UNTIL DAWN CHARACTERS GUIDE

Until Dawn is a game about eight idiots making bad decisions on a mountain. That sounds reductive but it's also the entire pitch, and it's why the game works. The cast is a slasher movie cast, the setup is a slasher movie setup, and the horror comes from the fact that every one of them can die and you're the one signing the death warrants.

What makes the cast actually interesting is that the writing knows what it's doing. These aren't just archetypes. They're archetypes the script is aware of, and the choices you make either lean into the trope or subvert it. The actor performances sell the whole thing. Hayden Panettiere is doing real work in this game. Rami Malek won an Oscar three years after this came out and you can see why if you pay attention to his performance as Josh.

I've played through Until Dawn more times than is reasonable, including the 2024 PS5 remake which I have complicated feelings about. Here's a guide to all eight protagonists, the actors who play them, the moments where they live or die, and what to actually pay attention to on your next run.

Sam Giddings (Hayden Panettiere)

Sam is the closest thing the game has to a true protagonist. She's the only character who's playable in the game's longest single sequence, the one where the cast really starts to crack open and the supernatural element shifts from "weird vibes" to "yes this is actually happening." Her chapter is the famous bathrobe sequence, and if you've played the game you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Hayden Panettiere brings real intensity to Sam. There's a scene where she's hiding under a bed and the camera holds on her face for what feels like an eternity, and the entire performance is in her eyes. She's not chewing scenery, she's just terrified, and the motion capture catches it. Sam is also one of the harder characters to kill, which the game does on purpose. She's the audience surrogate. Killing her requires you to actively make bad choices in her sequences, including a quick time event that's deliberately designed to look easier than it is.

The pivotal Sam moment is in the chase scene late game. Hide instead of run. Don't get cocky with the QTEs. The game is testing whether you've been paying attention to the kind of player it's been training you to be.

Mike Munroe (Brett Dalton)

Mike is the jock with a conscience, sort of. He's also the character who gets the biggest mechanical playground. His chapters give you the most exploration, the most combat, and some of the game's best survival sequences. The scene with the wolf is one of the most genuinely affecting moments in the entire game, and how it plays out depends entirely on choices you've made before you even meet the wolf.

Brett Dalton plays Mike as a guy who's used to being the leader and is realizing in real time that leadership in a horror movie means deciding who gets eaten. There's a sequence in the sanatorium where you're playing as Mike alone, and the actor sells the slow descent from confident to barely holding it together better than I expected from what looked like stunt casting at first.

Mike's death points are scattered. There's the obvious one with the trap, which is more about reading the environment than reaction time. There's the rooftop sequence which is pure QTE. And there's the late game choice that's not about survival at all, it's about whether you trust him with a specific decision involving Josh. That one ripples forward more than people realize.

Chris Hartley (Noah Fleiss)

Chris is the comic relief who turns out to be the heart of the story. His relationship with Josh is the actual emotional core of the game, and the scenes between them in the first half hit completely differently on a second playthrough once you know what's actually going on. Noah Fleiss plays Chris as a guy who's perpetually one step behind the seriousness of the situation, which makes the moments where he catches up genuinely heartbreaking.

The Chris death points are some of the cruelest in the game because they're about sacrifice, not error. There's the sawblade choice, which is the game's most famous moral fork. There's the door scene at the lodge, which is about whether you trust someone you have very little reason to trust. And there's the ending where his survival depends on a single shot at a moving target with a gun that may or may not be loaded with real ammunition. The game doesn't tell you which.

If you want Chris to live, the trick is being kind to him in the small moments. The friendship system tracks how characters feel about each other, and Chris's late game survival depends partly on having maintained those relationships earlier.

Ashley Brown (Galadriel Stineman)

Ashley is the most divisive character in the cast. People either find her sympathetic and underused or annoying and cowardly, and the game is genuinely ambiguous about which read is correct. Galadriel Stineman plays her as someone who's trying very hard to seem braver than she feels, which lands depending on how much patience you have for that kind of character.

What makes Ashley interesting is that her choices are some of the most consequential in the game and they're often choices about other people. The Chris sawblade scene is structurally Chris's moment but emotionally it's Ashley's, because she's the one we're cutting away to. Her final sequence has a choice that determines the fate of multiple other characters, and the game is brutal about whether your decision was the right one.

Ashley's own death points are mostly QTE based and one specific puzzle that I have watched friends fail in real time because they panicked. Don't panic. The game telegraphs more than it seems to.

Josh Washington (Rami Malek)

Josh is the role that signaled what Rami Malek was going to become. The character has the longest arc and the most layers in the entire cast, and the performance has to carry several massive tonal shifts that would sink a lesser actor. Without spoiling, Josh's storyline is the engine of the entire game's mystery, and the late game reveals about him recontextualize basically everything you've watched up to that point.

Malek plays Josh in three different modes across the game and all three feel like the same person, which is the hardest trick in acting. The early Josh is the goofy host. The middle Josh is the unraveling one. The late Josh is something else entirely, and that section of the game is the one that gets people most divided. Some players think it's a tonal misfire, others think it's the boldest swing in the script. I'm in the second camp.

Josh's survival is unique because it doesn't depend on QTEs in the way most characters do. It depends on what you tell other characters about him and whether you make a specific choice in the very last hour of the game. That choice is a true butterfly moment. It looks small. It is not small.

Jessica Riley (Meaghan Martin)

Jess is the most overtly slasher movie character in the cast. The script knows this and leans into it for the first hour before pivoting hard. Meaghan Martin plays her with more vulnerability than the writing initially suggests, which makes the early sequence in the cabin much more interesting than a similar scene in a worse game would be.

Jessica's death point is famously early. She's the first major character with a real chance of dying, and the sequence is a series of quick decisions where the right answer isn't obvious. The trick is that the game is judging both your reaction times and your understanding of the geography of the scene. Take the slower path. Don't try to run.

If Jess survives the early sequence, she gets a much smaller role for the rest of the game, which is one of the structural quirks of Until Dawn. Some characters become more important if they live, others become almost background. Jess is the latter, and that's not a flaw exactly, but it's worth knowing going in.

Matt Taylor (Jordan Fisher)

Matt is the boyfriend, which in this kind of cast is a job description more than a personality. The game gives him more depth than that, but it requires you to make specific choices that take him out of Emily's shadow. Jordan Fisher is doing a lot with relatively little screen time, and his sequence on the radio tower is one of the most underrated death traps in the game.

Matt's choices are mostly about ego. Stand up to Emily, defend yourself, take a risk. Or be passive, defer, get along. Both paths lead to interesting places but only one of them keeps him alive in the long run. The game has opinions about which approach is correct and it tells you those opinions through which choices lead to death scenes.

The deer scene is the famous Matt moment. It's a Rorschach test for what kind of player you are. There's no objectively correct answer but the game is watching, and the consequence ripples forward into how the cast survives the night.

Emily Davis (Nichole Bloom)

Emily is the character everyone loves to hate, which means everyone has very strong opinions about whether to keep her alive. Nichole Bloom plays her as completely unrepentant and that's the right call. A more sympathetic Emily would be a worse character. She's the friend group's antagonist and the game uses her to create internal conflict that the slasher plot then weaponizes.

Emily's survival sequence is the one with the mines and the elevator shaft and the climbing, and it's mechanically the longest survival run in the game. She also has the famous bite scene, which is the source of one of the game's most controversial choices. If you've played it, you know which one I mean. If you haven't, the game punishes both options in different ways, and there's no clean right answer.

What makes Emily interesting is that the friendship system applies to her too. Other characters' actions toward her late game depend on how she's treated them, and how she's been treated by you. A cruel Emily run plays completely differently than a sympathetic Emily run, even though the choices are technically the same.

The cast as an ensemble

What makes Until Dawn's cast work is that they're written as a group, not as individuals. Their relationships matter more than their individual arcs. Sam and Josh, Chris and Ashley, Mike and Jessica, Matt and Emily. The pairings are slasher movie standard but the writing actually invests in them, and the death scenes hit because you've watched these people exist around each other.

The friendship system tracks all of this. Every character has a relationship score with every other character, and those scores influence late game choices in ways the game never explicitly tells you about. Two characters who like each other will trust each other's instincts in a crisis. Two who hate each other will hesitate at exactly the wrong moment. This is the butterfly effect operating below the level of dialogue choices, and it's the part of the game that keeps revealing itself on repeat plays. If you want a deeper look at how this design philosophy works in other games, I wrote about the butterfly effect in games and which games actually deliver on the promise.

The 2024 PS5 remake

The remake is a strange object. It's a from-the-ground-up rebuild in Unreal Engine 5 with new lighting, new animations, new camera work, and a different feel even though the script is largely identical. Some of it is genuinely better. The lighting is gorgeous and the snow looks like snow now instead of like polygonal cotton balls.

Some of it is worse. The camera changes shift several scenes from cinematic to standard third person, which removes some of the carefully composed dread the original had. Certain death scenes lose their punch because the framing isn't as deliberate. The performances are intact because the motion capture data carried over, but the new camera angles change how those performances read.

If you've never played Until Dawn, the remake is the version to start with. If you played the original and loved it, the remake is interesting but not essential. The original is still on PS4 and runs fine on PS5 in backwards compatibility.

Rush of Blood and the wider universe

Until Dawn: Rush of Blood was the 2016 PSVR rail shooter that took the same setting and turned it into a horror theme park ride. It's not part of the main story canon but it's set in the same world, with cameos from main game elements. It's also genuinely fun in VR, in a totally different way than the main game. Worth playing if you have PSVR or PSVR 2 access.

Supermassive Games went on to build the Dark Pictures Anthology and The Quarry on the same engine and design philosophy that Until Dawn established. Different casts, different settings, same butterfly effect bones. The cast in The Quarry features another stacked ensemble of recognizable actors, which has become a Supermassive trademark.

What to actually do on your run

Save who you can. Lose who you must. The game is designed so that perfect survival runs are possible but require very specific choice patterns, and a no-survivors run is also achievable. Most playthroughs land in the middle, with two or three deaths that feel like the consequence of decisions you actually made.

Don't replay immediately to fix things. The game's whole thesis is that your first playthrough is the canonical one. Live with your choices. The dead characters are dead. That's the point of the genre Until Dawn helped define, and every game in its lineage owes its weight to the fact that Until Dawn was willing to actually let people die.