Julie Veitch is a PhD student at the University of Waterloo whose research focuses on “detecting figures” and the construction of authority in modern Occult-Detective fiction. She is particularly interested in the way that form affects narrative content and how player agency in video games factors into narrative. You can contact Julie on Twitter

Until Dawn is a 2015 survival horror game developed by Supermassive Games. On the surface, the game appears to be a straight-forward take on the slasher genre. The prologue acts as a cold open, showing the events of the last time the protagonists–a cast composed of eight young adults–stayed at the Washington family lodge. One year before the main events of Until Dawn, some of the characters played a cruel prank on their friend Hannah Washington, making her flee into the wintry woods with her twin sister, Beth, on her heels. And although the characters do not know what fate befell the missing sisters, the player watches them fall off a cliff to their presumed deaths. In the main chapters of the game, our eight protagonists return to the secluded ski lodge at the request of Josh Washington, Hannah and Beth’s brother, who wants to party like the old days in his sisters’ honour. Before long, the characters are terrorized by a fairly derivative figure in a clown mask known as “The Psycho”. However, about halfway through Until Dawn it is revealed that Josh Washington is The Psycho, no one is actually dead, and the entire ordeal was meant as a ‘prank’ to get revenge on his friends for the disappearance of his sisters. Soon after this reveal, though, the characters discover the true threat of the game: the vicious, starving wendigos that inhabit the nearby mines. 

Despite having many different possible endings, Until Dawn follows a fairly linear narrative, with the most significant differences in each playthrough being dependent on whether the characters survive or die at key moments. This narrative structure hinges on a mechanic called the “butterfly effect”, which the game introduces by warning the player: “A tiny butterfly flapping its wings today may lead to a devastating hurricane weeks from now. The smallest decision can dramatically change the future” (“One Year Ago”). As such, the ending of the game is primarily determined by the choices a player makes in response to dialogue and action prompts. The player’s response options are often binary ones: Hide, or run? Express support for your companion, or suspicion? However, the binary nature of the decisions does not necessarily make them easy ones, thanks to the butterfly effect. The player must always be considering what the consequences of their decisions might be. And, further complicating matters, sometimes the game is only presenting the illusion of choice. This is most obvious in the controlled environment of The Analyst’s office. In the brief interstitial scenes with The Analyst, Dr. Hill, the player is not allowed to interact with the game as they do in the main chapters of the story. These scenes are designed to take away player agency and make them feel as helpless as Josh, who is hallucinating these sessions with Dr. Hill. By completely removing the player’s freedom of movement, using a first person perspective, and providing clues for the main plot within the sessions, the player is forced into a position of powerlessness and encouraged to primarily interact with the scenes through interpretation rather than action. 

Until Dawn is broken up into eleven main sections: a “One Year Ago” prologue and ten present-day chapters that depict the ten hours of a single night until morning arrives. Between these main game sections, there are nine miniature “therapy” sessions with Dr. Hill. The sessions with The Analyst are very brief, making up around twenty minutes of the game’s roughly eight-to-ten-hour length. Many players may not think much of these short sessions, aside from being grateful for a brief break from the action in the main story. However, the break from the action that Dr. Hill provides is not necessarily a break from tension. In the sessions with Dr. Hill, the player is stripped of their agency. While they were able to run around, look for clues, and interact with their surroundings in the prologue, suddenly they are stuck sitting in front of a desk in a room where they cannot even freely turn their head to inspect their surroundings. Traditionally, “[i]n video games, players’ agency is delimited by the system—what they can see, say, and do” (Muriel and Crawford 145). However, in Until Dawn, there are two distinct systems at play: one delimiting the agency in the main game, and a much more restrictive one delimiting the agency in the sessions with Dr. Hill. In these interludes, the player cannot do anything without first being prompted by Dr. Hill. They cannot act; they can only react and observe. And while the player is safe from death within the confines of the office, it is unlikely that they feel safe. Even in the beginning, when Dr. Hill and his office appear normal, something about it feels unnerving. The decor is all dark browns and reds; there seems to be a lot of dust in the air; and the only light source is the setting sun streaming through the windows to the player’s right, so shadows lurk on the other side of the room. And this is the office at its best, as it gradually rots and morphs to reflect what is happening in the main chapters of the game over time. Between this dark and decaying setting, the increasingly erratic behaviour of The Analyst, the occasional jump-scare, and the player’s complete inability to act on their own accord, Dr. Hill’s office proves to be just as unnerving as the setting of the main story.

Dr. Hill’s office in his first scene; warmly lit and richly furnished.

A key aspect that contributes to the office’s unnerving atmosphere is point of view (POV). While the main sections of the game are in third person POV, with the player observing the character they are controlling, the first six sections in Dr. Hill’s office are almost entirely in first person. Because of this shift in POV, the player has no idea which character they are playing as during these sessions – and as Dr. Hill frequently addresses the events and characters from the main portions of the game (including an exercise in Chapter 3 where he asks his patient to choose which protagonists they like the most), the player would be forgiven for assuming these are metafictional sessions in which they are his patient. After it is revealed in Chapter 6 that The Psycho (Josh) is actually Dr. Hill’s patient in these sessions, the POV shifts to third person to match the main chapters of the game – and notably, this is also when the sessions with Dr. Hill become exclusively cinematic cutscenes. The sessions are no longer visually distinct from the main gameplay, and if the right in-game clues are found the player comes to understand that they are, in fact, hallucinations that Josh is having throughout the night because he has stopped taking the strong antidepressant medication prescribed to him by the real Dr. Hill. (Notably, there is also a popular fan theory that Josh has been misdiagnosed and is dealing with schizophrenia or another form of psychosis, which he never received proper treatment for, thus exacerbating his mental health issues.) As if to mirror the lack of control that Josh feels as his mental state deteriorates, once the player knows that Dr. Hill is not speaking directly to them, they can no longer interact in his sessions at all. Instead, the scenes devolve into an enraged Dr. Hill shouting at and taunting a visibly distressed Josh. This mirrors Josh’s role in the game’s main story, as he is the only main character who the player has not been permitted to control up to this point – because he is only ‘playable’, in the loosest sense of the word, in the final chapter of the game when his hallucinations come to a horrifying climax. The lack of interaction for the last three scenes with Dr. Hill —coupled with Josh’s extremely limited playability— highlights Josh’s own lack of control and agency as his mental state deteriorates, giving the player a glimpse into how frightening and debilitating severe mental illness can be without proper treatment.

These scenes with Dr. Hill stand in stark contrast with the level of interactivity and agency that players have come to expect from modern video games. As Muriel and Crawford note in their article “Video Games and Agency in Contemporary Society”, the concepts of freedom and agency are central to video gaming, as “players do not merely observe, they are in the story, they belong to, and are an operational part of the narrative and mechanic processes of video games. Video games force players to engage with them” (148). Additionally, drawing on Foucault’s ideas about power and agency “where both are (re)produced through each other instead of being in opposition”, they suggest that the player and the game act on each other as part of the same productive force; and therefore, one cannot exist without the action and influence of the other (146). In this way, games require that players explicitly interact with them; they demand an active agent (149). This is not the case in the majority of the sessions with Dr. Hill. The first four (of nine) sessions do allow limited interaction, as Dr. Hill asks the player seemingly benign questions about topics such as their anxieties (“Chapter 1”) and what qualities they value most in people (“Chapter 2”), and the player’s answers do affect the game in small (mostly visual) ways. The answers here are also very black-and-white; for example, the player will be given a choice between two statements like “men worry me” or “women worry me”, with no option to say “neither” or “both” (“Chapter 1”). The player is required to actively participate when Dr. Hill asks them direct questions in order to progress the scene, but their limited actions here are not nearly as significant as their actions in the main portions of the game – so while the game is acting on them, the player likely does not feel that they are acting on the game and producing meaning in these sessions, even when they are allowed some interaction.

When discussing game play as an artistic performance in “What’s My Motivation? Video Games and Interpretative Performance”, Grant Tavinor discusses Berys Gaut’s concept of a “compliant performance”, wherein certain actions must be taken in order for the performance to be considered an instance of the work (26). In the case of video games, “much of the compliant performance … is ‘automated’ such as where the player must perform certain actions for the continuation of the game”, and in a narrative game like Until Dawn, “automated compliance involves responding to the decisions prompted by the work, thus generating one of the work’s possible displays” (26). As touched on above, this is largely not the case for the sessions with Dr. Hill. Although the player is allowed some traditional automatic compliant performance in the early sessions, after Chapter 4 the player’s compliant performance is no longer automatic – instead, it is an interpretive process that they must choose to engage with outside of the game’s mechanics. And, further, it is a process that likely extends past the scenes with Dr. Hill and colours the player’s experience of the game’s main narrative.

With all of this in mind, in this limited first person perspective, I argue that interpretation becomes the key way that the player interacts with the narrative. While the sessions with Dr. Hill lack the ludic interactivity and agency found in the main sections of Until Dawn, they provide a wealth of details ripe for player interpretation. According to Tanine Allison, the sections with The Analyst “are particularly self-reflexive about how the game manipulates players’ feelings and aims to tap into their unconscious fears and desires, rather than merely provoking their physical button-pressing reactions and conscious decision-making” (292). Further, Allison asserts that these scenes “invite reflection, attention, and interpretation without directly intervening in the story. In these parts, the game is acting ‘on you’ and ‘absorbing’ you as a viewer” (294-5). An effective example of this is the dialogue in the first five sessions with Dr. Hill. After the main characters are terrorized by The Psycho in the main storyline, which often results in one or more characters ending up seemingly dead or in peril, The Analyst will say things like: “I am trying to help you. And this ‘game’ you’re playing… You understand that it’s not good for you. It’s not good for anyone” (Until Dawn “Chapter 4”). These comments seem to be directly addressing the actions of the player and holding them accountable for how the main story is progressing. In fact, hese statements are worded vaguely so that they can operate on two levels, applying to both Josh (within the narrative) and the player (metatextually). Although Dr. Hill is not calling out the player on specific mistakes that might have led to negative consequences for the main cast, instead seemingly blaming them for even “playing this game” in the first place, his criticisms provide an added illusion of accountability. These comments thus reinforce the butterfly effect mechanic and the fact that all choices have consequences… along with putting the onus for any negative outcomes squarely on the player.

Dr. Hill’s office in Chapter 4; decaying, with horror elements added to reflect the player’s anxieties.

Beyond the dialogue, the most important aspect of these scenes is the setting, as the state of Dr. Hill’s office visibly shifts between sessions. In the first scene, the office is clean and richly furnished. Throughout the next three sessions, however, the office decays more and more – boards are nailed over now broken windows, the wallpaper and curtains are torn, and various objects appear around the room based on phobias the player revealed to Dr. Hill in Chapter 1. In Chapter 6, the office features a wall of monitors showing the events of the main game, which is the first concrete indication to the player that their surroundings are changing in relation to the main gameplay sections. In fact, they are changing to reflect where The Psycho is in the main game: sitting in an observation room full of monitors while he remotely torments the main characters. This is confirmed in Chapter 8’s session, where the office is full of snow and trees – the contained setting of Dr. Hill’s office has merged with that of the main game, where Josh is being dragged through the snowy woods by a wendigo. And in the final scene with Dr. Hill, the office is gone. Instead, his desk sits in the abandoned mines where Josh was taken by the wendigo, indicating that Josh has completely lost the ability to distinguish between hallucination and reality. This is also hinted at by Dr. Hill in Chapter 4, when he asks the player if they think he is real or not, and he replies, “can you really tell the difference anymore?” regardless of the player’s answer. At the end of the final session, the player can control Josh for the first time in the game, but their agency is still limited, as they can only walk around the cave while watching his disturbing hallucinations unfold – they cannot leave the area, interact with anything around them, or even choose Josh’s dialogue. Much like the other other scenes with Dr. Hill, this scene is one that is designed to be interpreted, rather than interacted with; here, Josh and the player are not acting, they are being acted upon. Tellingly, the player only regains full agency when the scene switches to one of the other main characters.

Crucially, at the end of Until Dawn, there is no happy ending for Josh. While all the other main characters can survive the night, Josh only has two possible fates: he is either killed by a wendigo, or he is trapped in the mines and he becomes a wendigo himself. This inability to save Josh is an extension of the lack of agency that is found in his hallucinated sessions with Dr. Hill. Even if the player diligently finds all the clues about Josh’s sisters and hits every QTE, Josh will be snatched up by wendigo Hannah and he will turn into one of the monsters himself. Since this is the ending that the player gets for solving the mystery of Hannah and Beth’s disappearance, it is the ‘best ending’ for his character. The fact that Josh is the only main character who cannot survive until dawn (and directly because of his sister-turned-wendigo) is certainly another feature that encourages player interpretation over traditional interaction, reinforcing the themes of mental illness, helplessness, fear, and uncertainty present in The Analyst’s scenes. 

To conclude, the sessions with Dr. Hill play a key role in Until Dawn because they further draw the player into the narrative. It can be easy to feel disconnected from the characters in the main chapters of the game because the player is constantly switching between them, which allows only limited insight into each character’s inner world. While the player can guess at the thoughts and feelings of these characters, it is impossible to truly know what they are thinking. In contrast, the therapy sessions both provide a window into Josh’s fracturing psyche and help immerse the player into the narrative by reminding us that: “[e]verything you do, every decision you make from now on … will affect your fate, and the fate of those around you” (Until Dawn “One Year Ago”). But, of course, this sentiment is aimed at Josh just as much as it is aimed at the player – and by bringing his friends back to the dangerous mountain where his sisters vanished, he had sealed his fate before the game even began. Until Dawn’s portrayal of mental illness is undoubtedly a pessimistic one, as it suggests a person can be consumed by their illness to a point that they cannot be saved; but it is pessimistic with a purpose. The sessions with Dr. Hill put the player in Josh’s shoes and force them to simply observe as he spirals into psychosis, making them just as scared and powerless as Josh himself must feel. They cannot act because Josh’s mental illness is not something that can be overcome at this point in his life… Or, after being potentially misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated for years (as his symptoms and medical records suggest) and suffering the sudden loss of his sisters, perhaps Josh has decided that he cannot or does not want to be saved. Regardless, Until Dawn forces the player to confront the perceived hopelessness of Josh’s situation by stripping away their interactive agency in all of his scenes, giving them only the ability to experience his psychological break and try to glean meaning from the madness.

Works Cited

Allison, Tanine. “Losing Control: Until Dawn as Interactive Movie.” New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 2020, pp. 275–300, https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2020.1787303. 

Muriel, Daniel, and Garry Crawford. “Video Games and Agency in Contemporary Society.” Games and Culture, vol. 15, no. 2, 2020, pp. 138-57, https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412017750448. 

Tavinor, Grant. “What’s My Motivation? Video Games and Interpretative Performance.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 75, no. 1, 2017, pp. 23-33, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12334.

Until Dawn. Supermassive Games, 2015.