Until Dawn

x3 Supermassive have announced instead of a direct sequel they are making a Spiritual Successor series of short horror games called The Dark Pictures Anthology starting with Man of Medan

Edited by jormis29 on Aug 21st 2018 at 9:01:00 PM

While not surprising, that's disappointing.

Well there wasn't really anything they could do for a sequel; all the wendigos are dead except for Josh and I highly doubt anyone's going back to that mountain at any point in their lives.

Plus doing various other horror things can be good, and variety is nice.

Agreed. The best you could do is make a sequel set in the same universe, but with no real connections to the first game's events.

I think there are ways you could work in wendigos into a sequel, though it comes with barriers. In terms of strictly making it make in-universe sense, there are a few ways around it, some more satisfying than others. You could do something like, 'oh, this other mountain also has wendigos!' Or move to a different time period, etc.

I think the bigger problem is just making them work in a plot that doesn't feel like it's retreading ground. Obviously it could easily be awkward to try and pull them out as a twist again ('this mountain don't belong to the Jeffersons...'), so maybe this time they need to hold up a plot on their own, or be in the forefront earlier, etc. And we've already tried to make a bunch of relative everybodys survive them, so the hook would likely have to be a bit different. I suppose, for example, you could change the perspective, possibly take a turn towards action by having more experienced characters and/or giving them flamethrowers. I do like the wendigos as a monster — they hit all of my Uncanny Valley and sudden-burst-of-speed predator buttons — but they're relatively simple at their core. They stalk, hunt and kill, and while you could sprinkle new mysteries and information about them, I think you're gonna find it hard to alter their role in any narrative without drastically undermining some of the core fears behind them

Still, as to what they seem to be doing, Spiritual Sequel-wise. Horror is a pretty broad genre, so I think revisiting different types of horrors, etc. and working them into a similar format to Until Dawn (i.e. 'cinematic', choice-driven, everyone can die) could lead to interesting territory. I think sometimes Until Dawn suffers in that, especially before the reveals, it's obviously, seemingly straight-lacedly flirting with so many horror tropes that it straddles between homaging and feeling derivative. The Psycho / Wendigo dynamic is a good set-up that partly helps justify that, but I wouldn't mind something that's able to tap into its own identity quicker.

Edited by Lavaeolus on Aug 22nd 2018 at 4:22:08 PM

This is for the best. As long as the horror stuff is interesting, I'm fine with whatever they go for.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I'll wait to see what the new setting/concept is.

I still say Josh's fate was bollocks.

I like the idea of exploring different horror genres through Until Dawn's particular method of storytelling. It sounds like it will keep things fresh and interesting. There's only so much mileage you can get out of a handful of Wendigos on a frozen mountain.

Especially since none of the characters can return. The nature of the game's Anyone Can Die setup is that literally no one can ever make an appearance in a future game without revoking the game's premise. Any appearance of a character from the game showing up would establish, "This is the CANON ENDING. These characters lived, those characters died, THE END. That is the canon course of events and if you don't like it, then DEAL WITH IT because I am the writer and I decide who lives and dies."

That would utterly defeat the entire premise of the game.

So, since reusing the monsters risks the game becoming stale from overuse and the characters can never come back without ruining the game, there's no real storytelling options here for a direct sequel. I fully support the decision to go, "Let's just take the method of storytelling and see what else we can do with it."

As for Josh, here's the thing. The game has two antagonists. The Wendigos, who are monsters, and Josh, who is a villain. The Wendigos are basically feral beasts, no more morally complex than a hungry predator, a zombie, or a vengeful ghost. There's no real moral discussion to be had about Sadako Yamamura. She's literally a monster who wants only to kill people and we want her to not do that. Period. End of discussion.

Josh, on the other hand, is a sadistic bastard who psychologically tortures people for his own sick catharsis in retribution for being tangentially adjacent to his sisters' deaths. Does he deserve to be eaten by or to become a Wendigo? Probably not, but given the nature of the story, the alternative is much worse.

The nature of the game is that if Josh can survive, then there must therefore be a possible ending where everyone else dies. Josh walks away from his sick torture plot going, "Wow, that worked out better than I ever imagined!" and then lives happily ever after, never facing any repercussion or consequence for his actions.

Because Josh is not literally a monster, the story needs to take a moral stance on his actions. He's the human villain in a Supernatural Horror; walking out alive was never in the cards for his archetype, lest it look as though the writers are endorsing his behavior. There can be an ending where the Wendigos eat everyone, but there should not be an ending where Josh wins and lives happily ever after because people will take that as an admission that he was right.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 22nd 2018 at 12:39:36 PM

Josh can seriously fuck off.

"My sisters died because of an accident that came from an ill-spirited prank, and so I'm going to blame all of my friends and terrify them even though their deaths weren't their fault."

And his only reaction when being called out is "DUR HUR HUR WE'RE GONNA GET SO MANY HITS ON YOUTUBE GUYS"

He still didn't deserve to die for it, necessarily, or suffer a Fate Worse than Death. Prison time, absolutely. So I can understand some hesitation about his fate.

But like I said, them's the breaks in horror. A lot of people don't deserve to die. That guy who fights the Wendigos and knows his shit? He didn't deserve to die either, but there's no option for him to live because the nature of the story demands his death.

Josh is the Bad Guy who is not the Monster. That means he doesn't get to live to see the credits.

That's just how it works. If you walk into a horror setting as, for example, the corrupt banker who manipulated everyone's mortgages to steal their homes and get rich off their suffering, you're getting eaten. Probably first.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 22nd 2018 at 12:47:48 PM

As an older brother, I can definitely empathize quite a bit with Josh over what happened to his younger sisters. If something like that happened to my younger sibling, I'd probably be really pissed off at my "friends" (regardless of whether said anger was justified or not). Though realistically, I wouldn't have done what Josh had done and probably would've just never ever talked to them ever again for the rest of my life.

Speaking of The Dark Pictures, seems like Man of Medan is based off of the story of the SS Ourang Medan, a ghost ship full of corpses described as having "frozen faces upturned to the sun with mouths gaping open and eyes staring."

He's also severely ill and experiencing some violent hallucinations in the latter half of the game. I think the game went to quite a bit of detail about that, even using Josh's psychosis as a framing device.

I should rephrase: I don't like Josh's fate because out of everyone in the story he was suffering the most. Compared to Mike, a strangely, potentially competent douche who was cheating on his girlfriend, and participated in the prank that got Josh's sisters killed - and yet he's wearing Plot Armor all the way to the last few minutes of the game.

An ending where Josh can be rescued before Hannah grabs him, provided enough of his friends survive and forgive him, would have suited me just fine. It depends on Josh's crazy scheme being mostly non-lethal and most of his friends finding it in themselves to forgive their friend - he still has to face consequences but at least he's actually healing and he's not just abandoned in a mine shaft and left to transform into a monster.

That said, a game with multiple endings should have a Downer Ending; something where the bad guy walks off scot-fee just to hammer in how badly the player failed. Visual novels like Fatestaynight thrive on that. It makes the story feel more malleable and consequential.

If anything - with Until Dawn striving to mash-up classic horror movie cliches while giving the player agency to determine which ones come to the surface - it's disappointing that there isn't an ending where Josh lives and everyone else dies. That sounds like a huge oversight when there's already like 49 different endings where 1-7 different people might live or die, or have differing opinions of each other and different statements to make.

Telling this sort of person to f-ck off would be rather callous to me.

They didn't throw Hannah off the cliff but as far as Josh and the police were probably concerned - the two of them fled because of a mean prank and were never seen again. No Wendigos, no flamethrower-wielding boogeymen. Just a prank gone horribly awry.

I can't really disassociate their stupid prank from Josh's sisters running off and falling down that cliff.

Josh is pretty visibly unhinged by that point.

Edited by Soble on Aug 22nd 2018 at 5:46:36 AM

I get what you're saying about him being mentally ill. I do. My best friend in the entire world suffers from paranoid schizophrenia among other things. She has to live with terrible hallucinations and nightmares that follow her into the waking world for hours on end. She has difficulty trusting other people and lives in constant fear that everyone hates and will abandon her. I once, in my ignorance and lack of preparedness for dealing with her condition, made a joke that there was a sniper on a roof while we were driving and she seriously never trusted that street corner again.

And on top of the various things her condition does to her, she also has to live with people hearing the words "paranoid schizophrenia" and going "Oh, the murder illness that makes you a psychotic murderer. Gotcha."

So I get it.

But if she ever did the kind of things that Josh does, she would deserve to be locked away for the safety of herself and others. Shit, she'd want to be; she gave up her child for adoption because she was deathly afraid that her condition might cause her to one day harm him.

Mental illness is not an excuse for a campaign of brutal psychological torture. Mental illness does not make someone into a bad person. However, someone can be mentally ill and also be a bad person.

As she often likes to say: it is always a choice to listen to the voices in your head, no matter how loud they get.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 22nd 2018 at 7:42:23 AM

You have a point. I just doubt that this story absolutely demands Josh's death. I see it as a budgetary issue more than a thematic one.

I'm not sure I agree with this argument, simply because I think it overly ties down the agency the writers had whilst still keeping to the genre. Until Dawn takes tropes, but it leaves things in the player to subvert — and I don't think Josh walking away alone is a happy ending. Josh's pranks are incredibly disturbed, and to an extent he knows this even if he justifies himself with a certain vengeance, but there is a certain warped sense in which he thinks this'll be good for them, or at least, no worse than their own actions. 'I didn't mean for them to die!' is one of the justifications he clings to after the reveal. An ending where Josh walks away, I think, isn't a happy ending for him — it'd more likely be an ironic ending wherein Josh tries to do a lesser version of what the others did, and inadvertently repeats exactly what they did (a prank runs out of control and leads to the subjects' deaths) times tenfold. The Hill sections present a Josh who seems to feel some guilt for his actions; an ending where Josh is the sole survivor is an ending where Josh cracks even more, not walks away freely.

I think there are other reasons at play for the ultimate decision to have Josh end up dead / wendigo-fied. Partly to do with horror, but also to do with Until Dawn 'as a game'. From the outset, despite urging you to continue to the end no matter what, Until Dawn implicitly challenges you: help everyone survive to the end of the night. You can do well, perfectly, or completely botch it. You get hints, totems, both to foreshadow but also to occasionally help you along the way. There's a second challenge, poke the game to see odder consequences that others might not have stumbled across, but deliberately trying to get everyone killed is often an awkward experience and not really natural for a first-timer. Playthroughs where you deliberately pick bad options are kind of funny in practice, and failing QTEs can mean just sitting down the controller and walking away from the game.

Meanwhile, think of the characters who are definitively killed on-screen: Beth is a doomed death in a scripted tutorial, separated from the game proper by intros, Hill's early comments, etc. The Stranger dies in a scripted cutscene that always occurs in the pretty much the exact same way. I've seen people blame Chris for it, but certainly the player doesn't have any liability over it. These people don't matter, as much; you're not responsible for them. Which leads us to Josh, and an interesting question: is he one of the player characters? And the answer I'd give is, uh, sort of. He's not included in the ending interrogations. He's sort of playable, but in an entirely different manner to everyone else. He's kind of in the antagonist role, but when the wendigos do come for him he's 'sort of' allied with Mike (and the rest).

So, for the guy who's only sort of included in this save-everyone challenge, he ends up with an appropriately mixed fate. But I do think Josh's fate is, in its way, a 'reward', in a distorted sense. You 'save' Josh by finding clues — important clues that if missed basically mean the PCs just failed to notice one of the important parts of the narrative. (Hannah's been the wendigo hunting everyone! Granted the player can likely figure that out by themself.) Josh dying doesn't seem like it'd be an accomplishment unless you're metagaming; it's the result of the player missing two vital clues. But then why is this 'reward' worse, in story terms?

I think it's worth noting that Until Dawn doesn't really have a happy ending. The ending where most people survive is clearly better, but nobody's walking out with smiles on their face. What I'm reminded of is actually True Endings in visual novels and the like. Endings which take more effort, often requiring other endings already be met, and which are sometimes actually worse than officially marked Good Endings — especially in horror VNs. They're only better in terms of narrative closure, and I think that's what Josh's ending is part of. The wendigos, by the story's logic, aren't completely gone; sure, they were all destroyed, but the wendigo spirit always lurks in the mountain. Getting rid of them isn't a stopping point. And the ending, unless you really botch it, always has the police specifically sent to search. I think, like a lot of horror tropes, the wendigo overtly rising from the grave as supernatural monsters / serial killers are wont to do, is a kind of a closure, in its own way. This is how the wendigo comes back — Josh will roam the mountain as Hannah did, and the events of this night will continue on in their butterfly effect.

Edited by Lavaeolus on Aug 23rd 2018 at 12:47:28 PM

Wait.

Why did the Wendigo kidnap Jessica? Every other time they attack they just start ripping people apart.

Probably dragging her back to their lair to be kept for storage?

But I don't think they did that to anyone else. Everybody else ends up getting murdered first. The wendigo dragged her hella far just to keep her for storage.

I guess Hannah did take Josh.

I feel like they subconsciously decided to kidnap her so that Hannah could kill her herself. Besides, she was probably the scrawniest of them anyway, so there isn't much meat on her bones for them to munch on.

They rip Jessica apart too if Mike isn't quick enough to intervene.

They kidnap Matt too if they find him in the tunnels. They drag him down the tunnel and if he doesn't have a flare gun to defend himself with, they hang him up on a meat hook. Jessica's intended destination was likely something similar.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 14th 2019 at 11:12:56 AM

Replaying the game for the first time in ages.

Sadly, failed to save Jessica because my quicktime skills aren't great.

Matt can also survive if you get him to safety before Emily, and he won't get caught by a wendigo either.

Really enjoyed Until Dawn and am playing Man of Medan now. However, it seems like a significant Dragon Age: Origins to Dragon Age 2 downgrade.

Yeah, Man of Medan is a big downgrade in pretty much every way, which is a shame, because Until Dawn was a very fun game.

I have mixed feelings about Man of Medan. The chemical weapons twist was a kinda neat inversion of Until Dawn, where the horror turns out to all be an awful prank but then actual horror shows up. Here, the actual horror shows up, but is all a smokeshow; the human villains are the true threat.

However, while a neat concept, I'm not sure it plays out so well in execution. Until Dawn is fascinating on replay, watching for what parts of the events are the wendigos and what's just Josh. Man of Medan's twist makes it less engaging on replay, because any time a ghost thing happens, you can just be like, "Nope, you're fake."

As a rule, the shocking twist in a horror story should not make it less scary.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 21st 2020 at 8:55:10 AM