Exactly two years ago at Gamescom 2012, Sony and Supermassive Games terrified gamers with the reveal of Until Dawn, a first-person survival horror game fashioned after B-movie slasher flicks. Originally it was being made as a PS3 title exclusively for PlayStation Move, and then the game vanished without a trace like the oblivious victim in a horror movie who goes wandering off alone into the dark and never comes back. Until Dawn has been brought back to life this week at Gamescom, proving that a whole lot can change in the span of 730 days.
Supermassive Games has kept the core plot in place, telling the story of a group of young adults as they get together on the anniversary of a friend’s death and spend the night in a log cabin, where a murderous psychopath is offing folks at a snowy mountain getaway. Almost everything else has changed. Powered by the Killzone: Shadow Fall engine, Until Dawn, starring a cast of Hollywood talent including Hayden Panettiere, Rami Malek and Brett Dalton, is now coming exclusively to PlayStation 4 as a third-person horror game with adventure mechanics and choice-based story progression akin to Heavy Rain. The game has also dropped PlayStation Move controls outright in favor of traditional controls complemented by the motion control capabilities of the DualShock 4. Yep, I’d say that pretty much puts the nail in the Move’s coffin, as Sony continues to act like the device no longer exists even though it still offers the best motion control tech on consoles.
Comparing the original trailer from a couple years ago to the PS4 reveal, the tone of the game seems to have grown much more serious, lessening the teen horror vibe of movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer in favor of a grimmer style closer to torture porn. A “Butterfly Effect” interface promises to make it so that every single action alters how the story unfolds, leading to the potential deaths of every character in the game and thousands of possible endings.
It all sounds incredibly ambitious, not to mention gruesome. Hopefully Supermassive can pull it off. We’ll find out when Until Dawn launches in 2015.
Matt Litten is the full-time editor and owner of VGBlogger.com. He is responsible for maintaining the day to day operation of the site, editing all staff content before it is published, and contributing regular news, reviews, previews and other articles.
Matt landed his first gig in the video game review business writing for the now-defunct website BonusStage.com. After the sad and untimely close of BonusStage, the former staff went on to found VGBlogger.com. After a short stint as US Site Manager for AceGamez, Matt assumed full ownership over VGBlogger, and to this day he is dedicated to making it one of the top video game blogs in all the blogosphere.
Matt is a fair-minded reviewer and lover of games of all platforms and types, big or small, hyped or niche, big-budget or indie. But that doesn't mean he will let poor games slide without a good thrashing when necessary! 
