As Dusk Falls Review | GamersGlobal.de

teasers

London studio Interior/Night doesn’t make liking their debut easy. An exciting, branching story is faced with bland gameplay and inconsistent quality.

All screenshots and video scenes are from GamersGlobal

Route 66 in Arizona, one of the most famous roads in the world. The year is 1998. The Walker family meets the Holt brothers. What begins as a near-accident with a lively exchange of swear words ends in a hostage-taking. And as a player, you are right in the middle of it.

Well, right in the middle of a story-adventure that might be saying a bit too much. Then As Dusk Falls from the London studio Interior/Night is a typical representative of the genre, which means: You rarely intervene directly in the events. Rather, you determine what the characters do next through dialogue decisions and passed or failed quick-time events. Also common to these types of games is the promise by the developers that your actions will affect the course of the story and even determine life and death. However, the past has already given the lie to some game developers and so I was quite skeptical about the debut of the company founded in 2017.

However, the workforce promises an exciting experience. The studio was founded by Caroline Marchalwho attended Quantic Dream heavy rain (in the test, grade: 9.0) and Beyond – Two Souls (in the test, rating: 8.0) contributed. But their employees also have eventful careers behind them and most of them were at Sony London before they joined Interior/Night. But is all this expertise enough to create an exciting story adventure? I found that out for you in the test – don’t worry, spoilers are just around the corner. That’s why you only see scenes from the first three of six chapters in the 4K test video included above.

How important this decision really is, you have to find out for yourself.

family feud

As already mentioned, the story of As Dusk Falls revolves around the Holt and Walker families. The latter are actually just passing through Two Rocks when a near-accident forces them to stop. The car just doesn’t want to anymore. So they walk a few miles along Route 66 and finally end up at the Desert Dream Motel, where they move into two rooms. Despite this annoyance, married couple Vince and Michelle try not to lose heart, which is not easy thanks to the companions in the form of dad Jim, daughter Zoe and dog Zeus.

As we quickly learn, those responsible for the Walkers’ misfortune are the Holt brothers Dale, Tyler and Jay. Actually, one would think that the three would want to avoid any form of attention, after all they are on their way to a burglary in a house. It’s just stupid that it’s the sheriff’s home, which wasn’t known to each of the siblings. And of course not everything goes smoothly, so they have to flee quickly and also end up in the Desert Dream. Here a hostage situation unfolds, during which the two families involuntarily get to know each other better.

The story of As Dusk Falls may read a bit one-dimensionally when written so simply, but it unfolds a lot of tension as it progresses. This is not least due to the mostly well used flashbacks, which bring you closer to the motivation of the characters. However, the game has a genre-typical problem: In some places it doesn’t matter which decision you make. Otherwise the story would not be able to develop as the developers intended. Overall, though, it felt like my choice made more of an impact than other titles.

In such Hidden Object stages, you have to decide what to do first.

Hidden Objects and Quick Time Events

A lot is decided in As Dusk Falls about the decisions you make in dialogues, often under time pressure. You can only choose the clearly marked “crossroads”, which should have a massive impact on the story. All in all, you are only busy watching for a large part of the season, which I think is even a bit too much.

But you don’t always have to decide what your currently played character says. Occasionally you will also find yourself in a kind of hidden object and have to find the right place to hide or determine whether the bookshelf or the chest of drawers is to be examined first. And of course interspersed quick-time events should not be missing. Here you have to move your stick in a given direction or hammer around on a button. I couldn’t try the input via the smartphone, the app was not yet available in the AppStore at the time of the test. Due to the simplicity, there shouldn’t be any problems with touch operation.

Even if the inputs themselves are never overwhelming and everything is kept very simple, I still had to struggle with problems. First of all, there is the input delay, on the Xbox Series X it usually took just under a second for my gamepad commands to arrive in the game. In addition, you are often deprived of the power to act for several minutes, which is why I often put the controller on the table and then had to grab it in panic when a decision or a QTE was suddenly asked of me. There has to be a better way, because even if an immediately necessary action on my part is announced via vibration, I have messed up a few situations.

Even in the quick-time events, there is no real feeling of action because of the poor technology.

Graphics that take some getting used to

The look of As Dusk Falls quickly catches the eye. With her landscape shots, she is essentially reminiscent of the Better Call Saul series, of course without ever reaching their quality. The scenes feature cartoon characters whose style bears distant resemblances to Disco Elysium. It’s usually nice to look at, even if the characters’ facial expressions are unintentionally funny at times. All in all, it all looks very chic.

However, As Dusk Falls has a big problem on the graphic side: The characters only move every few frames and otherwise remain stationary. So there is little dynamic and you have to crank up your mental cinema properly to really be sucked into the game. Especially in action-packed scenes, this approach is simply boring and the immersion suffers from it. However, I also have to say at this point: The few real animations in the game, for example with moving cars, are so stiff and awkward that maybe it’s better that way.

A positive surprise, on the other hand, was that As Dusk Falls was completely set to German. However, the quality of the speakers sometimes varies greatly. While some of the characters sound believable, some converse so stiffly with those around them that you’d think the T-800 was given as directing instructions. I also had minor sound dropouts during the test period, which can certainly be fixed quickly with a patch.

Author: Dennis Hilla (GamersGlobal)

Opinion: Dennis Hilla

This test was really not easy for me. Because As Dusk Falls essentially tells an exciting story that often caught me off guard and made my moral compass go nuts. The decisions not only feel serious, they often have direct effects, at least in the medium term. However, you occasionally notice that two seemingly completely different options are aimed at the same result. It’s not a big deal, but it’s not particularly nice either. The developers could have simply dropped the decisions completely – after all, I rarely have anything to do in As Dusk Falls anyway.

In the best story-adventure tradition, there is often only spectating on the plan, garnished with a few quick-time events and a few hidden objects. Even Telltale had more to offer. Logically, this way I only see what the developers want me to see, but a little more interactivity would have been nice. This makes As Dusk Falls feel more like a film in the vein of The Complex or Erica without quite reaching their level of immersion. Because the comic look in individual images is only partially absorbing. In addition, the story levels off significantly after the first three chapters, which count as one book. Similar to prison breakwhich also got a lot worse after the first season.

Thanks to various flashbacks and an amazingly high replay value, As Dusk Falls is certainly interesting if you don’t have any problems with gameplay close to zero. Because how you put your moral stamp on various characters through your decisions is sometimes very exciting. And the cliffhanger at the end is just nasty. If the actual game behind it had been a bit more mature, I would have enjoyed Interior/Night’s debut even more.

As Dusk Falls Xbox X