News

Development studio Supermassive has revealed that its PS4 exclusive interactive slasher horror, Until Dawn, will have its scares designed with scientific precision.

“There are three types of fear,” executive creative director Will Byles has told VG247. “There’s terror, horror and disgust, and the one we want to use the most is terror.”

“Terror is the dread of an unseen threat”, he explains. “It’s always there. It rises or falls in strength, but it’s always there...The second fear is horror, which is the culmination of the terror, the realisation, the manifestation of the terror. It’s when you see it up close and face-to-face. And the third one is disgust, the gory reminder of how fragile you are, that you can be just torn apart.”

Until Dawn tells the story of a group of people trying to survive the night, and any of them can die depending on how you play. Allison hopes to provoke all three reactions, and the studio is hooking playtesters up to a special contraption to make sure they're getting scared in the right places and in the right way.

“We test people with a fear machine,” confessed Byles. “It’s basically a galvanic skin response test. We get someone in and we sit them in a darkened room with the game and we wire them up with this thing that measures the conductivity of the skin. The more anxious and frightened you get, the clammier your hands get as you start to sweat, and it reads it and plots a graph against what’s being playing at the time. We’re not building the game around that by any means, but we do like to make sure we are hitting the right marks.”

Until Dawn comes to PlayStation 4 in 2015.