Finally finished with this game! I got it for Christmas 2015, shortly after this game was all the hype, and started playing it a couple days after. Then I forgot about it. I rediscovered it when I was playing Michonne and picked it up again a few days after I completed Michonne. I didn't restart the game, but continued on my exisiting playthrough - eternally grateful for all the "Previously on..." this game has.
Before I asked my parents for this game I had seen PewDiePie play it and I knew how his playthrough turned out. So I remembered a bunch of things. Still I managed to go in a different direction. Don't know how. It's the tiny things that matter.
Jessica was the first to die for me. She died in chapter four after she was dragged through the window by the wendigo. Mike chased after her; I missed
one single button, which made him too slow to save her in time and she lost her jaw. Lovely.
One single button.
I continued on and managed to keep literally everyone else alive until the end. The first time I got ready to blow up the lodge I got too trigger-happy and blew the whole thing up while three of them were still in there xD So I replayed the last chapter, in which I missed a button again. I went slow through the scenes in the lodge. Everyone got out, and then Sam died. It was during one of those don't move things, and I swear I didn't move, but I did miss a button when Sam was running towards the lodge, which may have resulted in that don't move check being harder to pass? I don't know, but it seems likely. In any case I got through the game with only Jessica and Sam dead, and Josh being cannibalistic.
I really enjoyed this game, because it was so full of choice & consequence, everything I did would get some sort of consequence later on. Whether I missed a button or chose whether to run or hide, the action would come back and bite me at some point. Butterfly effect, all throughout the game. I also really liked the early therapy sessions with Peter Stormare :P Wonder if the game had been different if I hadn't been so persistent with the gore? Wonder if the psycho had worn a different mask if I hadn't said that clowns were creepy af? (They are.) Every single thing you do is a choice in this game and it makes all the difference, and it's amazing.
(What follows here is me ranting about consoles and the characters. You may skip it.)
I rarely play games on console because I'm so bad with the controls. I usually play games like this or other story-heavy things which aren't all that fast paced, because I keep messing up the buttons. For Until Dawn, those times I missed a button it was always because I can never remember which button is circle and which is square. I always have to translate the symbols in my head before pressing and sometimes I was just a bit slow. Triangle is easy. It points up and the button is up. X is always down. Then we have square and circle, with basically the same colour when in a dimly lit room and several times I just forget which button is on which side. Generally I know that square is left and circle is right, but in the heat of the moment I tend to forget. The mishaps I've had in Until Dawn have been me pressing circle when it should be square and vice-versa.
My favourite character was Sam. She was the only one who could keep calm in the midst of everything, and she was the only one who wasn't a spoiled brat complaining about everything. Every time I played as Emily or Jess (thankfully the latter wasn't for long) I just wanted to punch them. Funny thing? Going through Tumblr it seems like Emily is the fan favourite. I don't get it, but fine. Apparantly it's because she's intelligent and resourceful and ok, yes, she is. She's both of those things, but she's also an annoying bitch, a spoiled brat who complains like a baby when things aren't to her liking and uses her boyfriend as a servant. Like ffs, it's not until Matt and she are separated that she actually starts to do things properly instead of just asking Matt to do them for her. I wanted to punch Matt too but for completely different reasons. He was so leashed and he didn't even see it. I liked both Ashley and Chris, but they kept frustrating me with not revealing their feelings for each other and a lot of the time I just yelled "Just kiss!" at the TV screen. Mike, was the one character that grew on me. I didn't like him initially, but he grew up in the face of danger and became someone really level-headed and useful.
2. The Stand, by Stephen King. The last book in my King marathon! And I really liked it, although it felt too long at times, and the way it all ended felt a bit anti-climactic. I was very excited to read this after I read an interview where Corey Taylor said this was his favourite book ever. For me, I wouldn't call this a favourite but it's still really good. I liked most of the characters and for the ones I didn't like I was still interested enough in them to want to know where their stories would lead them. I felt like King spent too much time on certain characters' back story (e.g. Trashcan Man) and not enough on others' (e.g. Randall Flagg). I'm not a scientist in any way, but I still got the gut feeling that some of the science in the book wouldn't really work. While I mostly enjoyed the book it's getting on a bit in years (and it's still supposed to take place in the future, which is now 27 years in the past, but it's the future from the book's time of writing), and I would actually love to see a remake of this book but in our close future. I would like to see how this post-apocalyptic world would work with the prospect of trying to get the Internet back online or cell phones, and maybe finding survivors even in other countries. I want to find out what happened in the rest of the world. Did the flu hit there too or was it isolated to the US? Did the rest of the world founder or just move on and forget about the States? Food for thought... But the main question on my mind after finishing this book is: What happened to Kojak?
4. The House of the Four Winds, by Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory. First part in what looks to be a series, each book detailing the adventures of each of the twelve daughtes of Swansgaarde. This book is so up my alley it's not even funny (which is why I bought it to begin with); badass ladies in cross-dress, swashbuckling their way through pirates, all the while learning about seafaring and falling in love with the young and handsome crew member. Yes, please! What I liked even more about this book was that it wasn't the silly rose-coloured sort of girly love that's usually the case when romance finds its way into books. This was a mature kind of love. Something that evolved from simple companionship into friendship into something more. And also, it's not just pirates - it's also magic! Only thing I didn't like about this book was the dialogue - it felt a little stilted. The text was good. The dialogue not so much.
