Shadow and Flame with Magik

I finally got Fallout 4 platinum-ed and I had Walker Dennis pick out my next game (a traditional I’m going to continue to do, as it was pretty cute) and he selected Until Dawn.

Thanks to PlayStation for hosting the launch trailer.

This was probably my most anticipated game that I receieved for the PS4.  My wife couldn’t find a copy of it to add to the Christmas bundle of games so she got it for my birthday in January.  I just was able to start playing it recently due to finally getting Fallout 4 out of my system, though I could easily jump back into that game but I think it is good to take a break from it.  A nice long break from it as it was all consuming.

I spent a lot of time looking into Until Dawn and it sounded like an amazing game.

What initially sold me what the Honest Game Trailer for the game –

Thanks to Smosh Games for hosting their own video.

Which, thankfully, by the time I saw this prior to Christmas, and by the time I started playing the game in May, I had forgotten most of the trailer though there were moments from that I couldn’t explain and I didn’t want to watch it again without spoiling myself.  What really really sold me on it was this amazing line –

Thanks to Tumblr user, sodiumcqueen, for hosting the above image.

Emily’s “Understand the palm of my hand, bitch” was a line that captured my imagination and I wanted it to become my new catchphrase and I desperately wanted to understand the context of the situation.  It is a very intense moment in the game.  She’s slapping Ashley in the above scene and pending on how you got there, Mike has a tough decision to make and Ashley has an awkward decision to make after that.

So the game takes place a year after Josh’s twin sisters had died and the eight friends have come back together the following year to hang out.  Things go horribly wrong almost immediately.  There is a psycho who starts terrorizing them but there is an even larger more deadlier threat beyond him.

There are three ongoing mysteries in the game:  What happened to the twins, who is the mystery man, and what happened in the mines in 1952.

The game has eight characters, four boys and four ladies.  The boys are Mike, Chris, Josh, and Matt.  You barely play Matt.  The ladies are Sam, Emily, Ashley, and Jess.  You barely play as Jess.  At least, I barely did, as Mike, her boyfriend, was not fast enough to catch up to her and she was the first character I couldn’t save.  My initial play, I ended up getting Jess killed, and like a real idiot, I got Mike and Ashley killed as I had Sam flip the switch way to early and I blew up the lodge instead of waiting one more time, so I had to replay Chapter 10 immediately to correct that.  Josh also died but I fixed that by finding the journal that makes him live so I lucked into that.

Once you beat the game, you can either start a new game, or replay a chapter and continue from that point forward.  I’m on my second playthrough now, where I try to keep everyone alive.  I’m in the middle of Chapter 6 and I got Jess to survive through Chapter 4 so I’m well on my way, Matt is still alive and Ashley and Chris are super scared in the basement.  I’m really loving this game.

Another fun aspect of the game, is you can turn on global statistics so you can see what option was the more popular decision.  Of course, I’m choosing the less popular ones to mess with the statistics.  The game out  August 2015, so the majority has long since spoken.

The reddit page for the game isn’t as active as it first was, I imagine, but there is a loyal group of people on it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/untildawn/

This is the website I’ve been using for the trophy clean up –

https://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/until-dawn/guide/

My plan was to initially do my first playthrough, with no guidance (which I did), then a playthrough where everyone lived, a global statistic playthrough where I choose the least popular option and another one where they all die.

I’ve decided to flip the last two, as I do enjoy trophy hunting, I’m not sure if I’ll get the platinum as collectible trophies (ironically) are my least favorite trophies.  Well, besides multiplayer ones, unless it is simply, log into multiplayer, successfully play the first one, or whatever Uncharted 2’s multiplayer trophies were, I was able to successfully do those two, and never went back to it.

Which were Complete One Cooperative Multiplayer game and Complete One Competitive Multiplayer game, thanks to

https://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/uncharted-2-among-thieves/trophies/

for having the answer to that question!

It appears most of the trophies I’ll end up getting with the everybody dies trophy, so that’s why I want to do that one third.  I figure, by that point, I would have most of the clues and totems so I’ll make the decision about finding those and getting the three collectible trophies by that point.  Which, if I’m looking at the guide correctly, would be the final three trophies and that already feels annoying to me so I probably will collect all of the clues, as I really do enjoy the story so it makes sense to get the back story of those three events.

Especially after my fourth fun playthrough with the choosing the least popular decisions.

There is a companion app that won’t work on my Samsung Galaxy S7, so that’s disappointing.  The companion app for Beyond : Two Souls also doesn’t work with my phone so I sent feedback for both of those apps but I doubt anyone cares this far removed from the game releases.

Another fun thing I hadn’t realized about the game is that they actually casted known actors for most of the roles.

Thanks to Gaming Since Gaming for hosting this video.

I keep referring (for myself) to the Wikipedia page, so here is that website:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Until_Dawn

Josh is played by Rami Malek, who I apparently saw in Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 but he’s probably well known from Mister Robot and the upcoming Freddie Mercury bioflick, where he plays Mercury.   He is also Pharaoh Ahkmenrah from the Night at the Museum films but I only saw the first one and I sort of recall the pharaoh character.  He was also in three episodes of 24, during season eight, the Freddie Prinze Jr. season.

Ella Lentini plays both twin sisters, Beth and Hannah.  I don’t recognize any of her credits.

Hayden Panettiere plays Sam, the main lady from the game.  We all know her from Heroes and Nashville, amongst a slew of other projects.

Brett Dalton plays Mike, the main guy from the game.  Who I immediately recognized and figured Mike was the psycho (he isn’t) or was going to betray the characters at some point (he doesn’t).  I thought that as he’s Ward from Agents of SHIELD, where that’s exactly what he does, on multiple occasions.  Heck, he even was a bad guy who was secretly good in the Framework, so he can’t be trusted.  I’m not a fan of Ward, at all.

Noah Fleiss is Chris, who was apparently in Storytelling.  Which I only really remember Selma Blair’s section of that film (the first half) and Fleiss is in the second half, and I only remember Conan O’Brien appearing in that story as himself.

Galadriel Stineman plays Ashley, who was in season four of The Middle, a show I don’t watch but that looks to be her biggest role to date.

Nichole Bloom is Emily, who I know her from Shameless as Lip’s college girlfriend, who I really liked.  Lip was my favorite character on that show until they broke him and I started losing all interest in the show but it took my like seven seasons to just give up on it.  She’s in Project X which Malek is also in so I might have to watch that, it was on my watchlist before but I never got around to it.  Stineman was also on Shameless, apparently, but she wasn’t on the List of Characters list so it must not have been a large role.  Bloom wore glasses on Shameless and that threw me off, so that disguise clearly works!  She was in seasons four and five of Shameless, better in four.

Jordan Fisher is in the thankless role of Matt, Emily’s boyfriend.  I mostly know him from winning Season 25 of Dancing with the Stars with Lindsay Arnold, and via that show, I know he was part of Hamilton.  He must have been one of the dancers in Teen Beach 1 and 2 as I don’t recognize him from those films.  He may have been on Teen Wolf after we quit watching it due to MTV’s messed up schedule around season three.  he’s going to be Seahawk on the upcoming Netflix She-Ra show which I hope is good.

http://he-man.wikia.com/wiki/Sea_Hawk

I don’t recognize that dude at all.  Like Bow, but a pirate?  I guess that is the motivation there?

Meaghan Martin is Jess, Mike’s girlfriend, who I’m hoping to see more of in my second playthrough.  She’s in both Camp Rock films, but I only got like ten minutes into and lost all interest.  It was at whatever minute mark where Demi Lovato is the chef’s daughter but she doesn’t want people to know she’s the daughter of the chef and so has to hide that fact.  Which is dumb so I quit.  Also, Demi is way young in the film and that felt weird.  Martin is also in the television series 10 Things I Hate About You and Awkward, which I’ve been tempted to watch Awkward but I haven’t done it.  Too many episodes and that was at season three, who knows how many seasons it is now.  I simply clicked the link and there is five seasons.  She also provides the voice of Namine in the Kingdom Hearts games, and Panettiere provides the voice of Kairi in those games.  So there are some crossovers but not many.

Larry Fessenden, who co-wrote Until Dawn plays the Stranger.  Apparently, he wrote, directed and editted a movie titled, Wendigo, that I have to watch now.

Rounding out the adult cast is Peter Stormare, as Dr. Hill.  I know him from Season One of Prison Break.  He’s been in a slew of films and television projects and heck, he was even the voice of Dregg in the 2012 Ninja Turtles cartoon.

I played TellTale’s first Batman game, and really want to play the second one once it is out on disc, so I was used to the play style.  You move the characters and interact with the environment via pressing X or by quick time actions using the square, triangle and circle buttons.  R2 to pick up things, R1 to get to the menu of clues, and L1 to put a little pep in your step.  I used that mostly during Chapter 10 as I knew what to expect.

It really is such a fun game and I enjoyed it so much!

I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as NyxRising Industries though.

I stumbled across their ten part series, The Blackwood Files, on YouTube.

Thanks to them for hosting their own video.

I saw the first episode, Until Dawn retold via found footage and I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the series and seeing how they incorporate everything.  The first episode is barely 16 minutes so pending on the length of the next nine episodes, I should be able to knock them out relatively soon.  I saw all ten episodes and these are all simply amazing.

You could probably safely skip to Episode 8, to get into the true elements from Until Dawn.

Then nine and ten are pretty amazing and super faithful to the game – all things considered.

Their portrayal of Chris could have been a tad better, but I like what they did with him and all of the other characters.  There are several Community references which I appreciated.  There is a fun silly bonus episode as well as a wrap party video that I would recommend.  There is also a three hour live stream video that I think I’ll pass on at this moment, as I spent a lot of time this past weekend in the world of Blackwoods Files.  I didn’t play the game as much, as this video series was satisfying that itch.

Looks like they do a lot of fun videos like this.

https://nyxrising.com/

So I’m sure their other video series are of similar quality.

The game is a PS4 exclusive so if you have the system, I highly recommend it.  I read on reddit that Sony announced the PS5 is a couple years away.

Lastly, another great resource for the game is this site –

http://until-dawn.wikia.com/wiki/Until_Dawn

I wish it didn’t have the black background to be more work friendly but maybe I shouldn’t be looking at the site at work, which I don’t do.  Lots of great information on there, especially their character pages.

. . .

A kind reddit user, jayderaine, introduced me to this cool website –

https://howlongtobeat.com/user.php?n=jackalsiii

As they were discussing in a thread how to chose which game to select in your backlog, and many said to based the decision off of the length of the game.  I hadn’t realized there was a website that kept track of how long it took to finish the main portion a game, and how long to fully complete the game.  Which is a fun thing to keep track of and so I took the less than ten minutes to select my current backlog and it wasn’t that bad.  Plus, I’ve been needing a quick guide to which games I own as there is usually two or three of them that I forget about.  So just for my own knowledge, here is the official list of games I have.

Physical Copy

Grand Theft Auto V

Last of Us Remastered

Uncharted Collection, I’m playing Uncharted 3 on it

Uncharted 4

Uncharted : Lost Legacy

Batman : Arkham Knight

Life is Strange

Fallout 4

LittleBigPlanet 3, I still need to buy the TMNT on there, as they are so cute!

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy

Inside + Limbo

Flashback Classics Vol. 2, I bought it for my wife’s love for Maze Craze.

LEGO Dimensions

Until Dawn

Fallout 4

Digital Copies

Thanks to the PSN Free Games, I got these added to my backlog

Knack

Beyond : Two Souls

Bloodborne

Bombing Busters

Clare : Extended Cut

Darksiders II

Forma.8

Mad Max

Mighty No. 9

Psycho-Pass : Mandatory Happiness, took me so long but I finally finished one storyline with the guy and now I’m playing it again with K for one more trophy and then I’m pretty much done with it.  It got really interesting towards the end.

Ratchet & Clank (2016)

TrackMania Turbo, I love how this game keeps track of me and the other 511 Montana racers.  That’s a fun statistic.

So a pretty decent back log of games.