General Tips and Tricks

Everything you do in the game is PERMANENT

The game doesn't have any save points and check points. If you quit the game, you'll start immediately where you left off. That means every single object you miss, every decisions you make, every QTE prompts you make will affect the outcome of your gameplay. You can however, manually back up your game by copying it to a USB drive or uploading it to the Cloud if you have PS+ account but that will ruin the game's original purpose so do it only at your discretion.

Carefully consider the Butterfly Effect

There are certain points in the game where you'll have to make a choice. These specific events will branch out to the later chapters and will affect your characters' traits and relationships with other characters. There will be times that the character's traits and relationship levels directly affect his or her chance of survival or Death.

Carefully look for Totems and Clues

These valuable collectibles can help changing the outcome of an event or open up new options that will help your characters survive. These collectibles will glint when you're nearby making it easier to spot them. However, some of them won't glint until you get near enough so make it a habit to explore every nook and cranny of the areas where you can freely control your characters. There are three different clues in the game that will shed light to the background story of the Washington family, the Mystery Man, and the mountain's dark history. Totems are especially powerful items that will provide premonitions on various events that may happen in the future which will allow you to trigger helpful ones and avoid bad ones. You'll encounter these almost every chapter and you'll have more than enough chance to scour the areas you're exploring before you trigger a story event.

Every action and choices count

Whenever you're asked to make a decision, there's always a chance that it will affect your Character Traits and Relationship status. These stats will go up and down depending on the situation and how you react. Keep an eye on these since they'll affect how your characters interact on certain events, options, or encounters.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is to do nothing.

There will be several instances in the game where you'll need to stay perfectly still. The game explicitly tells you about this during the tooltips in the early chapters. Do not mess these moments up since usually, this will involve you getting caught by your pursuer or not. Also, there will be certain events where you must not take action in order to get the best results. This guide will help you decide on these situations.

Watch out for cutscenes

In other games, cutscenes is your best time to relax and take a breather. Until Dawn doesn't give you this luxury, especially in the later chapters since cutscenes will almost always have QTEs which has fairly short timers for you to press the correct button. When a cutscene triggers, keep your fingers on your controller as several button prompts may appear shortly.

Faster, Better.

As a general rule in the game, the fast route is riskier will feature QTEs while the safer route has less QTEs and risk. There will instances in the game when choosing the faster, riskier routes can save your life or another character's life.