As Dusk Falls is the first game by INTERIOR/NIGHT. The small studio is headed by Caroline Marchal who was one of the lead game designers for Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. Both these games can be categorized as interactive drama / action-adventure games with a huge emphasis on story. As Dusk Falls continues down that path and presents a decade-spanning drama with you in control of what will happen.
In control / out of control
As Dusk Falls tells the tale of two families who get entangled with each other after a robbery went wrong. The Walker family is en route to start a new life in Missouri after Vince Walker lost his job. When their car breaks down they stay at the Desert Dream Hotel as they try to repair the car. The Holt brothers are known to be trouble makers with some petty crimes and trips to juvenile detention to their names. This time around they went for a bigger score but end up botching the whole deal. On the run from the police, they also end up at the Desert Dream Hotel where things – again – get messy. As of this moment in time, the two families get entangled and a 30-plus-year story unfolds.
Your choice
Going more into the story would be spoiling too much so I won’t go into more details. Everything in this story is ultimately decided by the player(s). The game prompts you on multiple occasions for the next line of conversation. Depending on your choice the story continues on a different timeline branch. All choices have consequences. Some are just minor alterations to the mainline story, others have a more impactful influence on the story. This is made visual after each chapter with a nifty overview of the timeline taken and the greyed-out timeline branches you didn’t take based on your choices. I played a fair share of these types of games but to be able to see where in the story a certain branch was closed off and another one opened up was a nice addition (especially for those wanting to explore all possible outcomes on subsequent playthroughs).
Graphic novel style
I saw a comment on a trailer for As Dusk Falls that commented on the art style used. That particular person made a joke about the game being “GTA loading screens: the game”. Maybe that’s a bit too harsh and demeaning to the hours of work the team put into making these visuals but it gives you an idea of what they went for. I read they used actors to portray the scenes and used that material to digitize into this comic-book-style visuals. The characters are on a different layer and move a bit to give the idea of motion but the story pretty much is being told throughout still images. To be quite frank, it bothered me throughout playing the game. A few moments of these I could bear but a whole game is a bit too much for my personal liking. It often spoiled the immersion a bit mostly due to the fact I could not always figure out who on the screen was talking because of the lack of lip movement.
Quick Time Events
For a while, Quick-Timed Events, or QTE as they are usually abbreviated were all over video games. These acted as a way to get people involved during the cinematic phases of a game. Especially when things got tense, these quick-timed events had their purpose. There were a time game designers went a bit overboard and they just became annoying. Nowadays most games don’t bother anymore or have an option to disable them. With a game like As Dusk Falls, you want to offer something more than just selecting dialogue and the occasional mini puzzle to immerse your audience. I get the need for QTE in these types of games but that doesn’t mean I like them. In fact, I could do a fair amount of time after reviewing this game before I would start to miss them…
Multiplayer
The game is designed to play with multiple people. The game is perfectly playable as a one-player thing but it offers nice additions when playing multiplayer. Up to four controllers can be used to add extra people. When you’re out of controllers, another 4 can join by using the As Dusk Falls app downloadable on any phone. This means up to 8 people can play the game simultaneously. Each decision is simply decided by a majority of votes. When votes are evenly divided, the game chooses randomly from those choices. However, if you absolutely want a particular choice, you could use an “override”. These are limited so use them sparingly. There is an extra option intended for twitch streamers where decisions can be made by the chat. We tested the controller/app combo and found out it works perfectly. How the twitch broadcast method is working could not be tested.
Conclusion
As Dusk Falls adds a multiplayer aspect to the interactive drama/action-adventure genre. The rest of the game has been done before and I might add “in a better way” to that statement. The story doesn’t shy away from the grittiness of life but in the end, has a few too many clichés to make it stand out enough. As Dusk Falls is enjoyable and the multiplayer aspect is a nice addition but I still prefer the Fahrenheit/Heavy Rain era of this genre.
