Until Dawn, an upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive horror title developed by Supermassive Games, draws heavy inspiration from “classic ‘80s and ‘90s horror movies,” according to design director Tom Heaton.
During an interview with Gamereactor UK, Heaton explained that the development team’s main aim is to create “a playable horror movie” with Until Dawn, while citing the importance of films such as Scream, Friday the 13th and I Know What You Did Last Summer for “the techniques of how they scared people.”
When he was asked about the replay value that the horror title has to offer, Heaton described that every decision the player can make can result in a different scenario, meaning that the “replayability is huge” and there are a “ton of different endings.”
“There’s a ton of different endings and it’s very difficult to put a number on the number of endings, ‘cause there’s so many permutations that you can get,” he said. “And it can pan out in so many different ways, so the replayability is huge. We’ve seen from our user testing that players are very keen to go back and replay what they’ve played, make different decisions and see how things pan out.”
Until Dawn shares a similar butterfly effect with games like Heavy Rain, meaning that the fate of the eight characters in Supermassive Games’ title — Sam, Josh, Jessica, Mike, Emily, Matt, Ashley and Chris — are in the hands of the players’ choices.
With that being said, Heaton said he and the other developers believe “it’s unlikely that many players will get eight characters through to the end on the first playthrough.”
“What it was we looked at horror movies, inspiration for horror movies and we noticed that in horror movies when people die — which they do quite a lot [with] it being a horror movie — they never come back,” he explained.
“When they die they’re dead. They don’t pop back up in the next scene and give you another go. They’re really dead. So we said we have to have that in our game because what we’re trying to do is getting a playable horror movie. Dead means dead.”
Supermassive Games was present at The Game Awards and PlayStation Experience with Until Dawn last week, and the horror title recently had its teaser trailer from the latter event released online by Sony.
Starring Hayden Panettiere (Heroes, Nashville and Scream 4), Until Dawn is scheduled to launch sometime in 2015 for PlayStation 4.