Until Dawnis back, and it looks better than ever. That’s how it’s supposed to work, at least. Instead, while there are a thousand different details under the hood you may point to in order to highlight the remaster’s improved fidelity, higher precision lighting engines, or more powerful ray tracing capabilities, the evidence of one’s own eyes are chief over all.The game looks worse. It’s deliberately worse. And it’s not the only one - so many remakes and remasters are doing this, on purpose, over and over again. I have no idea who this is supposed to serve or why it even happens, but it’s probably going to keep happening.
I remember feeling a mild amazement when I played Until Dawn back at launch in 2015. We had been inching closer and closer to photorealism in games for a while, and throughBeyond: Two Soulstwo years earlier, I had seen (what I then thought to be) perfect recreations of celebrities in a video game. But something about Until Dawn, whether it was the extra detail, the wider range of emotions, the narrative that had me hooked, or the tense atmosphere, felt like something I had never experienced before.
Better Detail Does Not Make Until Dawn A Better Game
It’s true that we take some of that for granted these days. In 2015, it was highly impressive that this man in this video game really, truly looked like Rami Malek. Now it’s whatever, I just blew up a building with Keanu Reeves' ghost in my electronic skull. Get with the program guys. But it’s not that it doesn’t look as good as I remember. Watching clips of the original 2015 version, it does look as good as I remember. And the 2024 remaster looks worse.
💀 Until Dawn ⏳
🦋 2015 vs. 2024 🦌pic.twitter.com/0Xhx1zOeTm
— THE Until Dawn Remaster Defender 24k 🥴 (@soggycheesefry)June 28, 2025
Part of this is the quest for perfection. There is more detail on the 2024 models, with advancements in game engines allowing for more realistic reflections on the skin, visible pores, and noticeable wrinkles. We’re closer to perfect, but not quite there. Both clips still look like Rami Malek in a video game. But the 2015 version knows that’s all it will ever be, so it shies away from capturing every detail and thus allows your imagination to fill in the rest. It’s the digital equivalent of putting Vaseline on the lens to add a blur and disguise shortcomings.
In 2024, there is a misguided sense that limitations no longer exist. And so, rather than let our imagination provide the finer details, the game tries to render everything. Unfortunately, it is not as good as our imaginations. The facial models, while more proficient, look worse to the naked eye. Though both versions are aiming for photorealism, indeed even using it as a hook with Malek and Hayden Panettiere starring in the game, it feels as though only the 2015 original has an art style to speak of.
Until Dawn Was Blue On Purpose
Part of that comes down to the game being very, very blue. You may have seen a snarky meme that tells you when an author describes blue curtains, this means nothing beyond the physical fact, but that meme is incorrect. Go apologise to your English teachers. The blue tint provides some key atmospheric elements that the remaster, in search of true realism, strips away.
First, the blue effectively sells the freezing cold temperatures that are crucial to the isolation and helplessness of the game, especially the thematic importance of the elements - the whole point, as stated in the title, is to surviveUntil Dawn. Blue is also a lonely colour, mimicking the fact you can spend much of the game alone (or at least searching for others) depending on your choices.
The remaster is lit normally, and as a result, looks brighter (literally) and more dull (figuratively). The blue is important even if there is no logic behind it, and reality-obsessed remasters seem to forget this. As cinematographer Andrew Lesnie once said when asked where the lights came from inThe Lord of the Rings’battle scenes, the blue tint is coming from “the same place as the music”. It is there not to show how the scene actually looks in actual real life (it’s a made up story in a video game), but to convey a specific emotive response.
Remakes Have Got To Stop Thinking Only Of Realism
Until Dawn is by no means the only game to do this.A similar filter was stripped awayfromMetal Gear Solid, while the skyline effect was removed inMass Effect’s Legendary Editionto make itlook crisper at the cost of personality. Meanwhile, the images we’ve seen ofHorizon Zero Dawn Remasteredtakes a game that was very impressive in 2017 and in the quest to improve something - anything! - gives it the same extra realism as Until Dawn.Which, again, makes it look worse.
Things don’t need to be this way.Silent Hill 2is a remake of a much older game, with far more scope for technological advancements, and has been far more warmly received (surprisingly so). In part, that’s because it has preserved some artistic choices made by necessity. We no longer need the foreboding fog to hide the draw distance, but it is crucial to the game’s atmosphere and thus it has remained.
Of course, Silent Hill 2 can make more drastic changes, so perhaps it has this luxury. If you don’t make the face models look better and make the lighting more realistic in Until Dawn, what do you even change? And that’s the issue - there’s not much you may do to improve Until Dawn. But if you don’t do anything to it, then you can’t sell it. So if you want to sell it, you need to fix what ain’t broke, and this is what we get: a game that’s more broken than it was before.
