Until Dawn

Until Dawn is a survival horror interactive drama in which players primarily assume control of eight young adults who have to survive on Blackwood Mountain until they are rescued at dawn. The gameplay is mainly a combination of cutscenes and third-person exploration. Players control the characters in a linear environment and find clues and items. Players can also collect totems, which give players a precognition of what may happen in the game's narrative.

An in-game system keeps track of all of the story clues and secrets that players have discovered, even across multiple playthroughs. Action sequences feature mostly quick time events (QTE). One type of QTE involves hiding from a threat by holding the controller as still as possible when a "Don't Move" prompt appears.

During a celebration party at her family's lodge on Blackwood Mountain, a cruel prank causes Hannah Washington (Ella Lentini) to flee into the woods. Hannah's twin sister Beth (also Lentini) finds her, but the two are pursued by a flamethrower-wielding stranger (Larry Fessenden), resulting in them falling off a cliff. Despite a search, their bodies are never found and they are declared missing.

A year later, Hannah and Beth's brother Josh (Rami Malek) invites the group from the previous party—Hannah's friend Sam Giddings (Hayden Panettiere), Josh's friend Chris Hartley (Noah Fleiss), Chris' crush Ashley Brown (Galadriel Stineman), couple Emily Davis (Nichole Sakura) and Matt Taylor (Jordan Fisher), Emily's ex-boyfriend Mike Munroe (Brett Dalton), and Mike's new girlfriend Jessica Riley (Meaghan Martin)—back to the lodge. Despite tensions between members of the group and reservations about returning after the previous year's events, all seven accept Josh's invitation. Each member of the group arrives at the lodge via cable car before engaging in separate activities on the mountain.

British developer Supermassive Games served as the game's developer. Its existence was revealed after a trademark for Until Dawn was discovered. The studio began discussing an idea for a new game for the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Move accessory, which had a greater emphasis on narrative than Supermassive's previous games, such as Start the Party!. The proposed game would be a horror game that resembled a slasher film and it would be designed for a younger audience that publisher Sony Computer Entertainment had courted with the Move.

Supermassive hired American writers Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick, both of whom had worked on horror movies, to write the game's script. They were hired because the team felt the company's British writers wrote in a "parochial" way that is inappropriate for the horror genre. In 2024, it was revealed that London Studio worked on the title from 2008 to 2010 until Supermassive took over the game's development.

Until Dawn received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Jeff Marchiafava from Game Informer wrote that Supermassive Games had "polished the [adventure game] formula to a triple-A sheen". He also enjoyed the butterfly effect system because some choices significantly affect the game's narrative. Game Revolution's Jessica Vazquez described the system as a "welcome limitation" because players would not know the consequences of each choice until they reach the ending.

Alexa Ray Corriea from GameSpot liked the game for its impactful choices and the "paranoia" it invokes during critical choices that risk the lives of certain characters. She also admired the system's complexity and intricacy, which lets the player replay the game to discover new scenes. Mollie L Patterson from Electronic Gaming Monthly thought that the system is a "fantastic" inclusion but it never reached its full potential. Chris Carter from Destructoid called the butterfly effect system "gimmicky" due to the choices not significantly influencing the plot.

Sony announced a non-canonical spin-off, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, at Paris Games Week 2015. The company described it as an arcade shooter. Its development began halfway through Until Dawn's development. Until Dawn: Rush of Blood was released on the PlayStation VR on 13 October 2016.

In June 2017, a prequel to Until Dawn, The Inpatient, was announced. It is set in the Blackwood Sanatorium sixty years before the original. In June 2022, The Quarry, a spiritual successor also developed by Supermassive Games, was released.