Until Dawn ain't getting me

OH MY GOSH

OH

*Game Theory Intro plays*

Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory

The show whose viewers wouldn't be surprised to see an episode dedicated to Sam's anti-gravity towel

Seriously! She's getting chased by a psychotic killer and it stays up like that??

And then she crawls through vents and it stays so clean?

This towel is clearly worthy of a theory

But not today

So if you've watched our GTLive live streams then you know that we recently completed a playthrough

of the horror game Until Dawn

*devastated MatPat* "No!!"

If you haven't watched our GTLive live streams then you probably STILL knew that we recently completed

a playthrough of the horror game Until Dawn

because YouTube hasn't put a toggle in allowing subscribers to opt-in to those notifications

Hey! Don't blame the messenger

Regardless, chances are if you watch gamers on YouTube

You've seen this choose-your-own-adventure, teen murder simulator hybrid

A game that mashes so many horror movie tropes you'd think they'd pulled Keenen Wayans out of retirement

And had him do Scary Movie: The Video Game

But here's the thing, while we were all making fun of the gameplay

"We are playing a game that encourages you to not move the controller"

"COMPELLING GAMEPLAY"

The really good, but still not really good enough graphics

"Didn't quite make it out of the Uncanny Valley on that one" *laughs*

And hammy dialouge

We all missed something: The point

Along with a totem or two

Whether it was intentional or not,

Until Dawn is more than just a goofy horror movie cliche simulator

And the villain is far more menacing than a gangly spider-zombie

It's a much darker, much sadder, and much more serious game than any of us YouTube gamers thought

Carrying an incredibly serious message about mental illness and the nature of choice

Now before I go on, this is a heavy spoiler alert

We're covering everything from the game, so if you haven't watched any of the hundreds of Let's Plays

And still want to experience it for yourself, turn back now

But if you want to completely change the way you look at the game

Well, spend another few minutes with me

We all clear?

Good.

Now this game is a blast, not only to play but to discuss

You see, the game not so subtly points out that it's built around the Butterfly Effect

Where decisions you make earlier in the game have significant ramifications down the line

It's a game about choice

And what makes this game endlessly discussable and watchable

Is seeing how different choices lead to different gruesome murders for our -

*record scratch* Jeez they're 18 and 19 years old?

Oh man, now I feel really creepy about trying to get Jess into her underwear

No! No it is NOT when some of these kids are literally under the age of consent

Creepy revelations about everyone's true ages aside

Make the right choices, nail each QTE and miraculously

you may be able to keep everyone alive...Until Dawn

Roll credits *CinemaSins ding*

Well, not everyone

Meet Josh, older brother of both Beth and Hannah

We see in the game's prologue that one year prior to the events in the game

Beth and Hannah were killed accidentally after a prank went wrong

Yes, you can roll the clip one last time

Fast-forward to the present day where, halfway through the game, you learn that Josh is The Psycho

A masked madman setting up elaborately sadistic, Saw-like traps

For his quote-unquote "friends" to make them pay for the deaths of both his sisters

Well, that and to get them all a few thousand clicks on a certain video sharing platform

Gah! Everyone is a vlogger these days

Now, outside of the supernatural and cannibalistic wendigos,

Josh is the villain of the game, putting his friends through torture

As such, it's only fitting that he is the only playable character who will never survive the night

regardless of your choices

He only has one of two fates

Either getting his head crushed by a wendigo

Or, if you find enough clues, turning into a wendigo himself

A fitting end to a crazed maniac

Except, hold on. Josh's story isn't so cut and dry

True, the torture of his friends is extreme

And he isn't adverse to going so far as to punch Ashley out cold

But none of his actions directly lead to anyone's death

His traps are only there to scare, not kill

Fake bodies, fake bullets, saws that don't go all the way down

Now compare that to Mike, AKA the village bicycle where anyone gets a ride *horn honking*

Who can kill Emily in cold blood, and the world rejoices *party blower noise*

Or how about Ashley? Who in some scenarios can choose to kill Chris while he pleads for his life

Simply by keeping the lodge door locked

Then, in the final scene, Sam can actively choose to blow up the lodge early, killing everyone else in there

And then Matt who can basically leave his girlfriend, Emily, for dead when a tower falls

I mean seriously, the game gives you a lot - A LOT - of opportunities to kill off Emily

In short, pretty much every playable character in this game

Can take an action that will directly lead to someone else's death

Except for Jessica

And except for Josh

But unlike all the other characters, Josh doesn't get a happy ending

And sure, I get it. He tortured his friends and, yeah, thats really bad

But don't let Beth's yoga pants distract you from the truth

What these teenagers did to Hannah was also really bad

These aren't good people

They set up a prank where Mike, Hannah's crush, leads her on to the point that she starts undressing,

expecting a little totem action, if you get what I'm saying

All while they film in secret and laugh at her embarrassment

It's ruthless!

And unlike the quote-unquote "heros" of the story, who did this out of sheer meanness

Josh's saw traps aren't just born out of revenge

He has another excuse, mental illness

Throughout the game we gradually learn that Josh has had behavioral issues since the age of eleven

Since then, he's been treated with various medications for depression

In total, for nine years

And we learn that the mysterious analyst appearing between chapters in the game

Was actually Josh's psychiatrist helping him to cope with the loss of both his sisters

When we finally get to step inside Josh's eyes at the end of the game, Chapter 10,

It's clear he's being haunted by the vision of his sisters

"No no no no, you're not real" -"Why didn't you save us Josh?"

Through his hallucinations, we see that he blames himself in large part for their deaths

Despite being passed out that night, physically unable to do anything to help them

Now, does all of this excuse his eagerness to strap two people to chairs

Force one to choose between his life and the life of his crush

All while spinning saw blades descend from the ceiling?

No, but it certainly sheds light on Josh's motives

Showing that he's not a sadistic killer or cruel sociopath

He's a confused and grieving kid

Remember, these kids are like 18 to 20

*record scratch* Still - still kinda creeped out about the Jess thing

And the game actually acknowledges this

*another record scratch* Not the creepy jess thing, just the fact that Josh is in need of help

In alternate dialogue for Josh's big reveal as the psycho

Sam makes it clear that his behavior is more of a cry for help than it was anything malicious

"Come on, it was just for fun! Nobody got hurt!

"You're crying out for help, Josh"

In short, Josh is a sympathetic character who needs help, medical help

Help that, quite frankly, he's not getting

And this is where we go from Josh being in a weird gray area

A character who did some awful things, but had some excuses for it, to someone who is outright innocent

Throughout the game, we can piece together Josh's illness by the symptoms he demonstrates

Chapter 10 shows us that he clearly has very vivid visual hallucinations

He also has auditory hallucinations, hearing both his sisters' voices in his head as well as the Psycho's

It's important to note here, though, that the mask-wearing Psycho isn't a separate personality

Which would change his diagnosis

How do we know?

Well, if Sam escapes being chased by Josh, she can find a tape where he's practicing his "Psycho Talk"

"Hello - Hello, children...That's not right..."

I mean every good masked killer needs a catchphrase, right?

The Psycho is just a character he puts on for the purposes of this theatrical event he had planned

Not a split personality

So we have visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, but Josh is also delusional

The delusion that this is all a fun prank or game

That this would actually be socially acceptable to his friends

He also has delusions of grandeur

Seriously, in his opening video:

"Hello, friends and fans"

"Hello, friends and fans"? Who's he talking to anyway?

Seriously, his channel has like, what, seven subscribers

And after the events of the game, he's going to lose all of them

"YouTuber tortured me and gave me PTSD... unsub"

I'd say that that's a fairly solid reason to unsubscribe from a channel

He's also operating under the delusion that his friends don't care about him

Feeling so persecuted that he physically saws himself in half simply to prove how little they care

When that actually couldn't be further from the truth

Finally, we see his speech deteriorate into incoherent rambling

Based on these symptoms, Josh appears to have schizophrenia

A brain disorder in which a person has trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy

And has trouble managing normal emotions

Symptoms include: everything we just mentioned

Visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions, social withdrawal, disorganized speech

And the condition tends to appear between the ages of 16 and 30

See that age joke at the beginning wasn't just a non sequitur, it actually had a purpose

All in all, it sounds pretty cut and dry, right?

But then we look at his medical records

The slate of doctors listed for treating him over the last 9 years, Dr. Hill included, are all MDs

Meaning that they're psychiatrists, people who went to medical school, had a year of medical internships,

And have 3 years of residency to assess and treat mental health conditions

Training which now enables them to prescribe medicine to their patients

So Josh seems like he's seeing the right people for his issues, except apparently he's not

Looking down the list of medicines and treatments he's been given, they're all for extreme depression

You see, nerve cells in the brain communicate using chemicals called neurotransmitters

I've mentioned them before in my video on the addictive qualities of mobile gaming

And, as you can imagine, there are a bunch

But the most famous are dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine

Well, depression and schizophrenia are currently thought to be tied to different neurotransmitters

With schizophrenia being linked to the overactivity of dopamine, while depression is thought to be tied

To a decrease in the production of serotonin

The drugs we see Josh being prescribed, though, are all focused around serotonin

Fluoxetine is an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor

Which - to grossly simplify - is meant to increase the amount of serotonin in the brain

Duloxetine is a selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor

Which again leave dopamine, Josh's actual issue, untreated

And both Amitriptyline and Phenelzine are some of the earliest antidepressants developed

Effective, yes, but now replaced with newer, less side-effect heavy drugs

And neither of them primarily focused on what Josh's true problem is

Regulating the amount of dopamine in his brain

Knowing this, the results of Josh's medical reports are unsurprising

Each time, the medicine didn't fix his problem

And occasionally he would resort to taking more in an attempt to see any sort of result - any sort of relief

And here's why! He was being treated for the wrong disorder

His primary issue is schizophrenia, not depression

Of course the medicines would have limited effectiveness

They weren't doing anything to treat the primary symptoms

of hallucination, delusion, paranoia, and disorganized speech

What does this mean?

It means that Josh wasn't getting the help that he needed to mitigate his condition

And leads us to the true meaning of Until Dawn

In a game that prides itself on choice for its characters, Josh had no choice

Schizophrenia is tied very closely to genetics, so he had no choice to get the disorder in the first place

Josh had no choice when placed in the hands of experts, who misjudged and mistreated his condition

He was passed out and had no choice when the rest of the group pulled a prank that would ultimately

kill his two younger sisters

And even in death, he has no choice

You, as the player, cannot save him

No matter what you do, there is no happy ending for Josh

He was doomed from the start

In a game all about choice, probably the biggest one that you can have is forgiving Josh