It has some bafflingly stupid design decisions. So the game is hyped up on how many endings there will be and how many decisions you get to make, but the game is actually designed as if you are only supposed to play it once.
- You can't skip cutscenes. At all. So much for replaying to see all the different ways you can affect the story, not unless you want to spend 100s of hours watching the same scenes over and over.
- You can't run. You can walk and walk briskly, that's it.
- The New Story option is actually a 'delete save' button in disguise. It erases all the collectables you've found as well as removing the episode select menu as soon as you start a new story, even though you don't get access to the episode select menu until after you beat the game. Isn't half the fun of replaying games slowly filling in all the nooks and crannies in various checklists? It doesn't make any sense to me, it's like someone one the dev team had a fever dream and thought that they were working on a roguelike, when Until Dawn is pretty much the furthest you can get from being like rogue.
- The chapters in the episode select menu are way too bloody far apart, they are at least an hour apart. The kicker is that there are about 5 natural stopping points per chapter.
- The save features are a mess. Okay, so you beat the game and now you can access the episode selection and the chapters are based on the choices that you made in the game, but if you start from one of the chapters and beat the game again, then the original data is still the basis of the chapters and all new data is lost. Also you have to be very careful to only select "resume" and to not choose a different chapter or start a new story or else you lose all current progress. It's so convoluted, why did nobody tell the developers that such thing as multiple save files exist?
This makes replaying the game incredibly tedious, since there isn't a whole lot of gameplay to speak of. It's essentially a choose your own adventure book in which you are forced to read every single word, again and again, every time you want to try for a different ending.
The story is kind of interesting though. Although I've read that there aren't as many endings as advertised. Actually I've read that there is only one ending, and the only thing that changes is who is alive to see it, and that two characters can't even die until the last chapter.
The game also features a new mechanic that I find kind of bizarre: you have complete control over your characters head. Instead of controlling the camera with the right stick, the camera is stationary and you control where the character looks. It is completely frivolous to gameplay. The only time it matters in the slightest is when they have a flashlight and they point the light where they are looking. It does look pretty good when you can make the character move their head realistically, but I don't think it was worth making the controls as clunky as they are.
