On Until Dawn and How To Make A Collectible Worth A Damn

October 23, 2024

Written by Jamie Galea

There’s a lot about the Until Dawn remake that just comes across as bizarre. In a lot of ways, it’s an inferior version of a nearly ten year old game, that even despite the graphical updates and move to Unreal Engine 5, it feels utterly unnecessary. Just about the only thing about it that feels appreciated is that it finally makes the game available on PC.

For what it’s worth, I still think the game is worth playing, even if there isn’t that much new compared to the original game we reviewed back in 2015. It’s very much a shot for shot remake, the Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho style of remake, if you will. You won’t miss anything by not playing the remake, but the original is still very easily available if you want to save some coin.

Yet going through the remake has reminded me that Until Dawn is one of the few games to make collectibles actually worth a damn. Something that I often think is generally overlooked in lieu of throwing vaguely related items in to just help make a game be that much longer for a certain type of player.

Peter Stomare is not a collectible, but he’s always a delight when you see him…

Let’s get this out of the way – the vast majority of collectibles in video games are awful and boring. It’s clearly an attempt to bolster playtime and often feels just nonsensical. A great example of this is in the original Alan Wake. It makes sense that Alan Wake would find lost manuscript pages and it gives the player an insight to his trashy writing. To me that’s a really compelling idea and it makes you want to go seek them out. It’s infinitely more interesting than trying to find thermos just littered around the environment because of reasons.

Until Dawn has four types of collectibles: three of which tie closer into the game’s story and lore, which as someone who doesn’t think the game’s background story isn’t all that fascinating, doesn’t really do much for me. However, the fourth collectible are the Totems, which provide the player with an incredibly brief clip of the future and divided into five separate categories to give you a hint as to what may possibly be.

The thing that makes the totems such a fascinating idea is that the clips are just out of context enough that, unless you actually know, it provides a glimpse into a possible future.  You don’t know how such an event happens but you know that it’s a possibility, keeping you on your toes if you’re wanting to try and keep every character alive for the ending. So when you get to a scene that looks like something you’ve seen from one of the totems, you know to be aware or to try to make decisions to better suit a desired outcome.

For instance, one of the totem categories is death, and if it wasn’t obvious enough, will foreshadow the possible death of a character. The trick, and where I really think this works, is that it can be from anywhere in the game, not just the next story beat where that character could cark it.

In typical big budget game fashion, it’s also one of those things that are so highly rendered that they make you move it around to observe every little detail. I’ve never gotten the appeal of that. It’s more annoying than good!

Basically, it’s useful information to help make for an overall better gameplay experience, and one that genuinely makes it worth your while to seek them out, not just if you’re wanting to be a completionist or go for a trophy/achievement. It’s something I can’t say about a lot of collectibles in games, especially the rewards that come with them.

It might also be one of the few collectibles that, if you’re playing with friends, can make for a much better time. While Until Dawn isn’t a game you can play with other people, by treating it as an interactive movie night with friends, you can have people pick up on the clues left by totems and retain that information as to what they contain. So when a scene pops up from one of the totems, you can work together to avoid a grisly fate for the character.

Such a concept was elaborated on Until Dawn’s first spiritual successor: The Dark Pictures Anthology. That series of games actually did introduce couch and online multiplayer, and had a very similar collectible that informed the player of a possible future. I had a great night once playing Man of Medan online with a pal,  trying to keep everyone alive. They had seen info about a character’s death that I hadn’t, and we spent the session trying to keep everyone alive as much as possible based on what we collectively knew. It made for a really cool multiplayer experience that I haven’t really had since.

For as cool as these collectibles are, I don’t think they’re the sole reason you should go check out Until Dawn, let alone its remake. But if you are in the market for a slightly scary video game experience this Halloween season, Until Dawn is worth still sitting down and experiencing, even all these years later.

Code for this game was provided by the publisher. For more takes like this, follow Jamie on social media at @jamiemgalea