Examples of Narm in Until Dawn:
- During player-controlled sections (not quick time events), characters move at only one speed. So when Mike is chasing after Jessica, who is in imminent danger of dying, he does the last section at a leisurely walking pace. You can get players to walk slightly faster by pressing L1, but it's a tiny increase in speed, nowhere near the panicked run that would be realistic. In fact, the increase only makes the animations faster rather than changing them, so your choices are between walk and brisk walk.
- Some of Mike's facial expressions during more serious moments (such as when Josh is killed or taken by Wendigo Hannah) could count as this.
- Some of the deaths where the characters are beheaded count as this, their faces keep twitching for a while before finally becoming inanimate. Chris's death on the mines is the worst offender, as it keeps twitching for some good 15 seconds after his head is taken off. Watch it here: Warning: Spoilers
. Also some possible Truth in Television here. There are a lot of stories about how severed heads will continue to briefly act alive although this phenomenon is debated. - Speaking of beheading, during the segment where Mike finds a mortally wounded Deer, one of the options you have is to put the deer out of its misery. Mike apparently plans to snap the deer's neck using it's antlers as grips but manages to completely rip the deer's head off. It's completely unexpected and not helped by Mike's complete shock about it.
- Mike and Sam stumbling upon the Wendigos slaughterhouse can be this. If you had gotten every other character killed up to this point, it will be filled to the brim with their decapitated and dismembered bodies, and Sam and Mike will understandably react with horror, shock and disgust. But if you have all eight players still alive, the only body there will be the Stranger's/Flamethrower Guy, who is unsavable. But the animation and dialogue of Mike and Sam reacting as if they've seen all the bodies of their friends is the same.
- At several times during the game, several characters fall from super great heights that they realistically should not have survived such as Jess falling down the mine shaft and Emily falling from the tower, and while possibly injured, can get around relatively fine. This makes it hilarious when Chris falls down a five foot tall incline while running from a Wendigo, hurts his ankle, and has a whole Go On Without Me moment that can get him killed.
- This one is very easy to miss but, at the moment where Matt and Emily are surrounded by deer, if you stand still for a while, the game will soon show you a close-up of Matt's face, for no apparent reason. It gets extremely weird and funny when he starts making really exaggerated facial expressions.
- While the rest of Josh's hallucination in the final chapter of the game is very disturbing, it's hard not to find it a little weirdly amusing to see Josh punching a disembodied pig face.
- The sections with Dr. Hill can easily become this due to how over-the-top his facial expressions and voice acting is. The fact that he is a delusional hallucination of a character with pretty severe mental health problems goes some way to explaining WHY he is so odd, but does little to reduce the narm.
- Whenever Dr. Hill mentions "playing a game" or "the game you're playing" to the first-person character in the first several interviews. While it does make sense in-universe further on down the line, for the most part it comes across as the game's writers making an attempt to break the 4th wall by repeatedly pointing out that the player is playing a game.
- The painfully obvious way that your chosen fears in the second interview are implemented in-game. One of your choices for 'this scares me the most' is clowns? Surprise! The Psycho wears a clown mask. Even after the reveal that the psychiatric interviews are all in Josh's head, it makes little-to-no sense in-universe why the characters keep encountering your worst fears, which themselves can lose a lot of bite if you just happened to think the drawing of a clown face was creepier than the drawing of a zombie face, as the game will proceed to repeatedly shove clown faces at you in a way that won't have much of an effect outside of an intense phobia and mostly just come across as an incredibly forced attempt to exploit your 'fear'.
- This is compounded by the fact that the game only gives you two or three options to choose between for each fear. While they are common phobias, it's very possible that the player might actively like both options, and be forced to choose which one they like least (for example, if you're a Friend to Bugs and you have to choose between spiders and cockroaches).
- For players unfamiliar with the folk song (and potentially players who are), having the song 'O Death' be sung over the opening credits can seem so ridiculously unsubtle to the point of being hilariously narmy.
- It can be pretty hard to take Mike's Sanatorium section in Chapter 9 with the Wendigos seriously, due to the Bottomless Magazines of his double-barrel shotgun.
- Speaking of Chapter 9, at one point Mike is startled by a noise and given a choice to shoot at it or not. If he shoots, it turns out to be just a rat, but then a Wendigo drops down from above for a jump scare. However, if he doesn't shoot, the rat comes scurrying out all the same, but the camera follows it to the right until it lands on the Wendigo. The difference gives the impression that the Wendigo was sitting there in plain sight the entire time, and Mike failed to notice it because he was distracted by the rat.
- Getting the best ending where everyone lives can make the Wendigo threat seem overhyped. Sure, they're super-fast, bullet-proof predators with razor-sharp claws and fangs... which can be defeated by a couple of badly injured teenagers with zero prior experience. This can also make the Stranger seem a bit of an idiot by association. If he's so fantastic at hunting the Wendigo, how did he get his head ripped off by one while completely out in the open, with no cover for them to hide in? You'd think that'd be Wendigo-fighting lesson 101.
- The game has a tendency to reuse characters' audio, which can lead to some unfitting dialogue. For instance, right before his Heroic Sacrifice, Mike defiantly yells "How's that feel, you fuck?!"; this is before he's done anything to harm the Wendigo and has, in fact, just got his ass handed to him.
- In addition to the instance mentioned above, much of Mike’s audio is recycled during the aforementioned Sanatorium scene in Chapter 9, and sometimes in short bursts. This makes the otherwise tense scene much harder to take seriously.
