I like horror games. I'm pretty terrible at them, too. Until a few years ago, my reaction at a scare was to turn off the TV or monitor and wait for someone else to show up to turn off the console. I've gotten better and even revisited a lot of those games that caused the overreaction. One area that I've always wondered about is a slasher-themed video game. There were a few in the 1980s on the NES (specifically Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street). Texas Chainsaw Massacre predated those efforts on the Atari 2600 and Night Trap for Sega CD effectively killed the genre with the ratings hysteria in the early 90s. There were, surprisingly, two Saw games where you had to navigate traps and, unsurprisingly, quite a few titles where you play crazy serial killers (like Postal).

Enter Until Dawn. This game from Supermassive Games is scheduled to come out in 2015 and it's pretty much the slasher game I've always wondered about.

Essentially, you play as a group of teenagers vacationing at a cabin in the mountains. Bad things happen. Death is permanent. You screw up, someone dies. You can save them all or let them all die.

Mechanics are in that Quantic Dream/Heavy Rain style, meaning quick time events. Hit the buttons in the right sequence at the right time or someone might get a hatchet to the face.

More interesting is the new information that's come out of Gamescom this year. Apparently, this is a massive branching narrative game with hundreds of combinations. Things you choose to do in the beginning of the game can spell success or doom for characters in the last few minutes. Every time you reach a dead end, you can see a map of where all the possibilities are. It doesn't tell you what to do differently; it just shows you how expansive this universe is.

Obviously, Until Dawn is no slam dunk property. Slashers live or die on how much you care for the victims/survivors. A great villain can turn around a bad cast of heroes, but this game is clearly designed for you to want the teens to survive. A bad character is probably not going to be saved by anyone. If only a few characters are likable, most people probably won't go for a second run at the game. I'm cautiously optimistic for this one.