The Until Dawn Remake is the latest in PlayStation’s line of existing IP that has received a re-release in the form of a remake, rebuilt from the ground up with the PlayStation 5 in mind, and while the original horror game was developed by Supermassive Games for the PlayStation 4, the remake was developed by Ballistic Moon.

After a prank on Hannah went wrong, Hannah fled out into the woods, with Beth chasing after her. They were both never seen again. A year later, Hannah and Beth’s brother, Josh, has organised for everyone to get together for a reunion to honour his sisters. The eight friends return to the remote mountain lodge, but it’s not long until it all starts to go wrong. Before they know it, a masked madman is hunting them down, one by one.

Your main task is to guide the group through a night of horror – until dawn. Obviously, you want to keep everyone alive throughout the game, but there is a chance that you could inadvertently kill all eight characters by the end of the story. This will all depend on the choices you make along the way, which we’ll go into a little more detail shortly.

Until Dawn is broken into 10 chapters, each putting you in control of one of the 8 different characters. There are sections of the story where you’ll be given two options, and this is where things can get stressful. It may be choosing how to respond to another character, or deciding whether to run or hide when pursued. Depending on which of the two options you went for, the story is altered.

The game calls this the butterfly effect. Your choice can be for the best or the worst. Until Dawn also has some quick-time events. These aren’t overused either, mainly coming into play during some intense sections. If you want to keep track of any decision made, the game has a built-in “Butterfly Effect” chart that documents your crucial decisions, so choose wisely.

Totems are still a thing, though they have also been slightly changed in how they work. In the original game, once you picked up a Totem, you just had to flip it over, and the game provided a brief glimpse of possible future events, as well as giving you clues to help solve the game’s three overlapping mysteries. Now, additional Totems will help flesh out the story a little more, so keep an eye out while you’re exploring Blackwood Mountain.

In this new remake, once you’ve picked it up, you now have to flip and turn it around until you find a glimmer of light somewhere on its surface, and only then is the vision revealed to you. It seems like an unnecessary mini-game for the same result, and it slows down the game’s progress a little.

The Until Dawn Remake also introduces two new major story changes. The first is an extended prologue, and the second is new endings, which will require certain objectives to be met and certain characters to still be alive by the end of the game. Only then can you uncover these new endings. This new remake version on Playstation 5 also introduces some new accessibility options, such as being able to auto-pass quick time events and those Don’t Move sections.

Unlike the original Until Dawn which used the Decima Engine, the Until Dawn Remake uses Unreal Engine 5, and boy you can tell. The character models and environmental details have been vastly improved. Cinematics have been completely overhauled, along with a new third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective camera, which does an amazing job at creating a whole new feel of terror and suspense during certain events in the story.

The original game on PlayStation 4 already looked amazing, and in my opinion, it still holds up very well today. It did an outstanding job at capturing all the facial expressions with incredible detail, but this new remake in Unreal Engine 5 takes all this and dials it up to 11.

If you didn’t play Until Dawn the first time around on the PlayStation 4 and looking for an interactive horror movie, the Until Dawn Remake is a must-have pick-up. Even if you played the original, I had a blast revisiting this game again in 2024, complete with all the upgraded visuals and expanded story.

Written by: MKAU Gaming