Until Blog - Miss Jessica Riley

[distantattraction]

 

I don’t know when I became fond of Jess, because I don’t think it happened after the first playthrough I watched, but I really like Jess! I think she’s really cute. Her initial charm point is when she and Mike have that snowball fight where you can just dominate Mike. The goofy little roleplay they do where Jess pretends to be a southern plantation girl or whatever is really cute because it’s so… not what I would think a popular girl would do. It’s very silly and nerdy. I also like that everyone correctly chooses to hit Mike with a snowball instead of kissing him when given the option.

There’s frankly not really anything interesting about the whole Mike vs. Matt, Jess vs. Emily fight scene. It’s just heterosexual teen drama, and while I understand why it’s there, it’s very boring. I think the dialogue option where Mike tells Jess that she “brings out the worst in Emily” is half of the truth: Jess and Emily bring out the worst in each other in this game.

The scene where Josh hands Mike and Jess the key to the cabin, though? When Jess says she thinks Josh was hitting on her and then gets genuinely excited when Mike jokes about inviting Josh to come to the cabin with them to fuck? Amazing. Love the idea of Jess being a virgin who is nervous about having sex for the first time but also kind of down to have a threesome. I also like the idea that even though Mike is the one who’s dated around the most, it’s Jess who’s more adventurous. I think it suits Mike to be more conservative and get pulled along to more exciting ground. Also, I want him to get pushed around by women because he’s clearly into that.

The entire walk to the cabin is really good Mike content, Jess content, and Mike/Jess content. It’s where you can start to wring out Mike’s charm points, but it’s also the prime time to see what Jess is like, since it’s the last time we really see her pre-trauma. I’m not a fan of pranks in general, but I’m especially not a fan of pranks for this group of people. For that reason, I fucking hate when they scare each other on purpose during the walk up to the cabin. That said, every other piece of dialogue is really cute. I like it when Jess teases Mike because it shows that she’s not so hung up on him that she just accepts everything he does. Also, Mike deserves to be made fun of.

Once again I must recommend not opening any gates as Mike so Jess will yell at him and tell him he pooped all over his pants. Amazing content, truly. I love that she’s out here running for her life and still has room to be frustrated that her boyfriend is being stupid.

I’m also glad that Jess has one of the extremely rare moments when someone shows a modicum of responsibility for what happened to Hannah and Beth. When Ashley talks about it, she refers to it as “what happened last year,” whereas Jess properly acknowledges that the prank is what got Hannah and Beth killed. Which is obviously true. Since Mike and Jess were two of the most central figures in the prank, it’s an important conversation for them to have. The actual words they say aren’t a great look for them, but from the performance, it’s really clear that Jess does not feel good about what she did.

The scene where Jess gets pulled through the window in the door is truly the single most frightening moment that has happened in any Supermassive game, and I’ve seen full playthroughs of Until Dawn, Man of Medan, Little Hope, House of Ashes, and The Quarry. There’s only one moment in House of Ashes that even comes close to the level of fear that the Jess scene induces, and nothing else is in the same ballpark at all. The shape of her body in that window just looks so wrong. It looks like her whole body is broken, and I was shocked that she didn’t just die immediately when she first got grabbed.

What really clinches Jessica as a good character to me is the change in her attitude after she gets dropped down the elevator shaft and wakes up in the mines. First and least importantly, I love that one of the first things she can do is try to hit Matt with a shovel. (Get him, girl!) But what actually matters is the fact that her entire attitude changes once she’s hurt. She doesn’t mess around, she doesn’t tell any jokes or say anything unnecessary, she just tries to survive.

Jessica’s credits performance is another one of my favorites. Emily and Matt mostly talk about stuff that doesn’t really matter, which has always annoyed me about their personality and writing, respectively. On the other hand, Jess talks only about survival. There’s so much weight in the fact that she ignores the police interviewer’s question and doesn’t ask if Mike is okay; she asks if he lived. Jess has an almost instinctive understanding of just how dangerous this mountain is for them, and she only needs one encounter with a Wendigo to get there.

Jess has a maturity about her that I think she usually doesn’t let show because she’s too busy with her hot, popular, mean girl persona. It has interesting implications post-game. Will she keep playing up that part of her personality? Will she become more serious now that she knows there’s more out there than regular teen drama? Will she handle her PTSD well, or fall apart like Mike and Sam are likely to do? There are a lot of ways you can take Jessica after the game, but I think she’s most interesting if she does become more serious.

The depiction of Jess in “the balance book” is really good. I have a lot of fondness for the moment when Josh looks around at all of the drawings Jess has made out of trauma and realizes they’re not all just monsters.

I am newly fascinated by the idea of Jess undergoing a classic Big Chop once she's satisfied with her therapy progression and ending up with a fluffy bob a la Kristen Bell afterwards. I think it would be really cute :)