12/28/2023 0 Comments Zero punctuation gone homeWhat's more, it's the genre in which the cast list effectively doubles as a scoreboard, and you can let any of them get arbitrarily murdered without sacrificing their role in the story, because getting arbitrarily murdered largely is their role in the story. They're usually isolated with a lot of location revisiting, so the massive axe we saw in Act One can be splitting some nadgers in twain in Act Three. I think the teen slasher may well be the genre that can make the branching story thing actually work. Yes, Until Dawn is doing something right. So I was expecting to be dawn on Until Down, I mean down on Until Dawn, 'til I noticed I'd been playing for six hours straight and the edge of my seat had carved a furrow across my buttocks. Now obviously, every single one of David Cage's games have been one long exercise in sitting on a toilet looking sad, and quick-time events are to gameplay what a creepy moustache is to a primary school teacher. "No really, I'm terrified of Magners cider, Jaffa Cakes and handjobs." At one point a character brazenly asks, "Say, which three of these things do you find scariest?" And lo and behold, the three you pick will show up later. It also owes something to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories in that it tries to psychologically evaluate you to an extent, albeit with considerably less subtlety. So from that point, the game does the David Cage thing, that is, you steer a character who controls like they're standing on a Roomba with low batteries around some rooms looking for things to pick up and stare at like a monkey finding a purple banana, and then switch to scripted quick-time event chase sequences like you're playing Gone Home on one monitor and Guitar Hero on the other. I guess the party must have been fucking legendary before the buzz got killed by the whole "manslaughter" thing. While partying in Weird's holiday home, these carefree out-of-work actors accidentally act two of their friends to death, but all of them get back together the following year in the same house and don't feel in the least bit weird about it. Every single one of them could have their personalities fully summarized with one five-letter word: brave, hunky, bitch, funny, timid, weird, whore, and let's not forget, Black. You start Until Dawn and it's so fucking excited with itself you have to watch a little video going, "Decisions have consequences! Is your mind blown? Let's hope so, 'cause then you won't notice our complete lack of creativity!" Because the main cast are straight from the teen slasher default creation wizard. It's funny how developers of this sort of thing always act like no-one's ever thought of it before. I will have made the right decisions if every single one of these gurgleberks ends up upholstering the soft furnishings in Leatherface's man cave. I don't think you were paying attention, Until Dawn. Until Dawn is an interactive story of the David Cage school pushed through the filter of slasher movie with the promise being that if we make all the right decisions, perhaps we could keep all the out-of-work twenty-something actors alive. When the parade of out-of-work actors in their mid-to-late twenties pretending to be carefree teenagers with unfeasibly easy access to expensive holiday real estate seem to find no end of amusement in jumping out at each other ten million times across the first hour as the soundtrack shrieks like Sharon Stone just recrossed her legs in front of the violinists, Jason Voorhees is acting out the growing desires of the audience as he starts slitting them up like Christmas presents with good dentistry. But I like them because there's something very essentially cathartic about watching a bunch of complete twats get completely twatted. I mean, calling Friday the 13th "art" is like calling a face full of crusted shit "cosmetic surgery". Not that they're ever anything above god-awful. I have a soft spot for the slasher movie. This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Until Dawn.
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