Until Dawn Review (AREA 51)
So much contradictory "information" floating around in steam reviews, discussions and YouTube videos.
How about some simple truths from somebody who hasn't played any previous version of Until Dawn?
I'll try to address the major topics I've seen people spewing on about.
UPDATE: Sony, look at this beautiful community you got, see the comments. People love your games. Fix this game and bring us some more. When can we expect TLOU2 for example?
These observations are from 5 pm CET, 5th October 2024, i.e. one day after release.
- The game installs and launches fine, it prepares shaders which takes around 3 minutes and then lets you proceed.
- PSN: YES, the games requires you to make an account and login with it. No idea why people claim otherwise. For the account you shall provide email address, birthdate, place of living, first and last name. F*** this, seriously. But it's easily doable at least. Verify email, agree to a couple of things nobody reads and done.
UPDATE: Probably it's dependent on your location whether you need an account.
- At first borderless windowed mode seemed to work, but once you're really in the game (after logging in to PSN) it appears to go into an exclusive fullscreen mode, i.e. switching to desktop takes a second every time.
UPDATE: The HDR setting currently forces exclusive fullscreen.
- HDR seems to work.
- DLSS and FSR3 appear to work both. FSR3 with a bit better performance, DLSS probably looking better, as always. Setting them most certainly "saves". If combinations of upscaling type and frame generation type don't stick it's probably cause it's not supported like that. DLSS upscaling with DLSS frame gen works, FSR upscaling with FSR frame gen works too.
- Stutters: I saw some occasional stutters, but those are loading / streaming stutters, clearly. Permanent microstutters shouldn't be present if your setup (gpu drivers, vrr, etc) is sound, I don't have them, and I can tell, I'm very sensitive to this kind of stuff and got tons of experience spotting it.
- Performance: The GPU seems to be sweating which indicates optimization could be better, but then again it's UE5 and looks amazing. Constant 120 fps @ 4K are well doable with a modern PC, not those 30 fps they gotta live with on the PS5, lol.
- Crashes: I got one of those half-cooked broken 14900kf CPUs, so I've really gotten into stabilizing CPUs recently. I've limited my half-broken CPU to the point that it's rock solid, so I was really excited to see whether the game would crash here. Well, so far it hasn't crashed in 2.4 hours with several times switching between upscaling settings. Will update if i see crashes.
- Music: I've seen people saying the opening credits intro music got changed and the original was better. I've checked it out on YouTube, and I gotta say it's clearly nostalgia if you prefer the original score. Music seems fine, whatever I've heard so far seemed pretty nice.
- DualSense: Controller works perfectly, very nice usage of DualSense features. Haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, accelerometer, it's all used. You're gonna like it.
UPDATE: Over BT, adaptive triggers work but there are no vibrations at all, so wired connection is a must for now.
This was talking from a 14900kf (half-broken, throttled and rock solid), 4090 STRIX OC, 32 GB 7800 DDR5, M2 990 pro, 4k 160 Hz HDR VRR freesync 2 pro, Windows 11 pro.
And regarding the gameplay?
I like what I've seen so far, it's more of an interactive movie with some quick time events of course, but seems appropriate for a horror story.
Also the first few minutes were very immersive, I'm sure you can have fun with this.