of these style of games and can handle horror, I'd point you toward Until Dawn instead, as I think that's probably the best example of the genre.
[0]: [Spoilers] Here's a graph of the choices available in one mission. Some are significantly more linear, some are even more complex. Note that other missions may include two or more (Up to 5 I think?) starting points. https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2018/05/fugitives-82-percent-flowchart-detroit-become-human.jpg
A lot of talk about Eco, not much on the article! For my money, it's off the mark. The 'freedom' in open world games is mostly an illusion, and we seem to be getting away from it, as the technological demands increase. Generally the only freedom is the order in which you undertake the pre-scripted missions. Years ago in Morrowind, you could kill quest giving NPCs and wreck the story, but in Fallout 4 all essential characters are weirdly immortal.
Your 'choices' are overblown. For example, in Far Cry 4 you have the option to kill a character or not (on the orders of another). In your report, you refer to them as having been "taken care of". You can't even change the dialogue. Your reward is a different epilogue movie. It's all more choose your own adventure than choose your own War and Peace. You can see the game designers dilemma - why expend massive effort on branching paths when any given player will only choose one? Far Cry 4 also had an amusing bug - you could also choose to destroy a temple or not. However the bug meant the game would show you the non-destroyed model when past a certain range, suddenly popping to the correct model as you approached. The mask literally slipping!
Even non-open world games stuggle to provide meaningful agency. The much acclaimed Walking Dead allowed many choices, from which all resulting divergences were soon neatly resolved funneling the player to exactly one ending.
Honorable mentions : Fallout New Vegas, which offered so many options it almost collapsed under its own weight, and until Until Dawn, an interactive horror movie in which every single character can live or die.