Gray Dawn

About Gray Dawn

Gray Dawn opens on Christmas Eve in 1920, in a remote English village. An exorcism has failed, the altar boy jumped out of a window, and no body was ever found. You play Father Abraham, the priest the village blames, and your goal is to find the boy before you hear the swoosh of the guillotine.

You play in first person. You walk through the priest's house and church, interact with objects, listen to voice-overs and recorded cylinders that fill in the story, and solve puzzles to open the way on. Each time the boy or the murder charge comes back to Abraham, he falls into a trance fuelled by fear, and the game moves to another place: candlelit chapels, ruins in misty pine forests, an orphanage, and a Romania drawn from the mysticism of Eastern Europe.

The fear is dread more than chases. The trances show blood and gore, a growing revulsion towards God, and a voice that may be the devil trying to convince you of things that may or may not be true. The game keeps asking whether Abraham is innocent, and lets you doubt him. Along the way you can find hidden images of Christ; whether you find them all decides which of its two endings you see.

Interactive Stone released Gray Dawn on PC on 7 June 2018, with funding and mentoring from the Bucharest incubator Carbon. It came to Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S in December 2023, to PS4 and PS5 in April 2024 and to Switch in August 2024. A run takes around two and a half hours. Critics were mixed: Metacritic has it at 71 on PC, with praise for its looks and story and complaints about its voice acting. It suits players who like slow, story-led horror with puzzles and heavy religious imagery, in the line of Layers of Fear or The Town of Light, more than players looking for monsters to run from.

How to play Gray Dawn

1. Buy it on Steam, itch.io or your console's store and start a new game; Steam also has a free demo.
2. Explore the priest's house and church in first person and interact with objects to uncover the story.
3. Listen to the voice-overs and the recorded cylinders you find; they carry much of the story.
4. Solve the puzzle in each act to move on, and follow the trances when they carry you to other places.
5. Look out for the hidden images of Christ: finding them all decides which ending you get.

Tips

• Turn on the run toggle in the gameplay options so you do not have to hold the run button through each act.
• The game autosaves at the start of each act in a new slot, so you can go back to an act if you missed an icon.
• To see both endings, keep a save from before the last icon: collect it for one ending, then load and skip it for the other.
• There are five recorded cylinders; trophy and achievement hunters need to hear all of them in a single playthrough.

Questions