Until Dawn EP21: Wendigo is Wendigone!

By Shamus Posted Friday Feb 3, 2017

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 86 comments


Link (YouTube)

So why DO the writers have these characters constantly wading through freezing water? The excuse I keep hearing is, “It’s movie physics!” But is it? Even movies acknowledge just how brutal freezing water is, even if movie characters bounce back a little faster than in real life. I’ve never seen a movie where someone jumped into icy water and it was portrayed like they were just “chilly”.

There doesn’t seem to even be a point to it. The water at the bottom of the mine (where they find Josh) is the only part of the story where the water is used for suspense or to hide a threat. The rest of the time it’s just a pointless little moment where you have to walk slow for fifteen seconds. It’s such a strange design choice. For people like me it’s this huge break in immersion as our characters are repeatedly exposed to deadly conditions with no impact, and for everyone else… what? Even if you’re not pulled out of the game, it’s not like these short swims are interesting or add anything to the story.

Also, the end of Matt’s story is kind of a letdown. It seems like they’re still on the mountain. Still in the woods. It’s still dark. They’re still lost. All I needed was one line of dialog along the lines of “Oh look, there’s the [secure building]! We’ll be safe there!”

So that was Until Dawn. It bugged me in a lot of small ways, but I kind of admire it. It’s full of cool ideas, wonderful scenery, great character designs, and really offers a lot of branching decisions / outcomes. The problems I have with the game are mostly problems I have with the genre it’s riffing on. It feels like the game has an experimental / indie approach to gameplay, but with AAA production values. Despite my gripes, I think the whole thing is an impressive accomplishment.

 


From The Archives:
 

86 thoughts on “Until Dawn EP21: Wendigo is Wendigone!

  1. “Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!”

    1. Tizzy says:

      For a certain definition of “live”…

    2. Christopher says:

      I’m so happy Josh went this way with it. It’s out of character, really. But on the other hand, it is sort of subversive play, considering some characters usually die.

      1. Tizzy says:

        AT least, there was one guy with an incinerator who didn’t make good use of it and met a grisly fate, so that’s adhering to tradition.

      2. Benjamin Hilton says:

        I really don’t enjoy watching people die in horrible ways as the main point of a story. I thought I was going to hate this season, so the no death playthrough really made me happy too.

        1. Emily says:

          Yeah, I was not looking forward to this season’s apparent premise of “a bunch of children die because grown men don’t like their attitudes” and I’m super relieved it played out like it did.

          1. MichaelGC says:

            Well, look on the bright side – if it hadn’t played out like it didn’t, there’d have been nothing to moan about. Oh wait.

      3. Locke says:

        Josh is a trickster spirit, not a death cultist. He doesn’t kill characters for the sake ofi t, but to subvert the tone that the game is trying to impose on his playthrough. If he’s playing a horror game that expects a lone survivor, nobody dies is the more subversive approach.

        1. Christopher says:

          Josh is also already a character in the game with some issues who wants to harm everyone anyway.

  2. Ledel says:

    If it makes you feel any better, there is a case where a character falling into the water kills someone. If Mike fails enough chasing Jessica (i.e. falling in the water off the log), the wendigo kills her before he gets there.

    1. Ilseroth says:

      Well that’s not due to cold, more due to clumsiness.

    2. Tizzy says:

      My take on the water wading is that it’s a cheap way to build tension. Characters move really slowly, etc.

  3. Christopher says:

    http://www.strawpoll.me/12260350

    Now that you’ve seen it all, which teen main character did you end up liking the most? I threw up a strawpoll of every non-joke answer option(We all like Peter Stormare). So go for it, and give reasons in the comments. Way back in episode 8 I ranked them like this:
    1. Mike
    2. Sam
    3. Chris
    4. Emily
    5. Josh
    6. Jessica
    7. Matt
    8. Ashley

    Looking at it now, I would probably move Sam down under Emily. She’s pretty and pleasant, but you basically never see her for the middle of the game. Except for Matt and Jess, she probably has the least screentime, or at least heavily concentrated at the beginning and end. Watching a second playhtough, I didn’t appreciate her as much as the first time even though she’s a lot in the ending couple of episodes.

    1. Tizzy says:

      Sam is one of those that I guess we should like (she’s the biggest name in the cast and the canonical final girl, too bad I did mess up her don’t move segment!).

      But I simply could not get behind that. Too bland, too little interesting interaction with the others, not enough screen time.

      1. Benjamin Hilton says:

        I can understand that. I mean I know that the reason she isn’t in the middle allot is for the mechanical reason of making sure there are people to play as in the end if you get everyone else killed, but it does take away from her character development a bit.

    2. Grimwear says:

      It’s a bit hard to rank since Jessica and Matt are just throw away characters that are almost made to die. Potentially some of the others as well if Josh hadn’t been playing so well. A lot of the characters that you end up liking are those that get the most screen time so I enjoyed Chris and Mike, not sure why the group initially hated on Chris so much but maybe in other playthroughs he’s insufferable. Sam isn’t bad either except it gets really annoying when she constantly abandons others to go lone wolf because it’s faster. Without weapons. And then never encounters wendigos. She should have been picked off so quickly.

      And then least favorite…ugh Emily. Maybe she just rubs me the wrong way and is so grating and arrogant and just treats people like garbage. Heck in the house scene we see her push Ashley and that’s the good ending. According to Josh she can even shut the door on Ashley to make sure she dies. Even the debriefing has everyone recounting their experiences and yet Emily goes on about Matt and how she’s his girlfriend and super loyal and it just rubs me the wrong way like she doesn’t actually care about him and instead just has to say it. At least with Jessica you get that nice moment when she says Mike came for her and you feel the relationship become deeper. It’s just sad that Jessica is missing for so much of the game since the awkward teenage relationship scene between Jessica and Mike gets forgotten since it happened so early.

      1. guy says:

        To me, Chris felt insufferable during the “teens screwing around” phase, but once things became serious he made a real comeback.

      2. Benjamin Hilton says:

        Yeah Emily was borderline for me, but when she pushes Ashley so she can go through the door first she just dropped straight to the bottom, even accounting for Ashley causing the scare about her bite.

        1. Jokerman says:

          Well… Ashley straight up locks Chris out and makes sure he dies if he doesn’t shoot him self in Josh’s last prank. Right after the stranger dies, opinions of Ashley is often very diverse due to the fact she can come across as completely sweet and nice or pretty bad based on your choices.

          Even without the Chris thing, choices before that can make her some very unrepentant and uncaring about Hannah and Beth dying.

          1. Emily says:

            The thing about Ashley is she’s a pretty vindictive coward when her back is against the wall, so if you don’t do anything to bring that out she’s perfectly likable and nice but if anyone endangers her she will pretty much unflinchingly fuck them up regardless of if they actually deserve it.

          2. Benjamin Hilton says:

            This kinda links to the argument about roleplaying to save them. If Ashley investigates when she hears Jess’s voice she dies, but if she doesn’t stop to help (which many argue is what her character would do) she lives.

            1. Shoeboxjeddy says:

              There’s two ways to roleplay Ashley living through that. The first is if Chris is alive, she could be more concerned that he can’t keep up and justify avoiding the detour for his sake (he’s pretty shaken/beaten up by this point no matter what, thanks to the Stranger death sequence). The second is based on how closely you read the Stranger’s notes. It specifically calls out that the Wendigos can “perfectly mimic their prey” and Mike has INSISTED that Jess is dead. Even quite recently. So Ashley could logically (and correctly!) deduce that this is a trap.

              What I love the devs for doing is trying to prank the player by having the first Jess scene since her attack (if she’s still alive) take place almost immediately before this trap. They set you up for the fall pretty great here, using omniscient knowledge you have that the characters don’t against you!

              1. Zak McKracken says:

                The other (meta-)roleplaying way is this: You never divide a group unless you’re forced.
                The non-roleplaying way is: People entering dark rooms without telling anyone die.

                But then, Ashley is the most easily frightened of the group. Whatever bad actions she has in the came come out of fear, so it would be completely out of character for her to go. For anyone else with a minimum amount of brain, at least you should tell the group that you heard something, then decide what to do.

        2. Baron Tanks says:

          Yeah, I thought Emily made a pretty nice turnaround. I was pretty much sympathetic towards her at some point. But here in the post credits she just completely regresses into her previous behavior. I wonder if this is supposed to be her not growing or if it’s an oversight/screw-up by the writers.

          1. Fists says:

            That’s pretty believable for me, I’ve known people like that, they become good team members when they’re really under pressure and need people around, especially if it’s away from spectators. Then, once back in the public eye and recounting the story the narcissism returns and they need to big themselves up as an individual not as a team member.

    3. tmtvl says:

      If we ignore stuff we didn’t see in the LP I’d have to go with Sam or Chris, because they weren’t involved in the fatal prank…

      However, Mike would literally die for his friends, so I can’t help but like him.

    4. Wraith says:

      I don’t really get how anyone can not like Chris. He’s the only one except Sam who wasn’t involved with the prank that got Hannah and Beth killed (to our knowledge) and is usually the only to be actively regretful about it. I think the worst his characterization can diverge is that he can actively be played as a spineless coward, but most first-time players aren’t going to go for those options and thus aren’t going to see that side – additionally, if played that way Chris will almost certainly end up dead. So while I guess some people can be annoyed by his cringe-y antics in the early game I don’t know how anyone will dislike him by the end.

      On the other hand, I don’t get how anyone can like Emily. Her top qualities cited by advocates are her intelligence and resourcefulness but IMO it just does not make up for the grating core personality flaws. She bullies and berates her boyfriend incessantly into towing her party line. She panics at the drop of a hat when Matt is around. She constantly incites conflicts with other characters often for no real reason. The prank that humiliated Hannah and got both her and Beth killed was her brainchild. If Ashley reveals the information from the journal that the bite means nothing then Emily retaliates in the ending sequence by pushing her against the wall while they’re being chased by the Wendigos (as we saw in this episode). In post-game she’s usually going to be actively trying to sic the police on Mike for pointing the gun at her, and unless you agree with her on almost every decision as Matt she throws him under the bus to the police as well, and if he’s dead talks mad shit about him and doesn’t regret a thing.

      Matt’s characterization really suffers because his central relationship mostly revolves around the dilemma of “Are you or are you not a huge sycophant for Emily?” and he is by far the easiest character to kill. The vast majority of first-time players are going to get him killed because the method of saving him is bizarrely specific and counter-intuitive. He can have some really awful instances of divergent characterization that send him into unsympathetic territory (most obviously when he can badger Emily about Mike at the worst possible time) but again most first-time players aren’t going to go for that. Outside of his relationship with Emily there’s just not much to him, and he’s by far the most wasted character.

      While Jessica can also die early, saving her is much more straightfoward, and the writers do a better job of giving her concrete traits before she disappears from the narrative by using the stereotypical “High School Beauty Queen is secretly insecure” archetype as a shorthand for gaining her audience sympathy. If she lives (usually she will) then it’s practically impossible to dislike her by the end of the game because she’s just so pitiful with her myriad horrible injuries.

      Ashley on the other hand can safely be labeled the most divisive and potentially divergent character in the game. She can be played in two primary ways – a vindictive, grudge-holding hypocrite or a hysterical yet curious woman terrified for her life. Even when played sympathetically, her worst character traits are visible under the surface, most visibly when she panics and sics Mike on Emily after seeing the bite on her neck. But if she’s played unsympathetically, she’s an ultimate case of the “Bitch In Sheep’s Clothing” trope. She claims she’s willing to sacrifice herself for Chris yet if Chris does shoot her she will murder Chris by inaction when he is chased by Wendigos after the Stranger’s death. She sics Mike on Emily and can conceal that she was totally wrong. While it’s unlikely a first-time player will most of this side of her, it’s by far the easiest to glean compared to other characters.

      1. Christopher says:

        On the other hand, I don't get how anyone can like Emily.

        For me, her entertainment value places her above the likes of Matt and Jess(who vanish), Josh(sympathetic but villainous) and Ashley(terribly cowardly and self-centered). She’s fun to watch, which makes up for her lack of being at all pleasant, even if it doesn’t place her at the top of my list exactly. She also gets a pretty big exploration/action sequence in the middle, which is a plus.

      2. Zak McKracken says:

        I think some of the disagreement about who’s “better” is because the question can be read in two ways:
        1: Which character’s personality do you like? I.e.: who would you prefer to be friends with IRL?
        2: Which character made the story more interesting / is written better / does the things which make you like the story / … something

        If we’re talking about number one, I completely agree, couldn’t have said it better.
        Sam wins hands down, Chris is up there. Mike redeemed himself after a bad start, and Em … Em all the way at the bottom. She had a few scenes where she looked all vulnerable and sympathetic but as soon as other people are around she’s unbearable.

  4. Tizzy says:

    So I played the game a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed it, more than I thought I would. I think the horror movie format and adherence to tropes makes the move from movie to game mechanics work well. Characters are idiots, but that’s expected. The party split and switch to different POV makes sense. And I felt real suspense throughout the game, even though in hindsight a lot of the sequences are safe.

    Also, the fact that your actions can kill both the characters you’re playing and the other characters is inspired. The tracking of the butterfly effects is well-done. All of this helps create anticipation, tension, and makes you second-guess yourself.

    So let’s balance all of this with some mechanical criticism:

    The quick-time events can be quite unforgiving. It did not ruin my experience, but if there’d been a setting to allow for more time, I would have definitely used it. This inflexibility cuts the game off from a wider potential player base.

    The item hunt can be fundamentally at odds with the rest of the game. It’s a great addition from a pacing POV, it belongs to the genre in principle, but the game should have a much stricter delimitation between “quiet exploration time, let’s build the tension while researching the threat” and “danger time, you need to run”.

    Related to the previous point: the game yanks you out of free exploration mode periodically when something needs to happen. It makes sense from a story perspective, it’s required to build tension in the game, but this clearly doesn’t mix well with the whole item hunt thing. Sometimes, you’ll see several shiny points of interest things, and some are items while one is a one-way ticket to the next scene. Choose your order carefully!

    That leads to immersion-breaking play that Josh did not demonstrate too often (the benefit of having played through before). Where you reach a fork, and you’re trying to figure out which way the devs expect you to go, so that you can go the other way and not miss the optional content. So maybe you inch your way forward down each path, because you don’t know when controls might be yanked away from you for the next cutscene/QTE.

    [EDIT] Oh, and the freaking totems! Bloody useless lot, all of them. At first, you think they will show up in a timely fashion, but they mostly don’t. Most of them make no sense as you get them, and those that do are misleading. (Oh here, Matt, take this flare gun because the totem told me to. So that you can fire it in the air when there is no reason to believe ANYONE is around…). And the categories (loss, death, fortune,…) are ill-defined and useless.

    So. Very enjoyable all in all, but with room for improvement. And let’s hope the sequel brings us a completely different situation.

  5. DTor214 says:

    Is it possible that the deep water sections exist to slow the player down while the game loads in a new section of the level? Like the elevators in Mass Effect?

  6. Tizzy says:

    After checking on the wiki, the point of the Em and Ash scuffle (or lack thereof if their relationship had been better) is that it affects their placement in the house, and so who gets to leave last. (Em left before Ash in this playthrough.)

    If you don’t mess up, it doesn’t matter. But in a very specific set of circumstances, you could have whichever of the two left last dying, while the other survives.

    I actually appreciate these small tweaks. They’re easy to implement, easy to miss when you’re playing, but the fact that the devs made the effort to include them makes me happy.

  7. Grudgeal says:

    So, I guess in the end, Matt did not equal MATT!

  8. Daniel England says:

    Just want to echo something that Rutskarn mentioned in the previous episode.

    Josh, and his motivations, take up an enormous amount of this game. And by the end I was really able to empathize with his situation. It is understandable that losing two of his sisters makes Josh harbor strong feelings towards those who were instrumental in their deaths. That’s not in any way an attempt to condone his actions, but they are at least understandable from someone who has experienced trauma and hasn’t been able to properly deal with it. Josh is clearly in a bad way, but he doesn’t have an arc. There is no resolution to this man who has channeled his trauma into scarring his friends. Josh is either killed by Hannah (if Sam and Mike do not find Hannah’s notebook) or he fully loses his mind becoming a true monster. So I’m wondering what the game is suggesting with these being the only two options. Is it saying that Josh is already lost, too far gone to recover? That would really bother me.

    Now, to be fair, you also have to put that in perspective with the rest of the game. I mean, what is the game saying by having Jess die if Mike is too slow? Or Em die if she falls in a rock grinder? Or Matt die if he wasted the flare AND tried to help Em get off the fallen tower? Or everyone die if Sam runs to blow up the house too soon?

    The way I see it, any of these character’s possible “arcs” can be cut short by their deaths. That is, in some ways, what make their death meaningful (They still have things they want to do.) But with Josh, there is no way out. Watching this series, knowing that they is no way to get Josh to a state where he can recover, does make me resent the game a bit.

    As an aside… How to you think Mr. and Mrs. Washington feel when the kids return from their cabin sans their own kids… for the second time?

    1. Christopher says:

      To a certain extent, I think this is the worst knock against Mike. Since Josh isn’t dead and Mike watches him get dragged away, he should be aware that hey: Every free wendigo just ripped each other apart/exploded in the cabin. There aren’t any left in the mines, and it’s worth checking to see if Josh is still around. If they had come after one day instead of thirty or whatever it was in the post credit scene, he would be perfectly fine. Now, it’s just tragic that he turned in the same way as his sister.

      It’s possible that this has something to do with a “canonical” path. I wrote a little about this in some of the comment discussions about choices. If Jess is clearly dead, Mike isn’t an idiot for not climbing down after her, and she’s clearly meant to be an early death considering how little she matters later, with only a ten-minute section along with Matt. If the TRUE end of Josh is that his sister mauls him in the water, then Mike isn’t an idiot for abandoning him either.

      I would have loved for there to be an after credits-sequence where they just go and get the living Josh, though. I normally have sympathy for villains anyway and don’t want them to be killed rather than reform, but in Josh’s case his head is messed up in a sad way in addition to only being evil in a largely harmless prankster kind of way. I’m fine with the guys giving him a punch or two, but it was already too much when they carried him out to the ruined cabin and tied him up. Feels like it was more to set up the rest of the game than it was because that’s a reasonable thing to do.

      1. Zak McKracken says:

        Exactly that.

        They went into the mine at night to get Josh while he had the key. Now it’s day again, a large number of wendigos are no more, and nobody wants to go and rescue him? Mike mentions Josh being caught by a Wendigo and Sam just accepts that he must be dead — but they both know that he would not be the first to be caught and survive, and actually he did that himself before. So really, that’s inexcusable.

        If at least Hannah survived and was reunited with her brother in the end, that could have added some very weird sort of closure to the arc.

  9. guy says:

    Wait what there were eight people who could die and yet literally no one died?

    I’m going to credit this to deferring a lot of the decision-making to Shamus’s innate common sense.

  10. Benjamin Hilton says:

    That’s a really weird centerpiece.

    Yeah, I kept expecting it to get taken over by the Darkness, then we would have to dodge it to get it to break open the door so we could escape.

    1. Jokerman says:

      What, you don’t have a few of those around the house? I thought everyone did.

    2. Ledel says:

      But that would put them in an unwinnable position, seeing as nobody there has magic flashlight powers!

  11. Cinebeast says:

    You did it! This was a fun season, guys. A shame Mumbles didn’t get to see the rest of it.

    Now, I think the finale is okay, but after thinking about it I couldn’t help imagining a more interesting version. We know that Josh rigged the whole mansion to mess with the others, right? And they eventually find his command center, but don’t do anything with it.

    Personally, I wanted them to use Josh’s traps and nonsense to ward off the wendigos. The traps aren’t fatal, of course, but I think they could have used them to at least distract the wendigos. As it stands, the finale revolves around the finicky “hold still” mechanic, and no one really likes that. Swapping between cameras, using dummies and jumpscares and shit to keep the wendigos’ attention while the others escape the mansion one by one — that just sounds a lot more interesting to me.

    Like Night Trap, basically. The way I see it, Until Dawn is really just an elaborate, polished retool of that game anyway. I can’t help feeling like they really missed an opportunity here.

    1. Locke says:

      The finale looks spectacular. Watching it as a let’s play was amazing. Gameplay-wise, a bit of a miss, though.

  12. Daemian Lucifer says:

    So why DO the writers have these characters constantly wading through freezing water? The excuse I keep hearing is, “It's movie physics!” But is it? Even movies acknowledge just how brutal freezing water is, even if movie characters bounce back a little faster than in real life. I've never seen a movie where someone jumped into icy water and it was portrayed like they were just “chilly”.

    Well,technically they were wet for half an hour,tops(due to all the jumping you do between the teens).Its not that impossible to keep warm for that long while doing highly physical things and being full of adrenaline while wet in sub zero temperatures.

    1. Zak McKracken says:

      It’s mostly the “standing or walking around in soaked clothes in the snow” after the bathing that strikes me as deadly.

      You can totally swim water close to freezing and be fine, but you have to get dry and warm pretty quickly afterwards. Sam’s running pants could actually dry quickly enough, but Mike’s coat would have turned into an ice jacket rather quickly.

  13. Daemian Lucifer says:

    The reason sam left them behind and is going alone through the woods is that she is immortal.

  14. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Oh,a thing I forgot to mention last time:If you havent,you should really watch the hannibal tv show.The food on display there is sublime.And the preparation,magnificent.

    Oh,theres also some killing and plotting,but thats secondary.

  15. Phantos says:

    Now that Josh’s Final Fantasy XV update has finished downloading, we can eagerly await the next sea-

    Even I don’t want to finish that sentence.

    1. tmtvl says:

      Dude, Final Fantasy XV is really, REALLY good.

      It’d be a season like Fallout: New Vegas, which is also a really good game.

      1. Ledel says:

        Yeah, but the last 3 weeks would be nothing but complaining. “Why can’t you run again Josh? Why are we stuck in this linear hallway for the past 2 hours? Why do level ups mean almost literally nothing?”

      2. Cinebeast says:

        It’s good, but even if they played on easy and skipped all the sidequests it would still take them four months to finish the season. Experience has shown that shorter games work best for the show.

      3. Phantos says:

        The comment was more that it would be a really long game, rather than about the quality.

        It’s just… KOTOR was a such a drag, and that was a game everyone on Spoiler Warning LIKED.

  16. Phantos says:

    I hope the wolf made it out okay. :(

  17. Jokerman says:

    The bit with those hanging bodies doesn’t really work when nobody dies, when people do die… a bunch of the cast is hanging from those hooks, so Mike and Sam’s reaction makes a lot more sense.

    1. Stu Hacking says:

      Also when they crack open the door and a rush of water carries the head(s) out, this will include heads of any dead cast.

  18. Steve C says:

    Super glad you guys played this and I did not. Ton of fun watching you play and yet if I was playing myself I would have loathed it.

  19. lurkey says:

    Nobody died?! In a slasher?! It’s like, like, go to all you can eat steak and burger restaurant and only order lettuce, like put all your points in melee and lug a big ass flamethrower everywhere, like watch porn and not..well, like watch porn for acting and camera work! Worst season ever! Boo! Boooooo! >:-( *throws peanuts*

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        *slow clap*

    1. Phantos says:

      Rocks fall, everyone lives

  20. Henson says:

    I am a bit disappointed with how this story all turned out. Josh’s plotline, as Rutskarn pointed out, has no real resolution; this, to me, is a major problem, because Until Dawn is essentially Josh’s story. Sure, it has wendigos, but these are essentially dumped into the story in the final act. Josh’s mental breakdown from losing his sisters is the narrative throughline from the very start, the key to the story’s mystery plot, but it has no real end.

    Even the revelation that Hannah is a wendigo has no real payoff: Josh realizes the truth, but is given no time to ponder this new information. The other characters don’t discuss this revelation in any non-expository way. It essentially has no purpose.

    So what we’re left with is two plotlines: Josh’s breakdown and wendigos, which have no real relation to each other. This game seriously needs to connect the dots between these stories. We need to see the connection between the characters’ guilt over their prank with Hannah’s fate as a monster. We need to see Josh’s guilt and remorse become external as well as internal; shape his actions in relation to his sister and his friends. And this needs to happen earlier than in the last forty minutes.

    1. Geebs says:

      Josh escapes and shows up as an optional boss in Bloodborne. His final act of trolling is that the player finds out, after beating him, that the path he was guarding leads precisely nowhere.

    2. Sleeping Dragon says:

      Here’s an idea. Josh learns that Hannah is wendigoed but then, depending on previous choices, either assists the other characters in their escape, (redeeming his role in the first part of the story, reconnecting to the other cast members and symbolically accepting the loss of his sisters making a first step on the path to tecovery, if he survives), or he goes completely off the deep end and betrays the other characters to the creature he still thinks of as his sister, either dying in the process or, more in line with horror tropes, surviving for the post credits scene.

      1. Zak McKracken says:

        That or he could have a moment with the rest of the people, then sacrifice himself to get them out. Maybe he could even have a moment with his wendigo sister. Something where she hesitates because she recognizes him or so. Or he could just be properly saved. Although a completely happy end might be out of tone with the rest of the story.

  21. Christopher says:

    Could you give us any hints about what the next game might be?

    1. MichaelGC says:

      Horizon: Zero Dawn.

      1. Turtlebear says:

        Well they did eventually.

  22. Galad says:

    I think this is a good game, because even though I’ve watched a playthrough I would still want to do a playthrough myself, if I could – and I don’t remember where the exact spots of the important who lives/who dies decisions are. Of course, since I don’t own a PS4 and don’t intend to buy one, the best I can do is watch youtube so there’s that. Any recommended Until Dawn viewing?

  23. Abnaxis says:

    Tales from the Borderlands is AWESOME!

    I just finished a weekend binge-play of it, and it’s a great story, and I think Chris brought it up in this SW video, and I had to just come out and say it here…

    I really hope there’s a SW season of it, or a some sort of critique of it, or something here eventually.

    1. Redingold says:

      Gotta agree, it’s my favourite out of all the Telltale Games I’ve played.

  24. NotSteve says:

    I’m kind of surprised. I’d think that wading through water would be the last thing that could break immersion.

    1. MichaelGC says:

      You thought: “I’ll just take the plunge and float this one down here submerged by all the other comments,” huh?

      1. lucky7 says:

        It’s more a stream-of-consciousness thing, I’m guessing.

        1. Sleeping Dragon says:

          I hate to break the flow of conversation but was this really necessary? There are better ways to break the ice. you know.

          1. ehlijen says:

            Just go with the flow, mate!

  25. Nope, that was anticlimactic. They needed to die. I feel bad for Josh, but the rest of them should have stuck together and bonded with cannibals for years afterwards. This game was actually not too bad, except for the only two choices you could make at each diverging path. Next time, they should make it scarier and less cliche (either everyone dies or everyone lives…)

  26. I really like this games ending (when they all survive).

    They all seem more down to earth, more modest (Jess especially).

    The decision they made a year before to prank Hannah caused The Stranger to not be able to get the The Makkapitew (alpha wendigo and last wendigo still roaming freely on the mountain), possessing Hannah and transforming her and setting in motion some of the events we see in the game. Boom! Butterfly effect!

    It’s also a shame that Josh forgot to play the totem video.
    Here is the full Events of the past video, chronologically speaking the narration of the video sounds like it could be by The Stranger while he was talking to the kids at the main building.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz2_kHPZobE

    1. Zak McKracken says:

      Wow, that’s actually an important plot point.

      Of course, it also opens a big plot hole because that means the Stranger knew where the two girls were, and he could have had a look if they survived. Seeing as how easily the teens get in and out of that place, he (if not the search teams) should have been able to find them.

  27. Shamus you forgot to mention the sound design. The music is great but the context audio even better. This can be heard when Chris and Ashley are walking in the basement of the old hotel/lodge section, as (SW) Josh plays around a little by going to the door opening then back again, allowing us to hear the music swell then calm down again as the controlled character move closer/further away.

    I have no idea how many places they do this, but it seems subtle and it lets the music intensify/swell based on how fast (or not) the player moves a character.

    There is some impressive technical skill behind this game.
    The game developer hasn’t released any major titles (of their own) besides Until Dawn
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_Games

    One can only imagine what they might do next, I’m hoping for a similar but bigger game (technically speaking), which should be easier due to the success of Until Dawn and they shouldn’t have issues getting funding.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Its tough to comment on sound when he heard practically none of it.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        Speaking of sound, will it be possible at some stage to for us to get hold of the whole of Groove Until Dawn somehow, perhaps as part of a future album or whatnot?

  28. NoneCallMeTim says:

    So, no one commented when a character (Matt?) used the magical shotgun to jam a door?

    Also: my take on why the wendigos were fighting:
    The miner wendigos were trying to kill / eat the characters. The Hannah-go was trying to grab the characters and take them back to the hideout and turn them into wendigos so that they suffered the same way she did.

  29. James Bennett says:

    I feel like this question probably has an answer, but I’m wondering, who did Josh eat so that he could become a Wendigo? It wasn’t clear to me from watching this let’s play.

    1. MichaelGC says:

      Jimmy Flamethrowers, aka “Stranger.”

  30. Zak McKracken says:

    4:40: A you kidding me? She’s just going out alone, again? If she thinks that Mike and Josh can make it back the way they came, then she should be with them! Aaaaah, horror movie logic! Why can’t people write horror stories without people being as dumb as this? It should go against every one of Hannah’s instincts to stray from the group, and she does not even give a reason. I know Shamus comments on it later, but WTF?

    The light in the mines comes from the movie set lighting which has been set to very low, to indicate darkness … I suppose that a more realistic scene with actual darkness would have changed the tone a lot, what with most of the screen being entirely black. In RL, you at least have a sense of touch and can remember where things are in space, but in movies etc., where you don’t even control the camera, that’s impossible. On top of that the developers don’t know how any individual’s monitor is configured so “very dark” can look very different on different monitors. That’s why I think most movies/games usually go for a lot more light than would be realistic.

  31. Zak McKracken says:

    Can I just remark that I liked the music choice for this SW run?

    First time I heard it I thought that you must have gone back to using Kevin McLeod’s stuff but nope, Shamus did it! I think the tone is pretty much spot on for what it does, too.

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply to lucky7 Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.