Until Dawn

Having hit my word count for the day, and needing to keep my exercise promises to myself, I fired up the PS4 yesterday and jumped on the treadmill.

Well, not jumped really. Just cautiously put my feet down when it started off at 1km per hour and then acclimatised myself gradually.

You'll be please to know that I no longer cling onto the arms of the treadmill while I'm using the machine. I have graduated to walking and balancing on my own two feet. Yes siree, I'm as accomplished as a toddler.

Unfortunately, I discovered an unpleasant feature of my newest game, Until Dawn, is a tendency to crash part-way through the game. I followed the instructions and deleted it off my hard-drive, and then redownloaded and reinstalled it - a mere three hour wait - but it wasn't having any of it.

It's very hard to find out online if this is a common feature as well. The premise of Until Dawn is a teen slasher thriller, and the game changes depending on the choices you make throughout in a butterfly effect fashion which is labouriously explained in a sequence that I found you can't skip.

Due to this, when people are trying to pinpoint the common point of where the game crashes, it becomes a bit hard. Apparently there are a few folks who find it crashes when teen A, B & C meet in the mines. Sounds great. Unfortunately, in the sequence a few cut-scenes back, I chose to let teen B die, so he's not there, and teen D who I miraculously saved hasn't made it out of the lodge yet.

Not to mention that I think they may have missed a trick, because when teen E met her maker, she also took teen A with her in my version, so I would have only teen C wandering around in the mine, not finding any help whatsoever.

So at the point where my version crashes, I have teen F and teen D wandering around the lodge, and lord knows what happened to teen G who barely seems to be participating at this point ever since teen H was dispatched.

It gets very confusing writing this down, but I don't want to have any spoilers in there in case people make exactly the same pattern of choices as me and end up in my version of the game.

Which is a pity, because if I did trail spoilers through here at least I would know if they crashed in the same place. Not that they'd be looking up Until Dawn Crashing in order to find this blog if they didn't.

Anyhow, I have managed to start the game again successfully because it's difficult to stay committed to the treadmill when all you have by way of entertainment is the blue screen of Playstation death, or the downloading symbol gradually advancing from 3% to 16%

I'm deliberately trying to change my decisions so that I don't end up at the same point, and therefore won't have to worry about it crashing in the same scene (and I accidentally killed the wrong teen at one point because I thought you pointed to the picture of the person you wanted to kill, not the person you wanted to save) but that's probably about four hours of gameplay and treadmill from the start.

As a minor distraction I tried to play a few rounds of the Binding of Isaac, but every time I got to a boss fight to get to the next level I'd wander off the side of the treadmill, so I had to give that up.

And they wonder why it's so hard to get people to exercise regularly.