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Until Dawn Review (PS5) – Supermassive Games Marquee Horror Outing Gets A Stunning Current Gen Director’s Cut

until dawn ps5 review

Given the width and breadth of Supermassive Games output since Until Dawn released all the way back in 2015, it can be easy to forget just how much the Guildford based developer got right with its inaugural PlayStation 4 survival horror offering. A taut, atmospheric and visually appealing genre effort that would go on to shape Supermassive Games’ modus operandi for the years that would follow, Until Dawn has now found itself in the position of having a remake of sorts as we approach its tenth anniversary.

Until Dawn PS5 Review


Supermassive Games Best Horror Outing Gets A Stunning Current Gen Director’s Cut

Now to be clear, this remake of Until Dawn actually tampers very little with the core gameplay loop of its 2015 source material. This means that the third-person exploration, non-linear narrative, light puzzle solving and QTE elements of the original game remain wholly intact here – so don’t expect any major deviations from the PS4 version of the game. In fact, it might be best just to think of Until Dawn on PS5 as more something akin to a 4K director’s cut, rather than an overhauled take on a title most folks are already very familiar with. Therefore, our original review of Until Dawn on PS4 still endures as an effective critique of the story, pacing and gameplay systems that feature in Until Dawn in 2024.

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As a primer for the uninitiated, Until Dawn’s setting clearly wears its 1990s/2000s teen slasher influences on its sleeves. Centering on a group of eight young friends that find themselves staying at the frosty, snow-dappled Blackwood Mountain retreat after two of their acquaintances went missing a year before, Until Dawn follows each of them as they begin to fall victim to a nameless terror, all the while their own egos, misgivings and unique personalities result in an evergreen dysfunctionality within the group.

Using this setting as the backbone for its non-linear story progression where your decisions matter by not only open up new story paths, scenarios and areas, but can also result in each of the characters either surviving or dying horribly, it’s here that Until Dawn draws direct parallels to the more contemporary likes of The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Quarry and most recently, The Casting of Frank Stone.

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However, Until Dawn stands heads and shoulders above many of those efforts in a great number of ways. The first is that the quality of voice acting is much better than it has been in many of Supermassive Games’ most recent titles, with performances from established actors the likes of Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody, No Time To Die), Hayden Panettiere (Heroes, Nashville), Peter Stormare (Constantine) and Brett Dalton (Marvel’s Agents of Shield), that are a world away from the decidedly more wooden acting seen in the likes of The Casting of Frank Stone, for example.

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Elsewhere, Until Dawn absolutely understands the assignment of its teen slasher setting and runs that playbook to the hilt, with squabbling besties, arrogant jocks, awkward loners, messy kills and all the other trappings one would expect from the genre. Put simply, Until Dawn is the teen slasher trope made pixel and I’m absolutely here for it in all of its cringey, splattery glory.

In terms of what this Until Dawn remake brings to the table, let’s start with the visual side of the equation. By upgrading to Unreal Engine 5, Until Dawn’s native PS5 outing looks better than it ever has, with a huge uptick in texture detail, facial animation quality, lighting and shadow quality – all of which serve to deftly underscore the tense atmospherics of the game even further still. The upgrade in visual fidelity afforded by Unreal Engine 5 also manifests itself subtly too, with contextual facial animations now being present for each character as they roam the environment, grimacing if they find something that horrifies them, or otherwise adjusting to the environment at hand, while the level of facial detail has skyrocketed with visible skin pores, imperfections, small beads of sweat and more all looking simply incredible.

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Unfortunately all this added visual fidelity comes at a price and those looking for a 60 frames per second performance mode will be disappointed. This Unreal Engine 5 powered remake of Until Dawn is locked to 30 frames per second and while I too would have loved to have seen the game running at a silky smooth framerate, the cinematic style of the game coupled with the high end rendering features mean that 30 frames per second doesn’t bite as badly as it as otherwise would – thanks in no small part to relatively decent motion blur implementation that is present here.

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Also on the technical front, having a midnight mode normalise to audio output is very handy indeed. This is because it allows you to play Until Dawn when people nearby are sleeping by allowing jump scares and other such sounds that would normally be pitched higher to be set at the same volume as everything else in the scene. It’s a thoughtful feature, for sure.

Though the upgrade to a more cutting edge game engine is certainly welcome, the Until Dawn remake also makes a pretty big change to the manner in which perspective is provided to the player. No longer showing players a forced camera perspective, Until Dawn now embraces full third-person camera movement (ala Capcom’s Resident Evil 2, 3 and 4 remakes) which not only makes this remake feel more frenetic than it did before, but also allows players to essentially peel back the curtain on certain areas and environments that were otherwise not fully shown off in the 2015 version of the game.

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That said, I can’t help but feel that the shift to a roaming third-person camera robs this remake a little of the tension that the fixed camera angles of the original were able to provide. After all, fear is at its most potent as you feel the sensation of anticipation souring in your belly, and the original Until Dawn did a great job of engineering the creeping dread that would eventually lead to some of the game’s most horrifying moments. All the same, Until Dawn’s focus on sense-tingling atmospherics and outright terrifying scares still ensure that Until Dawn remains a genuinely unsettling affair.

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It also remains true that there is a whole chunk of replayability here too. Not only is there significant mileage in replaying Until Dawn’s story to see how many survivors you can get, or merely just see what happens when one character dies instead of another, but the sheer amount of different dialogue choices and event choices that can be made, warrant playthroughs on their own. All of this is before we start looking at the collectibles that can be scooped up – of which a number of new trinkets have been added for this current-gen remake.

Though Until Dawn’s PS5 debut is primarily concerned with a refresh of its aesthetics, some more nuanced adjustments have also been made to the content of the game as well. A lengthened prologue provides additional exposition on the events that lead up to the first act, while a pair of reworked post credit stingers provide a different perspective on events that were chronicled in the original game – and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Even though nearly a decade has passed since Until Dawn first spooked and tore its way onto PlayStation consoles, its keenly judged take on the teen slasher trope together with convincing voice actor performances and non-linear narrative still remain appealing – and arguably sit at the apex of anything developer Supermassive Games has created. Of course, if you were indifferent to Until Dawn when it originally released, this shiny new 2024 edition will do precious little to change your mind. For everyone else however, Until Dawn’s PS5 outing represents the definitive version of one of the most effective horror titles released in the last console generation.

Until Dawn is out now on PS5.

Review code kindly provided by PR.

Score

8.5

The Final Word

Even though nearly a decade has passed since Until Dawn first spooked and tore its way onto PlayStation consoles, its keenly judged take on the teen slasher trope together with convincing voice actor performances and non-linear narrative still remain appealing - and arguably sit at the apex of anything developer Supermassive Games has created. Of course, if you were indifferent to Until Dawn when it originally released, this shiny new 2024 edition will do precious little to change your mind. For everyone else however, Until Dawn's PS5 outing represents the definitive version of one of the most effective horror titles released in the last console generation.