For the first few chapters, Until Dawn feels like a hodgepodge of cliches. Exactly one year after two of their friends mysteriously disappeared, a group of eight high school kids heads up to a secluded cabin on a mountain, with plans for a night of debauchery. A morbid anniversary, reckless teenagers, and a dangerous, isolated mountain (which also happens to be home to a condemned psychiatric hospital): you get where this is going.

You're choosing between life and death

Until Dawn is happy to stew in those low expectations early on. The kids are almost all obnoxious and bratty, and the creepy, surprisingly huge house and its surrounding area are full of cheap jump scares; you’ll scream, and then you’ll groan. If you need an indication of just how rote the game is initially, one of the key scenes involves a ouija board. About four chapters in, though — after a brutal sequence where you have to make a horrifying choice ripped straight out of Saw — things begin to change.

Until Dawn plays like a narrative-heavy adventure game, reminiscent of Telltale games like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. You’ll control all of the eight main characters at different points throughout the story, walking them around environments, investigating with a flashlight, talking to people, and making decisions. (There are action sequences, but they’re relegated to quick time events in which you must reflexively hit a button in order to succeed.) Sometimes these choices are small — do you check a phone buzzing in someone’s bag, or respect their privacy? — but much of the time you’re choosing between life and death. And the answer isn’t always clear. When you’re being chased, is it better to hide or keep running? If you had to pick one person to live over another, could you do it? The further you progress, the tougher the choices.

Usually when I watch a horror movie, I get angry at how obviously stupid the on-screen characters are. There’s clearly a killer down that darkened hallway, so why would anyone go down there?! But in Until Dawn, in which I’m armed with the knowledge of an observer — I can see the events from multiple perspectives, and I can catch on-screen moments that the characters miss — I still made some bad decisions. According to the developers at Supermassive Games, it’s possible for everyone to make it through the night alive — or for no one at all.

In my case, I had a 50 percent success rate with four survivors. That may sound okay, but each death felt like a failure of my intelligence and cunning to keep these kids alive. Because while the characters all start out as bland stereotypes — the dumb jock, the annoying rich girl — Until Dawn does a sly job of turning them into real, believable characters worth caring for. Even after one of the huge plot twists, which renders one member of the group as a seemingly unsympathetic psychopath, I still cared when he ultimately died.