Until Dawn
Until Dawn (2015) blends genres, uses misdirection, and explores psychological and cultural tension. The game starts as a teen-slasher homage but becomes deeper and more complex. The surface is familiar: a snow-covered lodge, friends with fraying bonds, and isolation. Yet beneath that, guilt, deception, and Indigenous folklore reshape the horror you expect.
Eight playable protagonists—Ashley, Chris, Emily, Jessica, Josh, Matt, Michael, and Sam—gather after an incident sets the stage for horror. On their annual trip to the Washington Estate atop Blackwood Mountain in Alberta, Canada, the players’ choices shape the group’s fate.
All the characters have complex backstories that intertwine. The Washington family owns the mountain where the game takes place. Josh and his two sisters, Beth and Hannah, are all members of the family.
The group’s social dynamics are shaped by overlapping friendships and romantic ties. These create personal tensions and uneasy alliances. The story begins with the player controlling Beth Washington. During a night of partying, Josh and Chris pass out in the living room. This detail is important later in the game. Meanwhile, the rest of the group pulls a prank on Hannah Washington, as they know she has a crush on Michael, the jock with a heart of gold.
The group lures Hannah into a room under the pretense that she and Michael are going to hook up. Hannah quickly realizes the others are watching, exposing her feelings for Michael. Embarrassed, she runs into the cold wilderness, with her sister Beth following closely behind.
A tragic accident follows. The girls, frightened by strange sounds, run into the woods and onto a cliff. They slip. The player faces their first choice: drop Hannah or let Beth and Hannah fall together. The Stranger tries to help, but regardless, both sisters fall into the mines.
Now, a year later, the group returns to the Washington Estate. They hope to move past the prank that led to tragedy. However, the sisters, who disappeared after the incident, were never found. They are presumed dead.
Survivor’s Guilt
Beneath Until Dawn’s scares and choices runs guilt. Almost every character wrestles with remorse or responsibility, whether acknowledged or repressed.
The original prank, Hannah’s humiliation and disappearance, casts a long shadow. The group’s complicity is the emotional thread that binds them to the mountain and to each other. Their guilt shapes relationships, dialogue, and even which characters the player wants to survive.
After losing his sisters, Josh embodies festering guilt. His grief and untreated mental illness drive much of the game’s early peril. His suffering blurs the line between victim and antagonist. As a player, Josh is unplayable for most of the game, intensifying his guilt as something the others can’t fully confront.
On that fateful prank night, Josh was too intoxicated to intervene. He and Chris did not participate in the prank that caused his sisters’ disappearance. He feels survivor’s guilt; logically, he was powerless, but Josh’s self-torment lets guilt fester.
Throughout the game, the player will speak to a therapist named Dr Hill. These therapy sessions are presented as conversations between Dr Hill and a participant whose face we do not see. Later, we learn this participant is Josh. After the tragedy, Josh’s mental health worsens. He believes Dr Hill wants him to face his isolation and to punish both himself and his friends. This makes Josh both the victim and the punisher. He is the game’s most fascinating character and its heart.
Red Herrings and Misdirection
The game excels in its red herrings, twisting player expectations about horror conventions against them.
The Slasher Setup: Early on, the game invokes classic slasher films with sinister stalkers, ominous threats, and menacing strangers. The Stranger, who tried to help the Washington sisters in the prologue, emerges as a foreboding figure on the mountain. There are hints around the estate about a mysterious man driving the Washingtons away.
The Second Prank: In the first half of the game, the characters face threats from “The Psycho.” This figure stages elaborate horror scenes, uses psychological tricks, and sets up fake death traps. The first twist reveals that Josh is The Psycho. He wants his friends to feel the terror his sisters felt a year ago. While Josh seeks emotional justice, something else is truly harming the group in the woods.
These misdirections are more than ploys; they strengthen the theme of perception versus reality. Players discover that fear itself can become a red herring.
Wendigo: The Folklore Beneath It All
The deepest layer roots Until Dawn’s horror in Indigenous folklore. Specifically, the Wendigo is a spirit from Algonquian traditions tied to starvation, winter, and cannibalism.
In traditional Algonquian beliefs, the Wendigo appears when someone resorts to cannibalism in desperate times. The game follows this narrative, explaining that the Wendigo exists on the mountain because of earlier failed survival attempts. The Wendigo is the ultimate corruption of the human form, the result of hunger and spiritual imbalance. Its presence changes the story, turning personal drama into an ancient and unavoidable threat.
The Wendigo are used as a mirror of the choices the characters make on the mountain, including the sisters’ fate and Josh’s transformation. It represents consequences, morals, and past traumas.
The mountain mines have catastrophic consequences. Decades earlier, a group of miners struggled to survive after a collapse. Time passes. Hunger grows. The miners resort to cannibalism. That’s when the Wendigo’s spiritual imbalance begins on the sacred mountain.
When the Washington sisters fall into the mountain mines, Hannah survives. Sorrow hits hard. She continues the survival tactics the miners began decades ago.
Until Dawn succeeds because it never stays one kind of horror story. It begins with the familiar style of a slasher film but adds new layers as the story unfolds. The true narrative builds on guilt, broken relationships, psychological unravelling, and the power of a misunderstood yet symbolically strong Indigenous legend. Every twist, from Josh’s declining mental state to the revelation of the Wendigo, supports the game’s main idea: the past is never really gone, and ignored trauma becomes monstrous.
The game’s red herrings force players to confront their own expectations, just as the characters must confront their shared complicity. Its folklore roots turn survival into something mythic and morally charged. And the choices—large and small, that players make echo the themes of responsibility and consequence that define the story’s core.
Ultimately, Until Dawn is a narrative about what happens when guilt festers, when truth hides beneath misdirection, and when humanity is tested against hunger, literal, emotional, and spiritual. Its horrors linger not because of the creatures in the dark, but because of the all-too-human vulnerabilities that summon them.
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