The upcoming PlayStation 4-exclusive survival horror game Until Dawn will not feature “an endless stream of jump scares,” according to Supermassive Games’ Jez Harris.
Speaking to PlayStation Blog manager Fred Dutton, Harris explained that repeatedly using a horror cliché like jump scares would result in a rather “numb” experience in Until Dawn.
“To make the horror as effective as possible you need to telegraph in some of the scares and then obscure others, otherwise players get wise to a formula,” he added.
“So a lot of Until Dawn is about the quiet dread of not knowing what’s going to happen next. You might think there’s a jump scare coming any second, and then there’s nothing for five minutes—when you’re not expecting it. It has more impact that way.”
Until Dawn, which was teased at The Game Awards and PlayStation Experience last year, is preparing to take horror to the next level, as developer Supermassive Games has done “a lot of work with galvanic skin response.”
“We have testers strapped into apparatus that monitors their temperature and the level of moisture in their skin,” Harris said.
“We’ll sit and watch the data as the person plays the game, and if we get a good spike we know we’re doing our jobs right. And if those spikes correlate across a number of separate players then we can be confident we’re on the right track.
“We’ve had some great fun seeing the video output of our user testing – guys who are sat there, playing the game peeking through their fingers, not being able to look at the next scene, telling themselves to ‘man up’. We haven’t induced any heart attacks yet, but I think we’re getting close!”
Until Dawn design director Tom Heaton revealed in an interview that “classic ‘80s and ‘90s horror movies” served as an integral part of the game’s development, while claiming that keeping all eight characters alive in the first playthrough will be “unlikely.”
Starring Hayden Panettiere (Heroes & Scream 4) in the leading role, Until Dawn is scheduled to launch sometime in 2015 for PlayStation 4.