3/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Until Dawn.

This has gotta be one of the wildest remakes yet, and not in a good way. But it's kind of hard to see it as anything but hilarious because the original came out 9 years ago, completely holds up and you can play it for like a tenner. Sure, this is very, very pretty. You can see like five more wrinkles on Rami Malek's face when he says "GAWD SPEED PILGRIM," and I just got a new PC, so I was like, wow, my expensive life choices are so based. But it's also just a car crash of batshit decisions; like a handful of people sat in a room and said, hmmm, let's just do the weirdest shit we possibly can to justify a 60-quid price tag. So they start playing whimsical, Harry-Potter-ass music when the characters are quipping, there's a fully re-worked intro with seventy crazy camera angles a second, and they throw in a new ending cinematic just to be like, pay us you filthy bastards, maybe we'll do a sequel one day. But the best bit is that it's an absolute buggy disaster. Without fail, every time a scene starts, the characters will spawn as eldritchian Rayman monsters, sporting floating detached limbs that gradually form into a human shape. The game can and will soft-lock you in every section if you don't follow the seven unspoken teachings of the ancient QTE warlocks of the woods, adding one hell of a permadeath mode. And, man, my favourite section? The real villain is just the clue tab screen. Whenever you enter the clue screen, as you exit, there's a 30% chance that your game will freeze and crash. And when I say that percentage, I mean, this shit is so reliably frequent that it turns checking your recently grabbed clues into a electrifying game of Russian roulette. Truly, a thrilling addition. 10/10 for the new mechanic. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a review for Until Dawn. I fuck with this game so hard. I play it every single Halloween without fail. If I reach November without seeing that jumpscare where the dude jumps in front of the telescope, the mythical spirit of Halloween will come and stab my eyes out with plastic bat ornaments. But, genuinely, do not buy this. Just... don't. You're getting nothing for the price. Literally, spend a tenner buying the original game and then spend the extra 50 on bin bags. No one likes buying bin bags. It's like the eating cauliflower of buying things with your hard-earned money. But, by fronting 50 quid exclusively for bin bags, you'll have so many of them that you don't have to think about bin bags for like a year. Really let that sink in. You can play the exact same game you would've got if you bought this, but it's less buggy and you also never have that sinking feeling of seeing the bin empty and knowing that dirty-ass cupboard below your sink has no bin bags left to fill it. That right there is an absolute steal.