The Five Ways Until Dawn Is Slated To Scare You To Death

Until Dawn

In a recent interview for Until Dawn with one of the developers from Supermassive Games it was revealed the five strategies being used to scare you during the game

Until Dawn is slated to be a playable horror film coming sometime, hopefully, later this year for the PS4. This we already know as Supermassive Games has done a great job at conveying that as well as began doling out new information like the blood that squirts out of a decapitated body. What they have not been so forth coming with, until now of course, has been how they are going to be giving us that horror movie feel but still be able to startle or disturb some of horror aficionados with Until Dawn. This is where the most recent interview mentioned above comes in.

Over on the good old PS Blog there was a posting of an interview done with Jez Harris from Supermassive when some of these things were detailed out for Until Dawn. For sake of time I’ll truncate them down but do head over to the PS Blog if you want to get the full run down on how you will be scared in Until Dawn.

1. Bring in the experts — They brought in Larry Fassenden and Graham Reznick as the script writers for Until Dawn. Hopefully horror fans are in the know on who these guys are.
2. The element of surprise — While Until Dawn will use a lot of cliché horror film tactics the team has gone out of their way to make sure there are still some great surprises after lulling you in.
3. Always have willing test subjects — For Until Dawn they have been cycling through their entire focus test and Q/A testers to make sure that the scares will stay scary even if one tester has played a few months prior. Pretty much making sure the same tactic gets the reaction during replayed games.
4. Harness the science of fear — During those above tests for Until Dawn they would hook up devices to monitor the temperatures and stress of the players as they played through. If something brought the proper fear response it is kept and perfected.
5. Throw out the rulebook — This is kind of the same as the above rule number 2. Except that the team is making sure that they randomly place the jump scares to seem out of place for any formula that a gamer or horror fan can figure out for Until Dawn

I’ve played past version of Until Dawn and I think they are on the right track for it all. Although I think that the element of surprise is going to be thrown out the window in the long run as the scares will almost always be the same unless they are patching and evolving the game post-launch. I wasn’t startled at all when I played at the PlayStation Experience but that was due to the fact that I had seen everything play out before diving in myself. This is where all that work is going to be needed plain and simple. At least they have a good starting spot for it all.

I’m going to say that we are going to see a final version of Until Dawn sometime this October, makes sense for a horror game, this year. I could be wrong but it would give the whole team the ability to master all of what was mentioned above. What say you? Let us know in the comments below.