Eight teenagers, one mountain, one year after the prank that killed Hannah and Beth Washington. Until Dawn is the horror movie that knows it is a horror movie, built from the components of the genre with the intelligence of something that has studied what those components are for. The snow of Blackwood Mountain is the archive — it holds what happened there, preserves it, and the return of the survivors is the pressure that forces the preservation to crack.

The screaming beneath is both what the mountain holds and what the characters are carrying — the guilt, the complicity, the specific weight of having done something terrible and pretended the snow covered it. Part 1 is the game establishing its world and its rules: every choice matters, no one is safe, and the thing buried never stays buried.