This tone is kept up throughout as the two characters make their way through the woods to the secondary cabin, and the pacing is spot-on: at first they're confident and teasing towards one another, trying to appear impressive. But as they go deeper into the woods, things start subtly going wrong, and the dialogue becomes more and more fear-tinged.
So where's the gameplay in all of this? You play from a first-person perspective, switching between controlling the guy and girl as the story demands. The Move controller acts as one of your hands - one that's most often holding a torch. Holding the trigger button makes you move forward, and various paths and objects are scattered along your route that you can interact with. An abandoned mine shaft, for example, is discovered partway along the way - here, the player can interact with a few levers to make a mine cart move forward, and find items to inspect.
It's streamlined, simple, and the initial fear is that it's going to be extremely linear, but the developers stressed that they wanted to provide different paths in the levels - and that chapters can play out differently depending on your actions, even to the point of influencing who survives at the end.
The idea behind the game was for it to be just as watchable as it is playable, and it was certainly immersive even when I was just a passive observer. I can imagine it being lots of fun to have a few people over and take turns controlling different characters.
The confidence and dedication to the teen horror genre really shows, and the interactive nature of Until Dawn made it an oddly freaky experience, even though I was in a crowded room full of journalists. That's an impressive achievement, and it makes me eager to get some hands-on time myself - but maybe only with the light on.
