Should you go off by yourself? Or follow your friend into a different room?
This is one of thousands of choices you will make in the upcoming horror game Until Dawn for PlayStation 4. Eight friends go up to a cabin in the mountains for a vacation and are soon being stalked by a madman out to kill them.
Players will jump between controlling the different members of the group. If your actions cause the character you are controlling or another one of the friends to die, the game does not reload. The story continues, the plot irrevocably changed.
According to the developers, Supermassive Games, Until Dawn will be a demonstration of "The Butterfly Effect" taken to the extreme. Players will have to make thousands of choices which will result in hundreds of different endings for the story. The result with be an experience that is particular to you and your decisions, not to mention a game with significant replayability.
A post on the developer's site states, "Gripped by fear and with tensions in the group running high, you'll be forced to make snap decisions that could mean life, or death, for everyone involved. Every choice you make in your terrifying search for answers -- even the seemingly trivial ones -- will carve out your own unique story."
This is not the first game that Sony will publish a game with such consequential gameplay. Both Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls from Quantic Dream features cinematic gameplay where your choices effect the story of the game, though these games did not feature thousands of such decisions. The Walking Dead game and other titles from Telltale Games are also known for having players make difficult choices. The upcoming Life is Strange is also supposed to have a choice-driven story.
To bring this horror game to life, the developers have hired a group of actors to provide voice and motion captured performances. Supermassive has revealed three of the actors depicting the friends in the game: Hayden Panettiere, from "Heroes" and "Nashville" series, Rami Malek, of the "Night at the Museum" films and Brett Dalton from "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."
The developers also worked with indie horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden ("Habit" and "The Last Winter") and sound designer Graham Reznick ("Stake Land" and "The House of the Devil") to create the horror story and atmosphere of Until Dawn.
Strangely enough, this isn't the first unveiling of Dying Light. The game was revealed in 2012 as a campy horror title for PlayStation 3 that would use the PlayStation Move motion controls. But then the game was reworked completely. "We re-designed, re-built and re-wrote the game so now you have a more mature, darker and fundamentally more terrifying experience on PS4," stated Supermassive's director Pete Samuels on the PlayStation blog.
Until Dawn will be released for PlayStation 4, though the release date has not been revealed.
