MY OPINION ABOUT THE VIDEOGAME 'UNTIL DAWN'

MY OPINION ABOUT THE VIDEOGAME 'UNTIL DAWN'

The beginning of the story is very interesting. The graphics, the atmosphere, the use of the totems that show possible futures, the fact that you can find clues from different categories that explain the story... it's one thing that I loved, and it gives a lot of gameplay. Also, the video that you complete as you find the totems is very intriguing. It gives you certain clues as to where the story is going, although you don't fully know the true motivation of the story until you get to the big plot twist, which I also think is awesome.

The use of the psychologist is an addition that gives the game a lot of personality, a lot of mystery, and the fact that the things you talk to him are reflected in the story is a great thing.

First I summarise the story and then I give my opinion and some ideas that may fix the meaningless points (I'm not saying that the story is wrong, I just need to see the story as something logical and credible).

(It contains spoilers from here): I warn that this is a long post, but an interesting one if you like scary stories.

The story:

(It doesn't have all the details)

At the beginning, the story is very good: they were in a huge house of the "protagonist" family, who had bought that whole mountain for themselves. There were the children of the family (who are Josh, Hannah and Beth, the parents never appear in person) and their friends spending what seems to be the winter. The friends wanted to play a prank on Hannah and it backfired: Hannah got really pissed off at the friends and ran off into the woods, followed by her sister Beth. Josh was drunk and couldn't do anything about it. The sisters supposedly died falling off a snowy cliff (Beth is clearly seen dying after hitting her back on a rock, but we don't know about Hannah exactly), and a mysterious guy with a flamethrower and a really big knife that previously walked near the house seems to try to save them (even though it's a scary video game you don't have to be suspicious of everyone and think everything is going to kill you), but he couldn't.

Josh, a year later, invites all his friends to that mountain to have a party and forget the past. Their relationships have changed, now they have different boyfriends/girlfriends and all that (the game focuses a lot on love relationships at the beginning, giving it a teenage feel). They have arguments, they don't get along as well as they used to, it seems that the accident broke them up. The huge house, or mansion they go to has no light bulbs, and everything happens at night, until dawn. The psychologist is like a break from the game, like something separate but related. The person who is playing the game is like the psychologist's patient, who has problems. The psychologist makes him choose between characters, between things that make him "afraid"...

Following the story, photographs of the sisters are found throughout the house. At one point, the couples split up (there are four couples, although one doesn't form, Mike and Jess, Matt and Emily, Ashley and Chris and Samantha and Josh - the latter is the one that doesn't form).

The couple Mike and Jess are sent to a cabin where they want to get intimate in their relationship, but something chases them and ends up kidnapping Jess. Mike tries to save her and arrives at a typical gold rush mine, where some sections are collapsed. He finds Jess in a lift (dead or alive depending on the player's choices, I think), who falls all the way down without Mike being able to do anything. He then has to escape from there, sees a flamethrower and chases him to an old, abandoned and destroyed madhouse.

Meanwhile, Matt and Em have gone to get a bag that Em forgot (they are not seen again until much later in the story). Ash, Chris, Sam and Josh stay at the mansion, having episodes of scares, still in no danger. Chris continues to play pranks as before and Sam takes a bath.

While she's in the bath, Ash, Chris and Josh have a seance, and the sister's supposed ghost talks to them and directs them to the library to find out how she supposedly died (I think you can choose to be Hannah's or Beth's ghost). Josh doesn't like that and leaves, not to be seen again until much later. Chris and Ash find pictures, videos, supposed ghost apparitions... and they reach what appears to be the continuation of the mansion through the basement, but it's badly damaged, it looks like it was a different house.

For his part, Mike follows the flamethrower guy to the asylum and discovers that there were 30 miners in the mine looking for gold, 80 years ago. The mine collapsed at that time and 12 miners were rescued in the asylum. Doctors at the time had been shocked to find them in such a good state (they should have been dead), and witnessed transformations in the miners into murderous, insane, cannibalistic creatures, which apparently condemned the asylum. The staff didn't want the media to know what was going on there and hid it (a journalist found out, but I'm not quite clear what happened afterwards).

Meanwhile, Ash and Chris are chased around the house by a supposed madman, until he captures Ash and Chris must find her. He arrives at a place where he has to choose between saving Ash (he's in love with her) or Josh (his lifelong best friend), as there's a Saw-like scene with a saw. Personally, I saw Ash being saved, and Josh dying. When they leave the place, they are reunited with Matt and Em, who have returned from looking for the bag. They talk about the psycho and that, and decide that the two of them will go to the radio tower to alert the police (they can't go down the mountain because the psycho has the key to the cable car). When they are in the tower, something cuts the ropes and they fall, ending up in the mine. Here I saw Matt save himself and let Em fall with the tower into the void.

In the psychologist's office it is discovered that the patient is the psychopath who has organised all this.

The psycho finds Ash and Chris after finding out that there were a bunch of cameras all over the house and dead animals on hooks (it was the psycho's hideout). Just after, Sam has just had a bath and follows a trail of balloons with arrows drawn on them showing the way to "find her clothes" (her clothes have been hidden while she was bathing and she is wearing a towel around the house). She reaches a room where the psychopath talks to her and shows her a video of her in the bathroom and the video of the prank played on Hannah the year before, and the psychopath goes after her. He chases her and eventually catches her and leaves her in a room where Mike finds on his way out of the asylum tunnels. He gets her out of there.

Another Saw-like scene appears where Ash and Chris are tied to chairs, Chris is holding a gun and there are saws above their heads that are slowly lowering. He has to choose between killing himself or killing Ash, if he shoots, the saws would stop (and I think they would both die if they let the saws come down). The gun only have blank bullets and right at this point is when they discover that the psycho is Josh in disguise (this is the big plot twist). Turns out he wanted to play the joke of the century on them so they would suffer the same way his sisters suffered (this means that the psychologist's patient is him, he was crazy because of the dead of his sisters, I think the psychologist's visits show that he needed help to get over the death of his sisters and medicate himself - this is mentioned -. Something I liked is that every time the psychologist appeared, the place looked more and more like the destroyed asylum Mike found, until you see just the rubble - this may also symbolize Josh's mind -). He is taken to a place, blamed for Jess's death (he claims it wasn't him) and left there, guarded by Mike.

Then, it's discovered that Em, who fell into the mine next to the radio tower, is still alive (she was lucky to have hooked onto a wire). She walks through the mine and encounters the flamethrower guy (who she first runs away from) and a strange creature (which turns out to be the thing the flamethrower guy wanted to protect them from). She falls down a grotto and reaches the area where the sisters died. Their bodies are gone. She finds the sisters' stuff nearby, Beth's grave (just Beth's) and Beth's head (a flaw in the creators keeping the face intact. After a whole year it should be signs of decomposition, although it's a cold climate, it can't last that long - considering it's a cave and hasn't been in contact with snow).

(I explain why at this point the story stops making sense to me and just focuses on scaring the players and adding a lot of violence - this is my opinion, of course-)

Em is chased by the creature and manages to escape and get to her other friends who are back in the house. Mike runs off alerted by the screams and leaves Josh alone. They let the guy with the flamethrower into the house, who explains what's going on: the mountain has some kind of curse from an Indian tribe (or so I understood) that unleashes a spirit (or mutation) if someone eats human flesh on that mountain. It transforms into a wendigo, a creature with impenetrable skin, but susceptible to fire, very violent, that its eyes lighten and only detect changes in the movement of its surroundings, its teeth and nails become longer, its body moves very fast and adapts to the movements of its prey. Bullets don't kill them, but make them back out. This is what happened to the 12 miners they rescued (apparently they ate the rest of the miners).

As they left Josh alone, Chris and the flamethrower guy go to look for him, the others must stay in the basement until dawn, when the police arrive and the wendigos stop hunting (for some reason they don't explain?), because it's a safe place. They don't find Josh and the wendigo approaches them (apparently killing the flamethrower guy I believe there's a posibility where this guy survives) and Chris runs alone to the house (here he can die if you don't control the character properly with the controller, I saw him die - strange that decisions take a back seat and the controls are the ones that kill or don't kill the characters-).

Now, for some strange reason that I don't understand, they think that Em is infected by the wendigo (not true) because it bit her even though the flamethrower guy told them that they only transform if they eat human flesh, and Mike goes crazy and wants to kill her (you can choose whether to shoot her or not). And for another strange reason that I don't understand either, Mike wants to go to the wendigo's lair, where they supposedly have Josh's body, who has the keys to the cable car, to get out of there as soon as possible, and not wait in the basement safely until dawn -which is 2 hours left- for the police to rescue them by helicopter 🤔. Well, the thing is that he goes to the asylum through the underground tunnels, he finds a bunch of wendigos locked up there (by the guy with the flamethrower), and others who are untied and chase him to the mine.

Then it's discovered that Jess, the one they thought was dead (the one who was kidnapped by a wendigo), is still alive. They get another stroke of foolishness and those who had stayed in the basement go after Mike, and as if that wasn't enough, when they go down some sewer stairs, they continue walking without waiting and leave Ash alone 😑. Further on there is a choice between going towards some sounds or regrouping with the ones who left her (obviously regrouping, I believe the other one is for having a extremely stupid dead). Then they split up for another strange reason (they can't climb some stairs and Sam goes to climb the rocks, but Ash and Em go the other way). Sam finds Mike and they save themselves from some wendigos.

Another scene of the psychologist appears, but now he and Josh are in the mines. Josh is alive but now he's there. He has hallucinations of the things he fears most.

Now, Mike and Sam arrive at the wendigos' lair. It's a scary, terrifying scene, with corpses of people hooked to the ceiling, loose heads lying around.... (I couldn't watch this, I couldn't stand it). They meet Josh there. Then they split up again, Sam goes to the house to tell the other that they are good and Mike and Josh go back the way they came (a wendigo was following them). That wendigo, who turns out to be Hannah (she didn't die, she ate Beth after 30 days locked in the cave - which I say, in a few hours these guys have been in and out of the mine a few times, why did she stay there for 30 days? And besides, after 30 days, the meat would be rotten... I believe some animals would end up in the mine). The wendigo kills Josh (it kills him in a terrible way) and Mike leaves.

From then on, Matt is still alive and meets Jess by the mine. They are chased by a wendigo and manage to escape (if you control the characters well, I saw them being saved).

Sam, meanwhile, returns to the house and meets Mike. Then, Ash and Em arrive in a hurry, pursued by a wendigo. Then comes the most tense scene of the whole game: several wendigos are inside with them, and they have to stand still so that they can't be seen. The wendigos start fighting among themselves and the friends have a plan to get out of the situation, which is to explode the house with a gas leak, they just have to turn on a light and everything will explode. There are a series of scenes where they have to stand still and hide, and in the end, if everything is done right, they escape and manage to kill the wendigos (there is a final part where it looks like the wendigo who is the miner that the story talks about the most -Billy Bates - is going to kill Sam just as she is going to hit the light, but it is stopped by the wendigo who is Hannah, it's like Hannah saves her, and that's the only part of the ending that I really liked). The police arrive and save the survivors. The scene along with the credits of the survivors telling the police what they saw is also very original.

The video of the totems explains a lot: It was made by the flamethrower guy, addressed to the sisters' friends. In it, he tells that the flamethrower guy's grandfather hunted wendigos, but one escaped him, the most dangerous one called Makkapitew. Then the miners came to the mountain and the mines collapsed, awakening the curse again. The miners became cannibals and wendigos. If you kill a wendigo, you release its soul, which is susceptible to possessing another person, so it's better to contain them and not kill them. The Makkapitew, after so many hunts, was still free. The year Beth died, he tracked it down. But Hannah and Beth were there too. The wendigo forced them to fall off the cliff, and he could not save them, but avenged them by killing the Makkapitew.

I guess with the spirit of Makkapitew released, Hannah became a wendigo?

My opinion:

I actually liked it a lot (except for that final part full of nonsense). I like the fact that all characters can be saved (except Josh) if you choose the best option. Also, at the beginning it's very relaxed, not a lot of blood and violence. However, from the scene of the saw it changes very abruptly and everything starts to be much more savage and I don't like that, it gives me creeps, that's why I couldn't see some scenes like the hideout with the animal corpses (althought it's not real), the wendigo's lair and Josh's hallucinations. That's why I don't like scary movies and videogames that focus on that (I've loved other games like Little Hope and Man of Medan because there is the perfect amount of violence).

Things that don't make sense (but doesn't mean some parts aren't great):

At the beginning, I liked the story, it was very interesting, but when they add something that has no scientific basis, I usually stop liking it.

The thing I least understand is that the team investigating Hannah and Beth's death didn't find the mine or the wendigos or the asylum or anything. It seems that in this game they are all stupid when it comes to making important decisions but incredibly clever when it comes to organising pranks.

Regarding the characters, at the beginning it seems that they haven't changed much after the death of the sisters (but they no longer get on well), why are they still making annoying jokes if the sisters died with one of them? That happens to me and I would never think of making jokes again in my life.

Also, all that nonsense I wrote while summarising the story, why do they leave the basement which is safe? Are they stupid? I mean, they're scared but they're out looking for the wendigos? I don't understand that. Lastly, I have to ask, why must the wendigos have physical transformations? Why not have the same human vision but also the same speed? And it only happens to humans, why? Why doesn't it happen to other animals? And it can't be cured or avoided? Why do they only hunt at night? And why do they only like eating human flesh? The moment they stop being human, they stop being cannibals when they eat human flesh, but that doesn't mean they can't eat other things, after all, their stomach doesn't change and I suppose they will still be able to eat the same things as humans.

Ideas:

Personally, I would have given more play to the asylum. It was put on the back burner. Instead of curses and all that nonsense, I would have had them rescue the miners, and because they were in such bad shape, they tried a serum or something they were still researching to save them, but it went wrong and they were turned into that. Makes more sense, doesn't it? Sure, but it doesn't fit with Hannah being turned. But for that I have an idea compatible with this one: Hannah managed to get out of the mine (like all her friends in a few hours, you can clearly see there are exits from all the rooms), and half dead, maybe disoriented, she made it all the way to the asylum. There is no light there, she doesn't know where she is, she is traumatised from seeing her sister die, so she injected herself by mistake (or not, I'm thinking about it as I go along) with the serum that the asylum wardens hastily left behind before she died, and she was transformed. But... you'll say, that doesn't fit with the flamethrower man's grandfather hunting wendigos either, and I'm not convinced... Don't worry, I have a different idea to the previous ones, although it's not very well thought out: perhaps, the minerals in the caves of that mountain had a strange chemical component that causes such mutations, compatible only with humans, and there were people who ended up with those components in their body and were transformed before the miners arrived. So anyone with that compound in their body, with a trigger, could transform into a wendigo. Could that trigger be human flesh? Is there something different about human flesh than the flesh of other animals? Obviously their composition varies, and that could be key. That is, if they spend time in the caves and eat human flesh, they become wendigo. This last idea is more in line with history (or maybe the best idea it's a combination of these two?). I've just shown that it's possible to make a story almost as good without resorting to myths and curses. And ruining (in my opinion) the possible increible end.