Until Daybreak is a short horror game made in RPGMaker MV, created by nysan and translated to English by HiragiHoux. Now, I don’t have as much experience with RM horror as some other people might. Nevertheless, I feel safe in saying that Until Daybreak starts off very strong for such a short game, but fails to keep this up until the end due to its hollow core.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)


Until Daybreak is consistently successful here. From the well-styled menu accompanied by a truly creepy theme, to the cute CG and upbeat credits music rewarding you for beating the game, to everything in between, it’s well-done. The custom parts, such as the busts, the CGs, or indeed, the fully animated screen shown when monster catches you, obviously stand out, but the resources (mapping tiles and music from various websites) are also used well. The heavy heartbeat theme used while you’re hiding from the monster is as successful as always, while the unnatural laugh that intermittently accompanies your attempts to actually run away from it manages to just stay on the right side of the creepy/annoying divide.

Storyline


The game opens with the atmospheric narration from the player character, Leon. The first lines already establish its more grounded and cynical tone by refusing to provide him with stereotypically happy family, instead acknowledging the hurt that comes from seeing your parents’ marriage turn toxic and loveless, riven with ugly arguments. Even so, it still shocks when they both suddenly die in a car accident, the night after the gentleman in the image above, only visible to Leon, says they would be collected.

In the present, the teenaged Leon converses with his younger sister, Anna, who is now gravely ill, even if she is cavalier about her condition, and refuses to give up and accept the role of victim:



Luckily, the doctor is due to arrive next morning, and Anna only needs to last through this night. Unluckily, Leon had seen the same black-clad figure earlier, and is under no illusions as to what it means. Even so, he still puts on a brave face, takes a flashlight, and embarks on a nightly patrol – the last one of the several he’s already made earlier.

As you walk through all the rooms for the first time, the game simply lets you soak in the atmosphere and piece together the additional details from the descriptions given. They fill in quite a lot: from the way Leon explicitly refers to the various crates and such placed around as cover, keeping him out of something’s sight, to how he and Anna survived the following years through selling off the valuables from the once-glorious home (which also explains why the rooms are largely barren besides the empty bookshelves and crates), to mundane degradation (a fridge filled with ready meals since only Anna can cook, a laundry basket revealing the monster reduced him to wearing diapers) and the same cynical approach about adults in his world



There’s even the odd humorous reference to provide contrast:



And all the tension-building culminates with this:



Needless to say, there’s very much a clear reason to suspect if it’s only in his mind at this point. So much so, that Leon immediately feels the need to say "If I were a third party, I would probably think of myself as some kind of psychopath. What they don’t understand is that I have a reason for doing this." We are soon shown this reason as he walks away from the doll, when the monster finally arrives, violently assaults it, and then…we are explained the rules of the game.

Gameplay





In these three simple screens, Until Daybreak had effectively crossed out all the hard work it did to establish the atmosphere earlier. The unknown became fully known, and the dread disappears with it. They’re added at pretty much the worst possible time, just as it appears the monster would chase after you, and much of the information in them was clear from the environmental descriptions already! In fact, with only a few tweaks, (i.e. making Leon turn the flashlight on and off at the start to teach the player how it works), they would’ve been completely unnecessary. As it is, though, you’re left with a set of rules you know pretty clearly, and which are not too troublesome to exploit.

Essentially, the only thing you don’t know after those screens is how to reach the victory condition, daybreak at 6.00 AM. There’s no timer, visible or hidden, so do not try to let the game run for X minutes while you’re standing in a spot the monster never checks:



Though it was still kinda fun to do that for 20 minutes. (And no, the pelabyte is not stuck there, but merely clipping through on its scheduled patrol.

Instead, it seems to either depend on the number of times you move from one room to another, or on the number of times you escape a room with a monster in it. Either way, though, the solution is not too difficult. First, you need to totally forget anything about the flashlight, the cameras, or indeed, the dolls. The former only barely increases your already decent visibility (which is why a recent playthrough of this game was subtitled “TOO BRIGHT FOR A FLASHLIGHT!”), while the cameras take too long to check. I’m not sure if it’s possible for the monster to get you while you’re checking their feeds, but I do know that the one time I tried seriously using them, it simply went straight for Anna, giving me the poetic bad ending. Even dolls, atmospheric as they are, need never be disturbed once you realize how easy it is to summon the monster to you.

All it really takes is moving from one room to another quickly. You don’t even need to get down to the first floor to do this effectively: simply go from the entrance to East Wing 2F (the room in the screenshot above where the monster never finds you), towards the entrance of the opposite room, across the corridor, as quickly as you can. If you hear the knock telling you the monster is coming, DON’T enter it: wait for a few seconds for the monster theme to start, then go into that West Room, save, and go in the opposite direction. Sometimes, of course, the frog monster might spawn from the door you just walked towards to, and you’ll probably die (though once it managed to ignore me and move through Leon down the corridor, until he turned around), but because there are five entrances in that corridor, and so five points from where it can spawn, the actual chance of that happening is low: more like 1/10 then 1/5, honestly.

If you don’t hear the noise by the time you’re standing opposite the entrance, the monster will never come, so go into that room immediately: otherwise, you’re giving it time to knock down some doll and/or reach Anna. Once you enter either room, there’ll again be a chance for the knock to appear a few seconds later, which successfully prevents it from ever reaching the doll or Anna. It doesn’t even need to enter that room; in fact, since the West Room is less exploitable, it’s best to walk out of that place as soon as you walk into it (only making the time to save every once in a while), and go back the same route to the East Room. There, if you hear a knock, it’s best to assume the same position behind a bookshelf (monster will usually spawn faster there then you can walk out), and wait for a while until it dashes straight down the center – a time when it’ll never detect you leaving.

To be fair, the monster is fast and tenacious when it does detect you, and escaping it can be quite difficult. It’s too bad, then, that using that scheme well means you’ll only need to do so once, at the scripted instance just before 6.00, when it’s perfectly possible to just run up in a small circle (from floor 1 hall up the west ladder, through the floor 2 corridor towards the east ladder, down east ladder, towards the west ladder, repeat ~5 times) until it gives up.

Conclusion


In all, Until Daybreak is an unfortunate example of how a single major flaw can weaken a significant amount of effort devoted to making the rest of the game feel right. You might get more out of it if you resist the urge to exploit it and play it “fairly”, more like the person in the playthrough I linked to above. Even so, I still think repetitiveness would be an issue, since the gameplay process doesn’t really change from 0.00 to 5.00 in any meaningful way.