Games Like Until Dawn: Choice-Driven Horror

The closest match is The Quarry, Supermassive's own follow-up. Nine camp counsellors spend the last night of summer camp in the woods, hunted by armed locals and something far worse howling in the dark, and any of them can die for good from one wrong choice. Up to eight friends can share it.

The Dark Pictures Anthology is the same studio's series of shorter, standalone stories, each with five playable characters. Man of Medan puts divers aboard a ghost ship from the Second World War, Little Hope traps students in a fog-bound New England town that keeps replaying a witch trial, House of Ashes drops soldiers into a buried temple where pale creatures hunt, and The Devil in Me lures a film crew into a copy of a serial killer's murder hotel. All four can be played with a friend online, or with up to five people passing the controller in Movie Night. Directive 8020, the newest, takes the formula to space: a colony ship crashes on an alien world where something copies the crew.

The Casting of Frank Stone is Supermassive's story set in the world of Dead by Daylight: young friends making a horror film in an Oregon steel mill walk into the legacy of a masked killer. Like Directive 8020, its reviews are mixed, but its slasher setup is the nearest thing to Until Dawn's first half.

With a PlayStation VR headset, Supermassive's two rail shooters put you in the seat: Until Dawn: Rush of Blood is a horror rollercoaster through seven levels of nightmares drawn from the game, and The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR rides through the settings of four Dark Pictures games, letting you choose which fellow passengers survive.

If you want the hard choices without the cinematic slasher, Telltale's The Walking Dead is the one that made choice-driven stories famous: you keep a young girl alive through the zombie apocalypse, often with seconds to decide who lives. Oxenfree is a gentler, eerier night: teenagers at an island party open a ghostly rift, and how you talk to your friends shapes how the night ends. Killer Frequency turns the slasher around: you are a radio host in 1987, and you talk callers away from a masked killer one call at a time.

Four smaller games carry the same weight of choice. Scarlet Hollow is a horror visual novel set over a week in an Appalachian town of cryptids and spirits, where some of the people you meet will not survive what you decide. The Inn-Sanity traps you in a quarantined hotel whose guests are turning into creatures, and one wrong word in a conversation can kill you. At Dead Of Night is filmed in live action, like an interactive horror film: Maya searches a hotel for her tied-up friends while its psychopath owner hunts her. Buried tells its story in text, photographs and sound: a logger wakes in the woods with his crew missing and decides whom to trust and who lives or dies.

Start with The Quarry if you want more of exactly the same, Little Hope or House of Ashes for a shorter evening with friends, and The Walking Dead for choices that hurt.

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