Published , by Will Borger
Published , by Will Borger
I love Supermassive Games. I love House of Ashes. I love The Quarry. And even though I don’t think all of them work, I’m something of a Dark Pictures Anthology evangelist. I’m excited for every one of Supermassive's games, and they’re routinely part of the horror extravaganza my wife and I overdose on from Spooktember through Nopevember. So please believe me when I tell you that I wanted the Until Dawn remake to be good. It’s not. It, to be kind, runs like hot garbage on a PC that overwhelmingly clobbers the recommended system requirements. In fact, it ran so poorly that I eventually just stopped playing it.
Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way: Until Dawn doesn’t need a remake. The PS4 original turned nine this year, and still looks and runs very, very well, especially if you’re playing it on a PS5, one of the two systems the remake is releasing on (the other is PC). Why are we remaking games that are less than ten years old, you might ask? For the things modern-day Sony loves most in the world: easy money from established IPs and brand synergy. Over the last few years, Sony has become The House Pointless Remakes and Remasters Built, almost completely eschewing new IPs (there are a couple exceptions, like Returnal) and going all in on sequels (or remakes/remasters) of popular franchises like Horizon (which was remastered 7 years after its original release) and The Last of Us (The Last of Us: Part 2 Remastered released less than five years after the original game) and live service games like Concord. If you’re familiar with how Concord did (its servers were shut down two weeks after launch), you’ll know how this strategy is going. Hint: badly.
So it’s only fair that Until Dawn gets its turn, which I am sure Sony hopes will get people excited for the Until Dawn film set to release next year. Everything's gotta be a multimedia franchises these days, you know? And while remaking Supermassive’s breakthrough horror game isn’t as egregious as remastering The Last of Us: Part 2 less than five years after it came out, it still feels like a soulless cash-grab designed to more get people hyped for the upcoming Until Dawn than to preserve or enhance the original game.
Ironically, the whole thing is eerily similar to the original release. Yes, there are a few more scenes here and there, and a post-credit sequence that hints at a sequel. Sure, remake developer Ballistic Moon has made other changes, too, but almost all of them are to the game’s detriment. The fixed camera angles that defined the original have largely been replaced by a third-person, over-the-shoulder-like-Resident-Evil-4 camera. In theory, this is fine. In practice, it means that Until Dawn’s remake loses much of the cinematic quality that underlined the original’s “interactive movie” design.
Ballistic Moon has also bafflingly removed the ability to manually walk faster. Characters will speed up during sequences where it makes sense for them to be running, but removing the ability to speed them up on your own dime makes exploration slower. This, combined with the fact that the remake’s controls are generally clunkier than the original’s, means the game is generally less engaging to play. I get that clunky controls in horror games can enhance the spook factor, but Until Dawn’s quick-time events, and your ability to explore the environment, are what define the experience. When it doesn’t feel good, that’s a problem.
That’s a shame because all of the things that make Until Dawn great are still there. The story is engaging and campy in all the right ways, there are great performances from Hayden Panettiere, Peter Stormare, and Rami Malek, among others, and this is still a great game to play with friends, though I wish the pass-the-controller feature Supermassive introduced in their later games had made its way over. And, thanks to the new visuals, Until Dawn looks great.
But man does it run badly. The Until Dawn remake crashed on me twice in the first 40 minutes, and stuttered constantly, no matter how many settings I turned down or how much I tweaked my graphics settings. And my PC absolutely annihilates the recommended requirements. No matter what I did, Until Dawn ran poorly. And when some of the quick-time events you’ll deal with require Speedy Gonzales-level reactions, stuttering can mean you’ll miss crucial opportunities that can lead to pretty gruesome outcomes. This is a horror movie; people die. But if they do, I want them to die because I screwed up, not because I’m having technical issues.
Reader, I tried. I really did. Eventually, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I turned the Until Dawn remake off, and began installing the original game. I hope Ballistic Moon fixes the Until Dawn remake. I really do. Until Dawn is a great game, and people deserve to be able to play it. But it’s impossible to justify the cost of this remaster when you can get the original on PS4 for a fraction of the price. It already feels like a cash grab, and the state of the launch doesn’t help matters. As it stands, this is one nightmare you’re probably better off waking up from.
These impressions are based on a PC code provided by the publisher. The Until Dawn remake is available now on PS5 and PC.