Until Dawn's PS5 remake scares - with bugs, image quality concerns and frame delivery issues

As discussed on DF Direct Weekly #183.

Ahead of its eventual theatrical release (and rumoured sequel), Sony has returned to the Canadian Rockies to remake 2015's interactive horror drama Until Dawn for PS5. Digital Foundry's own Canadian representative, Oliver Mackenzie, was given just 24 hours before the game's October 4th launch to test it out. Unfortunately, the game is on a shaky technical footing so far, despite some impressive elements in this surprisingly deep remake.

Let's start, as Oliver did recounting his experiences on DF Direct Weekly #183, with the good stuff. Compared to the original PS4 version running on PS5, it's clear that there are some seismic upgrades in terms of character models, environments and even cinematography. The opening minutes of the game have been significantly expanded too, with new and reworked gameplay segments that replace previous quick-time event sequences and a new third-person camera that replaces the loosely tracked and fixed or semi-fixed shots in the original game.

Until Dawn's core visual design has also seen a generational leap, as you'd expect from an early PS4 title transitioning to the now-mature PS5 using Unreal Engine 5, with higher-res graphics and effects, better lighting and skin rendering and a warmer colour tone. However, this fidelity upgrade isn't matched by improvements to performance, and the game has other issues too that call into question exactly how much QA time and polish the remake was afforded.

• 0:00:00 Introduction
• 0:00:53 News 1: Nintendo takes down Ryujinx
• 0:17:28 News 2: Until Dawn remake tested!
• 0:33:20 News 3: Unreal MegaLights tech demoed
• 0:48:26 News 4: Square Enix wants FF16 on Xbox
• 0:57:39 News 5: Next Guerrilla game reportedly Horizon online
• 1:06:04 News 6: God of War Ragnarök gets PC patch boosts
• 1:14:02 News 7: STALKER 2 documentary shows war torn game development
• 1:22:20 Supporter Q1: Was Strix Halo designed for a new Steam Machine? Could Steam Machines match the performance of a PS5 Pro at the same price?
• 1:28:56 Supporter Q2: What is Naughty Dog working on?
• 1:35:04 Supporter Q3: Will Switch 2 support the newest UE5 features?
• 1:38:43 Supporter Q4: Can the Switch 2 compete performance wise with the Steam Deck? Does it need to?
• 1:42:34 Supporter Q5: The PS5 Pro hasn’t sold out, so is this a sign of underperforming sales?

Some of these issues are glaring but limited in scope. For example, the 2024 remake has significant frame pacing or frame ordering issues in its (admittedly few) pre-rendered cutscenes, making them look bad even if you're not exactly sure why. There's also a film grain effect enabled by default that updates extremely slowly - perhaps at one-sixth to one-quarter rate, or 10 to 15Hz - and is extremely coarse and ugly as a result. Thankfully, this can be disabled, but other issues are more deep-seated.

The game's basic image quality, for example, isn't great. The internal resolution is typical for a recent Unreal Engine release on PS5, at around 1440p, but there's a huge amount of aliasing in spots like hair, fur and high-contrast edges in general. (Unfortunately, given the game's setting and lighting, you're often looking at hair, fur and high-contrast edges.) There's plenty of break-up whenever there's motion on screen too, which is a real shame.

We mentioned performance issues in cutscenes earlier, and performance in live gameplay and in-engine cutscenes also has frame pacing problems, with highly variable frame-times above and below the customary 33ms. The game is also limited to 30fps, with no option for a higher update rate - which is understandable given the nature of the gameplay, but still disappointing given the PS5's signficant advantage in terms of GPU and particularly CPU resources versus the PS4. (The PS5 Pro could potentially be tapped for a 60fps Pro mode, as we saw in other games when we went hands-on with the new console, so perhaps that's the plan here.)

Given the nature of the game's issues, it's somewhat surprising to see that the game was remade at all, especially as Until Dawn remains quite playable on PS5 and the title generally holds up well despite its age. In fact, the 2015 release actually runs unlocked between 50 and 60fps in back-compat mode on PS5, making for a smoother experience than in the 2024 remake - despite the lower 1080p resolution.

As Alex points out in the Direct, we wouldn't expect that too many of these remade assets would be reused in a sequel, but perhaps with Until Dawn movie in production Sony just wanted to have a modern version of the game available on its latest console and PC - and certainly having a UE5 codebase to build a potential sequel from would make sense too. Regardless of the reason for the remake though, the game's frame-rate delivery issues need to be solved.

Of course, we didn't spent the full 108-minute duration of this week's DF Direct discussing Until Dawn. We also covered a range of other news topics, like Nintendo's take-down of the Ryujinx emulator, the release of the Unreal MegaLights tech demo and improvements to God of War Ragnarök following a recent patch, amongst other items and supporter questions.

If you'd like to support Digital Foundry, see what we're up to ahead of time and ask questions we can answer in the Direct - including insights into Switch 2 and PS5 Pro in this week's edition - then you can do so via Patreon.