I remember celebrating New Years Eve on December 31st, 2019 with high hopes and ambitions. A new decade! A fresh slate–a new start. Then the shit show that was 2020 ensued and you know the rest. However, before the horror of COVID-19 hit, I was served an appetizer of trauma that solidified 2020 as the most challenging year of my life. And despite what you may hear in the news about how awful video games are–how they rot people’s brains and poison the youth–horror games in particular were vital in my journey of overcoming the trauma. Particularly, choice-based narrative games like Supermassive Games’ UNTIL DAWN and Telltale’s THE WALKING DEAD.
It was January 26th, 2020–the day Kobe Bryant died. I was walking home from my part-time job that Sunday during the afternoon reading an article on my phone about the tragic, abrupt death of Kobe. It was the same route I walked home every day, and I was so engrossed in the article that I didn’t notice the group of three teenagers walking towards me until they had closed in on me and pushed me against the fence of the Catholic grade school I’d attended growing up. The next thing I knew, I felt the cold sensation of circular metal pressed to the back of my head before instincts took over and I forfeited my phone in what I’d hoped would be an exchange for my life.
It was quick. I got away physically unscathed and made it to a nearby friend’s house, but something curious stuck out to my friends, family and I–I hadn’t cried throughout the entire ordeal. I was brought to a police precinct, made a report, went home, and went to bed. That was that. I laid in bed bewildered by the fact that I’d had a gun against my head hours before–that I was moments from ending up as a story in the news instead of safe in my home that night yet I felt completely apathetic. It was unsettling.
Weeks passed, and I ended up testifying against one of the teenagers who had robbed me. A week later, while on the sales floor at my job, I received a call from the DA, warning me that “retaliation is an unfortunate reality” and that I should give them a call if I had seen anyone who looked suspicious. Paranoia began to set in that anyone in the store could be a friend of the group who had robbed me, ready to retaliate. But still, I didn’t cry when I got home that day.
A thought struck me: I didn’t know anyone who could relate to my situation at that moment. I didn’t know anyone personally who had been robbed at gunpoint recently. I didn’t know anyone who’d also had a near-death experience that I could talk to. Months passed, and I found myself isolating physically and mentally as I struggled to process what I’d gone through. And to add salt to the wound, the crisis of the pandemic unfolded as well, pushing me into one of the loneliest times of my life. I retreated into the virtual realm of video games.
‘Until Dawn’
I booted up Until Dawn one day, and found myself reacting to the game in a peculiar way that I hadn’t before. It was like an adrenaline rush–I was almost giddy as I called the shots of who saw the light of day. In particular, I was fascinated by the element of who lived and who died at the end. I was enthralled with the bonus scenes you witnessed if one of the teenagers narrowly evaded the grasp of the Wendigo. It pushed me to start reaching out to my friends, imploring them to play it too, but I noticed that they didn’t seem to share the particular enthusiasm that I was experiencing.
The catharsis I experienced from playing Until Dawn pushed me to play similar games in the genre–The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope and The Walking Dead were two other standouts. In retrospect, my obsession at the time is so obvious. Immersing myself in video games that coincide so deeply with death like Until Dawn became a facet I used to confront the trauma of my own near-death experience. It was the exploration of how quickly and arbitrarily the boundary of life and death can be breached that I desperately needed.
At the beginning of Until Dawn, the first character of the bunch that can be killed is Jessica. As Mike attempts to woo her in a cabin, she’s abruptly yanked out of a window and into the woods by a Wendigo. Whether or not she lives hinges upon how quickly you’re able to reach her as Mike. If you take the slow, safe path, or take the risky path and stumble on the way, you come across her lifeless body. However, if you make just the right choices, you can keep her alive to appear again much later in the game. But when you’re in the moment, there’s no way of knowing what the right or wrong choice is. You just act and hope for the best.
It brought me back to that fateful Sunday. I didn’t have a cheat sheet or a guide that told me how to escape that situation. I just acted, and as it turned out, I made just the right choices. It’s a terrifying reality to acknowledge how much differently it could have turned out. It’s a reality that I had no tangible way of acknowledging until I put myself in a fictional character’s shoes and saw that sometimes, death can just as easily be an outcome as well.
‘Little Hope’
If you do manage to reach Jessica in time and keep her alive, she’ll reappear much later in the game in a cutscene that most players typically miss. You still need to make a handful of tricky choices in order to have her survive, and she’s one of the most difficult characters to keep alive during your first play-through. But it makes her epilogue cutscene all the more satisfying when you achieve it–knowing that you overcame some of the game’s most difficult and arbitrary choices and seeing the bonus cutscenes that you would have missed otherwise. The epilogue almost served as someone in my life listening to my story and saying, “I understand what you went through.”
I started looking at my life like these bonus cutscenes. The experience I had that day could have pulled me into a deep, dark place–and it had for a bit. But games like Until Dawn reminded me that life is going to shove, drag, and rip you into all sorts of situations when you least expect it. If you trust your gut (and sometimes with a stroke of luck), you’ll live to tell the tale the next day. That day was my own personal choice-based horror game, and I’ve learned to accept that.