The Until Dawn remaster reveals a decade of technical stagnation
Rhianne Ward
Note: this post has been transferred over from my old Wordpress blog. I could go through the trouble of reformatting everything with supporting images and italicisation and whatever else, but I don't really have time to do all that unfortunately, and I'd prefer to spend my time writing new things than labouring over the old. So, if anything looks a little weird or messy, that's why. I hope you enjoy it regardless!
I really, really like Until Dawn. It’s a surprisingly nuanced take on the classic slasher genre usually reserved for the silver screen. It markets itself as a playable version of those movies, where you act as a director of sorts, your choices and abilities affecting the outcome of the game’s story.
In theory, an extremely cool idea for a video game, and 15-year-old me agreed back when the game first released. As someone with a blossoming fondness for the horror genre, the idea of a slasher game with the same mechanics as The Walking Dead and Heavy Rain was revolutionary to me. I didn’t have a PS4 at the time, so my exposure to the game was YouTube, so by the time I was actually able to play it, I was already a superfan who knew all the ins and outs, and the fun became introducing it to friends. We’d pick our characters before the game started and passed the controller around, and that made for a really fun couch co-op type experience.
A core memory of mine was when we were in the final encounter and the game asked me to hold my controller as still as possible, but at that exact moment, at the peak of the tension, my friend dropped a massive fart, making me laugh and move the controller resulting in my character dying at the very last second. At the time I was fuming, but in hindsight, as stupid as it was, it’s probably one of my favourite gaming memories, and speaks to how well suited to the party format Until Dawn is.
Now, the year is 2024, and I am 24. I finished high school, went to university, miraculously graduated with a degree, and now I live in Glasgow with my best friends, working a full-time job that I sometimes enjoy. My priorities are so different now, and I’ve changed an awful lot. I mean shit, I’m a whole different gender now! If that doesn’t prove my point, nothing will.
Now, the year is 2024, and Until Dawn is releasing yet again. This time, a remaster! Updated visuals and…that’s about it. No worries though, because they just released a new trailer, so maybe it’ll transform the experience and unlock its true potential?
Well, not exactly. Rather, faces look a little melty, the lighting is much less distinct, dropping the blue tint in favour of naturalism, and the animations are, from what I can tell, not updated at all, maintaining their slight jankiness. It would be easy for me to laugh at how underwhelming this game is and move on with my life, but something about it really bothered me. Then I realised: this game is over 9 years old, and nothing has changed.
That’s maybe a dumb observation. Of course it hasn’t changed, you might say, it’s a remaster. It’s just a rerelease of a game; it doesn’t need to change. However, what became clear to me watching this new trailer and looking at side-by-side comparisons is that the original game could quite easily come out today and nobody would blink an eye based on its visuals. I’m not just saying that it looks amazing by today’s standards, but rather that the look of games really hasn’t changed much in a decade. We’re still fruitlessly pursuing photorealism, and we’re still heavily influenced by the aesthetics of movies rather than embracing the visual language of video games. Until Dawn gets away with this by deliberately emulating slasher movies as part of its core identity, but many other games share this look and aesthetic approach too. Until Dawn, through no fault of its own, doesn’t stand out much on a surface level anymore.
It becomes clearer to me every day that this homogenisation of blockbuster game visuals is a purely cynical evolution. Corporations are naturally less interested in explicitly video-gamey games, because they’re harder to sell in a trailer for mass market appeal. Imagine trying to cut Citizen Sleeper or Undertale into a Superbowl trailer that appeals to dudes who play only numbered sports games every year, and you can see why executives would prefer to invest in games that look like movies.
Of course, this is incredibly lame and anti-art, but it’s an unfortunate reality of the modern gaming industry. Companies are always chasing that golden goose, so every game needs to be the biggest game ever made with 60 hours gameplay minimum, and shakes the foundations of the medium itself. It’s a deeply stupid business model that’s resulted in countless studio closures and staff redundancies, while the executives making those idiotic choices get to sit pretty at the top of a fresh pile of developer corpses.
To make a long story short, the problem is capitalism, but you already knew that. I guess the reason I’m talking about this now rather than the other million times in would have been relevant is because, to me, Until Dawn marks the first time I’ve been able to remember exactly where I was when the original game came out, and compare that period of my life to now. I’ve changed enormously since then, and so has the world, but video games, in many ways, haven’t. In a way, we’re still stuck in 2015, ogling at pretty faces and saying shit like, “it looks like real life!!” We are so enamoured with hyper-realism even now, and it stems from this fetishisation of technological advancement where the belief is the most perfect game is surely one that looks closest to our own lived experience.
In practice, its a fruitless pursuit. We’ll always find ways to cram extra polygons onto character models and develop new methods of simulating sunlight bouncing off a car and onto a reflective sewer cover. We are stuck on this because it is impossible to truly perfect, and in this endless battle against inevitable disappointment, we miss the forest for the trees. Until Dawn benefits from its aesthetic, given that it is designed to be experienced like a playable movie, but it also employs colour theory, depth of field, camera framing, and all sorts of other cinematic techniques. It really leans into its conceit, and that makes for a unique experience.
I want to point this out because I’m not someone who disregards photo-realism as a form of artistic expression. Just like any aesthetic choice, there is value in it, depending on the execution. The same can’t really be said for other games going for the photorealism look. It’s an expectation for big budget games, and that feels very cynical to me, not least because such a game often misses its own potential because it looks the way it does out of obligation, rather than that aesthetic being born from wanting to match the tone and themes of the work.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to prove with this post. I guess if there’s anything to take away here, it’s to think more about the presentation of games, and how they lend themselves to the overall package. Games are amazing because they represent a culmination of so many artistic disciplines, coalescing to create a singular experience. This centralising of games into one agreed-upon look flies in the face of art, and prevents many games from being as impactful as they could be.
Until Dawn came out in 2015, and it still looks amazing. Now, in 2024, maybe we can try something a little different