Games Like Until Dawn

There’s a sequence in Until Dawn — the one in the mines, after the second hour, when Sam is alone in the lodge with no flashlight — that I think about more than I think about most movies. It’s twenty minutes long. The camera holds you in three or four fixed angles. The music drops to almost nothing. The game asks you to do almost nothing except keep walking forward.

That sequence is why Until Dawn matters. Not the QTE moments. Not the Butterfly Effect graph. The fact that a video game in 2015 could make you walk through a dark house for twenty minutes without giving you a single thing to interact with, and you’d come out the other side wrung out.

Every game on this list is trying to do some piece of that. None of them have done all of it.

The Quarry

The closest thing Supermassive has made to a direct successor. Same studio, same structural DNA, summer camp instead of winter mountain, a cast of nine instead of eight, polished and confident and a little more cinematic. The early game leans on summer-camp tropes that some players find hokey — the radio chatter, the counselor archetypes — but once the cabin doors lock in the back half, The Quarry remembers what it is and pays out hard.

The Quarry is the most recent strong example of the form. It’s also the entry I’d recommend most to a friend who doesn’t usually play horror.

The Dark Pictures Anthology (all four)

Man of Medan, Little Hope, House of Ashes, The Devil in Me. Each is six to eight hours, each is its own contained story, each uses Until Dawn’s branching architecture compressed into a tighter format. Smaller casts (usually five), tighter run time, the same dread.

If you have to pick one to start: Little Hope. The ending is the strongest of the four and the middle act trains you for the format.

The Casting of Frank Stone

2024. Supermassive again. Set in the Dead by Daylight universe but standalone. The dual-timeline structure (1980 / present day) is the most narratively ambitious thing the studio has built. Six hours, sharp, mean in the right places. The DBD lore is window dressing — you don’t need to know who the Entity is. If you finished Until Dawn and want to see where Supermassive’s craft has gone in the decade since, this is the one.

Detroit: Become Human

Quantic Dream, 2018. Three protagonists, branching paths, the genre’s most generous flowchart visualization. Sci-fi rather than horror, but every other mechanical similarity is exact — characters can die at any point, the game accommodates, the flowchart at the end of every chapter shows you what was on the table.

The flowchart is the design statement. Until Dawn’s Butterfly Effect screen is a smaller version of the same idea: here’s what you didn’t see. Detroit just commits to it more.

Heavy Rain

The grandfather, 2010. Quantic Dream’s first cinematic-choice game. Four playable characters, a kidnapping, choices that can kill any of them. The controls are aged poorly. The writing lurches into goofiness. But the idea of the game — fail-forward narrative with branching paths that don’t reset — is the idea Until Dawn refined five years later. Play it for the historical context if nothing else.

As Dusk Falls

INTERIOR/NIGHT, 2022. Painted-frame visual style. Two families, decades apart, choices that bleed generations. Mechanically the closest non-Supermassive entry. The art style is divisive — some people love it, some people can’t get past the still-image animation. The structural ambition is genuine: choices in the first half affect a second half twenty years later.

This is the one I’d recommend to a friend who said “I want Until Dawn but different.”

The Inpatient (VR)

If you have a PSVR or a Quest, The Inpatient is Until Dawn’s prequel/spin-off, set in the Blackwood Sanatorium that’s referenced in Until Dawn’s lore. Short — three to five hours — but the VR immersion is something Until Dawn itself can’t provide. The script is uneven, but the form is interesting.

Not a great game. A great curio for Until Dawn fans.

Hidden Agenda and The Inpatient (PlayLink era)

Worth mentioning: Supermassive made two PlayLink games around 2017-2018 — Hidden Agenda and The Inpatient — that you could play on your phone in a living room. The form was interesting (your phone is your input device, multiple players have different information). The execution was uneven. Hidden Agenda specifically has some of the smartest multiplayer mechanics in the choice-driven genre. Worth knowing about even if you don’t play it.

The structural thing nobody talks about

What Until Dawn got right that almost nobody has matched: the cast is too big to manage. Eight characters is too many to keep alive. You will lose one. You will lose two. The game knows this and structures the third act around the assumption that your cast has been pruned.

Most successor games shrink the cast — The Dark Pictures uses five, Heavy Rain uses four, Detroit uses three. The smaller cast is easier to write but it removes the panic. Until Dawn at eight characters is operating at the upper bound of what a choice-driven narrative can hold, and the design lets you fail multiple characters without breaking the story.

That’s the trick. That’s why I rank it #1 on this list with no second place.

Where I’m headed

I’m a solo developer working on The Bone Game, the first title under TSWT Presents. Six teenagers, a Friday night, a story told from a treehouse. Six is fewer than Until Dawn’s eight, but the structure puts the narrator at the center — every story is told by one of the six to the other five — so the panic comes back. You can lose the narrator. You can lose half the listeners. You can lose all of them and the story keeps going without anybody to receive it.

If anything I wrote up there resonated, you can put The Bone Game on your wishlist. The comparison ladder ends here — go back to the anthology post if you want to keep moving. Or read the cornerstone on cinematic horror games, which is the longest piece on this whole site.

Whatever you play next, play it the right way. Late at night, alone, with the volume too high.