When high school friends play a prank that accidentally ends with twin sisters being killed out in the snowy Washington mountains, they're brought back together by the sisters' brother a year later, tentatively agreeing mostly through sheer guilt to come together again for their annual ski lodge party. But things quickly go awry as the characters are all stalked through the ski lodge, sanitarium, and mines beneath by mysterious figures.
So the story is wildly teen-slasher-tropey, but it embraces it fully. It plays three different horror movies all in one, and blends them together. It's a game that says "What you do will make a difference down the road" and absolutely means it. How much characters like/dislike you and the choices you make can lead to a character surviving or dying (And most the characters have multiple ways of dying). It's hard to review this game without getting too spoilery, because the game changes entirely with a huge second-half reveal, but props to Remi Malek, Peter Stormare, and Hayden Panettiere for strong performances (Malek especially). However, I will say that while it embraces these tropes, it will sometimes be surprisingly clever in retrospect in bucking some expectations.
There's something of a massive reveal halfway through the story of who the true enemy of the game is that people didn't like, but I found it alright, it's not like they weren't massively hinting toward it all through the first act. I managed to get most of the kids through to the end (goddammit, Matt) before going on a 'kill em all' run, but I found that jumpscares in the beginning tended to be cheap, that some of the deaths were pretty cheap, and the game sometimes wouldn't give you enough clues about how to avoid them.
The twists and turns to the story were good, if predictable. I'd long already figured out the more minor of the two big reveals in the story about the moment one of the antagonists popped into the picture. The bigger of the two reveals was telegraphed enough that you could figure out something was wrong, but one totem in particular kinda spoiled the surprise for me when I saw in a brief flash something killing one of the characters (more on totems in a second). However, the game is rather clever about the first antagonist (again, it's really hard to talk about this game and not spoil it) in that it defies some of the tropes of the stereotypical slasher villain.
But on my last story-related note, props to the game for being a rare horror game that treats severe mental illness as tragic and sad instead of going the cheap route of making the subject a slobbering psychopath.
As for the setting, the graphics were well done even if people didn't quite escape the uncanny valley in long appearances (Peter Stormare especially goes full Rogue One Tarkin at times). The settings were appropriately creepy and often so busy as to make every little wave of tree boughs or rattling tools on a wall become unnerving. The sound effects were excellent, visceral, and served to make everything more tense.
For the mechanics, that's where I'm divided. The game sometimes makes you 'stand still' by holding the controller completely steady, which I found a very compelling idea, but it could sometimes be finnicky and fail me even when I did it right. And I know my hands weren't shaking, because I'd already warded off the shakes with a few drinks beforehand. However, there was one neat section at the very end where the game is deliberately trying to startle you into moving your hands as it tells you not to move.
Picking up clues and piecing the story together ever so slowly was fun, giving me a feeling of accomplishment. Totems are an interesting addition, showing the future in a variety of different ways by telling you what to do or what to avoid. One, however, I particularly frowned on, because it gave away a huge reveal. The shooting was tense, and often had you making tense split second decisions as to whether to shoot an enemy or something else to stop it.
You also hop between characters over the course of the story, and I didn't realize until halfway through that there was a clear way you were supposed to play each of them. Some are cowards, some are investigators, some are brave badasses, and the game doesn't really clue you in on how you're supposed to make choices with thm.
And, of course, QTEs are in the mix in a big way. There was one particularly abhorrent section in the beginning where shit first starts to get real, and failing any one of a number of QTEs will kill off a character. While they give you some time, the QTEs are always positioned in different areas around the screen (like near the bottom of a screen if you need to jump over a log), making it occasionally difficult to see them before it's too late.
To go spoilery:
Spoiler: show
All said, I'd highly recommend anyone with a PS4 and an interest in horror try this game out. I wouldn't say it's the absolute best video game horror experience (RE1, SE2, and Amnesia are still my top picks), but it'd definitely be in a top ten, maybe even top five.