Back in October 2016, I was looking for something to do with my PlayStation 4 as it sat collecting dust in my grad school apartment. I had just begun grad school, and so I sent out a wide invitation to the rest of the Quidditch Team (yeah, I know) at College of Charleston to come to my place, and try out a spooky little game called Until Dawn that I had heard about on Reddit.
I mention all of this only to stress that the first time I experienced Supermassive Games’ masterful debut, I did it the absolute best way possible: in a dark room, passing the controller between friends, making wrong choice after wrong choice late into the night, getting drunker by the hour. Simply as a gaming experience, Until Dawn has been impossible to beat over the past eight years for me. The 2024 remake leaves it unchallenged.
It would be pertinent to say that Until Dawn is one of my favorite games of all time – I’ve played through it five separate times over the years, each time with a different group of friends locally, in addition to watching many streamers and Let’s Play channels do blind playthroughs. I know all the routes, I know what decision does what, I know exactly how to make every character live and die. The fun, of course, is replaying it with people who don’t know any of these things.
I was very excited about Ballistic Moon Studios (made up of former Supermassive staff who made the original game) and Sony finally bringing this game to the PC audience and maybe cranking the PlayStation version up to 60 FPS. Better lighting, better facial motion capture, and better performance would all have been welcome upgrades. Until Dawn 2024 is a full remake, so the entire game was essentially rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5. With those expectations, to say I have mixed feelings on the result would be an understatement.
The positive aspects of the Until Dawn remake are many, and it’s not quite the flop that the Steam reviews would have you believe. The facial animations and motion capture are extraordinarily improved. While I’m more mixed on the actual art style change to the faces, the animations are some of the best I’ve seen as of late and I found myself a little more immersed because of it. I have found the environments, animals, and monsters all look better with the new art style, while I still prefer the human faces from the PlayStation 4 version.
The lighting is a bit strange, because in some sections of the game it looks much better, and in other sections it looks much worse. It is a lot sharper though, but whether sharp lighting helps with the atmosphere of the scene or not is dependent on a lot of factors. There is an atmosphere control factor in the original that, paired with the fixed camera views, created a very directed experience. Now that there’s a free camera for about 90% of the game, the Until Dawn remake has lost the intense, directed experience it used to offer. However, that isn’t bad – by giving you free camera control, there is now a different kind of sense of dread, the feeling that something is creeping up behind you no matter where you’re looking.
I really enjoy the changes that Ballistic Moon has made to the Prologue and Chapter 1. The Prologue adds a few new playable scenes and a few new cutscenes before the infamous prank to give a little more context to it, and Chapter 1 now takes place during the day. I was a bit worried about this at first, but it worked very well to lull you into a false sense of security before the kids reach the cabin. There have also been changes made to how some decisions and quick time events (QTEs) affect the story branches that make it a little harder for your teens to die, and a new main ending and secret ending with it that sets up for a sequel. There are also new totems and collectibles to hunt down. I am happy with all of these story changes and find them all to be an upgrade.
The sound design has also been massively improved, especially with headphones on, but I must confess that the new soundtrack is not working for me. For reasons unknown, the original 2015 score by Jeff Grace and Jason Greaves has been removed from the game and replaced with a totally different score by Mark Korven (The Lighthouse, The VVItch). While it is still a perfectly serviceable score, I feel it does much less to help pull the player in to the scene and set the tone. It feels more like background music than scene-setting music. There are also a lot more licensed pop songs present in the Until Dawn remake, and I’m not really sure why. They seem to just detract from the scene every time they show up and totally take me out of the world.
The Until Dawn remake also comes with numerous accessibility options which I have not fully explored, but the most notable one is the ability to adjust the difficulty, timing, and presence of QTEs for those players that are unable to complete them. On that note, the infamous “DON’T MOVE” moments where the player must hold the controller perfectly still have returned in a big way. On the PlayStation 4 version, I’ve sort of cheated my way through these by simply setting the controller down on the floor. By reflex, I did it in this remake as well and was surprised to find that Ballistic Moon saw my BS coming a mile away. The new DualSense features include haptics that make the controller “hop” around on flat surfaces during these segments, registering the hops as movement to prevent you from cheating, but aren’t strong enough to register movement of the controller if it’s in your hands. I thought this was a funny little addition, and kudos where it’s due for outsmarting me.
I am also somewhat dismayed that the Until Dawn remake does not have online multiplayer in the vein of every other Supermassive game – just couch co-op. The original Until Dawn did not feature online play either, but this had become such a popular group game over the years I felt it was a no brainer to add that in with a friend pass. I streamed the remake to my friend over Discord while I drove on the controller, and we split the characters up for which of us would make their decisions. Not the optimal way to play, since I had to do all the QTEs, even for her characters (Mike’s QTEs running through the forest still gave me a heart attack), but we had a great time nonetheless. That said, Until Dawn really only works with friends. Whether that’s in person or over streams, it’s kind of the only way to play.
The Until Dawn remake has significantly better performance than the original. My PC rig is an RTX 3080 and Ryzen 7 3800x, and I ran the game on high settings at 1440p 60 FPS. It ran beautifully, with only a handful of stutters over the course of the game and no bugs, glitches, or crashes to speak of. There were no noticeable frame drops or clipping issues.
I’ve been ducking around the biggest problem with this remake, which is that it costs $60 and has no upgrade path for owners of the original game. I don’t know that I can recommend the Until Dawn remake wholeheartedly when it’s such a modest upgrade, and the original PlayStation 4 game is regularly on sale for $15.
If, however, you’re on PC where this is the only way to play it – I personally feel it is well worth it. PlayStation 5 players, I’d recommend waiting for the cost to come down if you’re waiting for a replay. If you do own a PlayStation and have never played before, the original Until Dawn is as amazing as it ever was, and I recommend playing it instead as soon as you are physically able.
Whichever way you play, I issue this challenge. If you’ve ever watched a B-horror movie and thought “these people are idiots. I would be much smarter than them and survive,” then I implore you to step into the twisted mountain machinations of this cheesy cabin in the woods and prove it. Your move.
Nirav reviewed the Until Dawn remake on PC with his own bought copy.