If you’re in the shower and you hear creepy sounds, won’t you want to put some clothes on? If the five seconds it takes to put on a pair of shorts gets me killed, I’d be okay with that. I’d rather die with a little bit of dignity than butt naked.
The live-action trailer for the upcoming choose-your-adventure horror game, Until Dawn, shows some cliché horror-film moments. Girl in the shower, she hears slasher-killer sounds, she wraps a towel and does one of three things depending on what the gamer has her do. In the trailer, the choices are defend, explore, and go back. It does not include, “put on some clothes so you die with dignity”. Is the slasher-flick genre still targeted at pubescent males?
Until Dawn seems like a cool game, but why make this lame live-action trailer?
In any case, the game’s value proposition is that you tell the characters what to do and they do them to either their peril or survival. Butterfly effect, small choices-big repercussions, etc. But this trailer gives us nothing of that cool stuff. It’s just an annoying, not-scary horror scene.
When you watch a lame slasher flick, half the fun is laughing at the idiocy of these characters who stick their necks out windows or reach into a dark hole or something. You blame the characters for being idiots, and then you blame the movie’s writer and director for treating the viewer like idiots. Here, you can only blame yourself. Yes, you the gamer is the idiot. At least that’s the impression I get from this questionable live-action trailer. Again, why make this lame trailer for such a cool-looking game?
It’s fun to watch lame slasher flicks at a party, but games like Until Dawn are best played alone in a dark room.
Perhaps the point of the trailer is to capture some of that slasher-flick fun, but the way to sell this game is to distance itself from lame slasher flicks, not rub against it. But it’s always fun to laugh at people, and yourself, and that’s worth the price of admission, or in this case, a console game.
The PS4 game is out August 25, 2015.