October 2024 is shaping up to me an absolutely packed month for horror games. On Wednesday, PlayStation announced that the Until Dawn remake is set to launch on October 4 for PlayStation 5 and PC.
To celebrate, PlayStation and remaster studio Ballistic Moon also released a video that compares the old footage to the new. The game has been rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, giving a huge boost to visuals, from the characters to the backgrounds. It also now features ray tracing, so the lighting looks more realistic and dynamic, along with new simulation techniques to create “more realistic real-time fluids.” Look, this is a slasher horror game, there’s going to be a lot of blood.
However, Until Dawn didn’t just get a visual upgrade. Ballistic Moon creative director Neil McEwan reveals in a PlayStation blog post that the studio made a couple tweaks to the narrative, specifically in the prologue. The team added more context for the original prank that ended in tragedy one year before the events of the game and more detail behind the Washington family.
A big part of Until Dawn are the totems that you can collect that give you visions of possible outcomes. People who played the original will find them in new locations, along with a new type: the Hunger totem.
Finally, there are new accessibility settings. Until Dawn has a lot of quicktime events, including some called Don’t Move that require you to, you know, not move. Even the slightest twitch of the controller can ruin it. Now, Until Dawn will have a Stay Calm option for controllers that don’t have a gyroscope or people who need something a bit different.
The Until Dawn remake was announced at Sony’s January State of Play. The original was released as a PlayStation 4 exclusive in 2015, and starred Rami Malek, Hayden Panettiere, Peter Stormare, and others. It cemented developer Supermassive Games’ interactive story style, which it utilized for its The Dark Pictures Anthology and The Quarry. Currently, the studio is working on The Casting of Frank Stone with Behaviour Interactive and Little Nightmares 3. An Until Dawn movie is also in the works.