The creators of Until Dawn are working on a spiritual sequel that aims to be the first video game horror anthology.
Ever since Resident Evil coined the term any horror-themed video game is always referred to as ‘survival horror’, but that shouldn’t really be the case. There are many sub-genres of horror movie and while survival horror has dominated in games it’s not the only way to do things. 2015 hit Until Dawn had very little in common with Resident Evil, or any other video game, but it was definitely a horror title. And yet despite two spin-offs it looks like there’s not going to be a sequel, because developer Supermassive has moved onto other things…
Anthologies are almost unknown amongst video games but The Dark Pictures is intended to be a series of almost entirely unconnected horror games that use the same basic gameplay concept of Until Dawn. The first one was announced last month as Man Of Medan and like all the games is based on an existing urban legend or piece of folklore. It’s one we’ve never heard of but is essentially a Mary Celeste style ghost ship story, where the crew of the Ourang Medan were reportedly all found dead in the Dutch East Indies.
The game was playable at Gamescom and we were able to take control of a boat full of American teens (aka horror movie fodder) who come aboard and try to investigate what’s going on. The WWII era ship is deserted and filled with horribly contorted corpses, and it’s not long before supernatural shenanigans begin to take place. There’s no clue from the demo exactly what’s going on but the ship is obviously haunted and, without wanting to spoil anything, it’s not long before members of your own crew are added to the list of victims.
The first things that strikes you about Man Of Medan, other than the welcome surprise of it being another big budget horror game, is just how good the graphics are. Until Dawn was already a great looking game, but as Supermassive boss Pete Samuels explained to us later the team has switched over to Unreal Engine for the new game and it looks fantastic – with some of the best facial animation we’ve ever seen.
The demo is a slow burn though, and so we didn’t have to make much in the way of important decisions until the end. One of your crew mates is acting weird and we correctly predicted that he’s already a ghost of some sort and so we didn’t fall for his trick to try and lock us in a room with a bunch of zombies (whether they are actual physical zombies is unclear, but we’ll call them that for the sake of convenience).
Whether our character got out or not is not clear, as that’s where the demo ended. But the person playing next to us chose the opposite option and ended up getting swamped by a different set of zombies, so as with Until Dawn it seems as if all the characters are constantly in danger and that the game has several different endings where some, or none, of them survive.
We always welcome any new horror game onto the scene, especially one as atmospheric as this, but exactly how scary the game is going to be we couldn’t determine just from the demo. But Until Dawn was never the most frightening of horror games and owed most of its success to the pliability of its story and the surprisingly collaborative way many people ended up playing it. That’s clearly something that The Dark Pictures Anthology wants to continue and we’re excited to see how Supermassive can evolve the concept further.
Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Developer: Supermassive Games
Release Date: 2019
GC: I have to be honest, I usually can’t stand interactive movies. I can’t bear Quantic Dream’s stuff in particular…
PS: I read your article on the last one, so I know how you feel.
GC: [laughs] Actually, I didn’t hate the last one. It was rubbish, but I didn’t hate it. So that counts as a great improvement.
PS: [laughs]
GC: I was suspicious of Until Dawn but it was genuinely interesting. I could absolutely see what you were going for and I could understand why some people loved it. But I’m surprised there was no direct sequel. I thought it did well and Sony were pleased with it?
PS: It did very well, yeah. Both critically and commercially. It got four BAFTA nominations and one BAFTA for Best Original Property. [Samuels pauses here and gets a look in his eye that we interpret as stopping himself from explaining exactly what went on between Supermassive and Sony.]
We were delighted that people responded to it the way that they did. It has a massive fanbase and… that’s one of the reasons we’re doing this, is that we wanna do more for that fanbase and to move that fanbase across multiple platforms.
GC: Why an anthology though? I always enjoy them but it seems like a lot of work, given you have to create completely new locations and characters and stories every time.
PS: It’s a challenge for sure, yeah. We had looked into it, but then some of the big fan followers of Until Dawn actually started to suggest it at one point. And I looked at it again and I thought, ‘That’s gonna be really hard!’ And then we went away and thought about it and thought, ‘Yeah it’s hard but there’s so much potential in it, the rewards could be so great because we can tell multiple stories.
We do have to inject new and fresh creative ideas into it every time on a regular basis but… that’s a large part of what we enjoy about what we do. So to have more of that… yeah, it’s challenging but it’s genuinely exciting.
GC: Well, that seems the best possible reason to do something.
PS: Absolutely! Yeah. And when you think about it, it’s been done in literature for 200 years…
GC: But it costs nothing extra to write a new scene or character in a book.
PS: No, but then it was done in radio for a 100 years and it’s been done in the Twilight Zone, Black Mirror – a lot of TV and film for the last 50 years. Nobody has done it like this in games, yeah?
GC: I was surprised to hear you say that there’s no connection between any of the games though. Are they not all set in the same universe? I would’ve thought you’d have little cameos or something at least.
PS: Yeah, I understand there has to be enough to link them together as part of a set.
GC: Like a Cryptkeeper intro or something?
PS: Something like that, yeah. And also similar game mechanics, albeit used differently. Yeah, the Cryptkeeper idea, that kind of thing that you’ve seen in similar horror anthologies in the past. But yes, it is the same universe. So there’ll be like Easter eggs that you find, like the machinery in this particular game is made by a company… [stops himself giving away a spoiler]
GC: This is going to seem like an odd question, but I don’t understand why your graphics are so good?
PS: [laughs]
GC: In terms of the human characters they’re amongst the best in the business, but were they really created just for Until Dawn? That seems an enormous amount of work for what was originally meant to be just one mid-budget game.
PS: Well, we’re a different engine now. We’re now Unreal.
GC: So what was it before?
PS: We were using the Killzone engine.
GC: Ah, well that explains things.
PS: We’ve done a lot of work with Unreal to have that deliver the things that are important to our games.
GC: We’re getting to the point now where there is a very wide difference between the quality of visuals in even big budget games, especially in things like facial animation. It’s weird how they can look almost photorealistic in one game and still last gen quality in another.
PS: It really depends on what people see as important to their game, as to what they’re going to focus on. What we do is very expensive, the way that we do it. And to get that kind of visual quality isn’t easy, it isn’t cheap. There’s high data costs, there’s high technical costs doing the set-up with the faces so that they can do what we need them to do; so that we can map real actors’ emotional performances accurately to their faces.
GC: One of the best things about Until Dawn was how good the actors were. Were you just lucky they didn’t phone it in, or was there something you were doing to get those performance out of them? Because often the bigger the star the less effort they put in.
PS: It’s an absolute combination of things. A lot of it is the cast and the way that we cast people, and how much we get the cast involved. It’s sharing the story with them, having them interpret what we want and giving them some freedom – not total freedom, because there’s a thing that we’re making and that character needs to be a certain character and a certain way.
But 50% of it is just getting great actors that care and helping them to care by involving them in it and having them really understand it, rather than just giving them lines to read – which is I think where many people might be going wrong.
And keeping too much secret from them. You do hear horror stories, and we hear them from some of the actors that we work with, where they’ll turn up and they won’t even be told it’s a game.
GC: I’m thinking of that Simpsons episode where Krusty comes in to do his line reads.
PS: I don’t remember that! [laughs]
GC: Do they enjoy it? I’m trying to remember what your behind the scenes stuff looked like, are they in leotards with golf balls on their head or do they have all the scaffolding in front of them?
PS: So we split our process into two, some people don’t. Some people do it all as one process. We capture facial movement and voice at the same time, so it’s the hat with the camera pointing at the face. And that’s how we get the emotional performance, if you like.
We also have a reference camera that films the performance they’re giving while they do it; we take that reference footage and we take it to a different studio with different actors, sometime stunt actors, with the mocap suits with the dots and they deliver the body performance. It suits our process much better for us to do that.
GC: With all that on is possible for actors to enjoy what they’re doing?
PS: Pretty much everybody says they forget within 10 minutes that it’s there, it’s very lightweight nowadays. It’s hard doing it in the summer in L.A., which we have done, we have to turn the air-con off, because of the noise, and they’re carrying a lithium battery – which is about quarter the size of a car battery on their chest which pumps out a lot of heat. So we’ve had some actors that have to really go through it. [laughs]
But everybody says they’re enjoying it. And they enjoy the freedom of it compared to what they do when they’re doing TV and film, which is a lot of stop/start, a lot of waiting for cameras to set up, a lot of waiting for lights to set. Whereas ours is very actor-friendly, very dynamic.
GC: I’m a big horror fan, in terms of both games and films, so I was a bit concerned when you went out of your way to say that the game would not be gory. Why are you so adamant about that? You don’t need gore to make anything scary but can you honestly say that when you go to the cinema to see a horror movie and it’s PG-13 you don’t take that as a bad sign?
PS: I don’t see it as a bad sign, genuinely I don’t. And most of the horror films that I’ve enjoyed… most are not gory. On reflection you think, ‘Oh that must’ve been gory because I enjoyed it’. But then you think about it and it’s not really.
GC: It doesn’t have to be gore, but it at least has to be horrible in some way…
PS: Horrible’s fine. We didn’t say it’s not going to be horrible, we said it’s not going to be gory. [laughs] We’re British, we have to struggle to somehow smuggle in one happy ending. [laughs] But it can still be really scary, really terrifying.
GC: So what are some of your favourite horror movies? And don’t lie to prove your point!
PS: [laughs] I’m not gonna lie! I watched A Quiet Place a couple of weeks ago and I thought it was really good. My knuckles were white all the way through it, and some of the standard approaches that they took to that in terms of setting the terror up really early… having you understand how horrible this is gonna be if it goes wrong. It was a great mechanism for creating that tension and then maintaining that tension throughout. It Follows is another big favourite, again not gory but absolutely terrifying.
GC: I see what you’re saying but it just seems an odd thing to rule out straight away, especially as I imagine it’ll be 18-rated anyway. Because any even moderately adult-themed game always tends to be.
PS: We have swearing…
GC: But that’s what I mean, if you have swearing that instantly bumps it up to an 18 anyway.
PS: We’ll see, we’ll see how the ratings come in. It’s not that we don’t want gore in it, it’s just that this specific story doesn’t need it.
GC: So the other ones might?
PS: They may have. But there’s no need for it, it would serve no purpose and add no value to the story we’re telling in the first story in the anthology.
GC: To me the best is horror is not just scary, it’s… it’s when you get that queasiness in your stomach. That sense that everything is wrong and this thing you’ve sat down to have fun with is actually becoming really disturbing. Something like Silent Hill was great at that.
PS: Absolutely, absolutely.
GC: And is that what you’re aiming at? Something that… unpleasant?
PS: Absolutely, a lot of it is the fear of the unknown. It’s to make the suggestion to the person that there is something horrible and you don’t know what it is. Quite often in monster movies, as soon as you show the monster that’s it – you’ve blown it. You have to hold that back, because once you’ve seen it it stops being frightening.
GC: It’s interesting you mention A Quiet Place there, because there’s also the question of rules. Because, again, you’re making things difficult for yourself because you’ve got to make up new rules for each game. But A Quiet Place… it looks great, it was very tense, well-acted but it didn’t really make much sense.
PS: [laughs]
GC: The ideal is when the rules are predictable and then when they’re used or subverted in a clever way you don’t feel cheated.
PS: Totally. Something we do right at the start of the design is we establish what we call ‘the truths’, which are the things that are true for this story. And we do try and check everything that we put in to make sure it is honest with those truths. And if we spot it and it’s not we won’t use it. That’s not to say people don’t make mistakes but it’s part of our process, it’s a test we try to pass.
GC: You said the whole anthology is based on urban legend and folklore. But I’ve never heard of this one before, so I’m not clear how specific it is or if it’s just generally influenced by existing stories?
PS: It’s very specific. Google Man of Medan and you will find something.
GC: I tried that and all I got was your game!
PS: [laughs] Well that’s good, in a way! Or if you look up on Wikipedia Man of Medan you will find it.
GC: So that’s how it’ll work going forward, it won’t just be general monster in the woods thing it’ll be a very specific story?
PS: What I will say is it’s not necessarily always using a story as a basis, but they all have their roots somewhere in truth or existing conspiracy theory or long-standing myth and legend. And… that is going to be true for everything we’re going to do. They have a link to the real world.
GC: I could see your mind working there, thinking about what you couldn’t tell me.
PS: [laughs]
GC: How many games have you planned out so far?
PS: Obviously this one is well into production, we’ve got another one in production that we’ve already shot performance for. We’ve got one that is moving into production… we have quite a lengthy design process and it’s getting towards the end of that now. We have the concept for a fourth story and we have high-level stuff for a fifth, sixth, and seventh. We’re just going to keep going until somebody tells us to stop! [laughs]
GC: Are people going to pay for these individual or is there going to be something like a season pass?
PS: Well, the great thing about working with Bandai Namco is that they will know the best way to do this. And that’s currently being discussed between us and them. But we haven’t decided anything yet.
GC: Okay, great well I look forward to being frightened by your game next year.
PS: [laughs]
GC: Just, err, don’t put any spiders in it, eh?
PS: We’ll add one just for you! [laughs]
GC: [laughs] I really shouldn’t have said that.
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