Last year I managed to convince myself that I had a read on basically every game I came across, just by looking at the title and a handful of screenshots. No matter if it had made my review queue previously, if it didn’t pass the sniff test when I finally got around to looking to play it I’d leave it by the wayside. So it was for As Dusk Falls, the low-fi approach to animation being enough of an “off scent” for me to chuck it on the I’ll-get-to-it-later pile. Really though that was to my detriment as it’s a game that’s right up my alley: great storytelling, good voice acting and a branching narrative with an interactive map ala Detroit: Become Human that teases you with the possibility of a story you didn’t uncover.
It’s the late 90s and the Walker family, along with their grandpa, are making the cross country trip to relocate to St. Louis where the mother has just gotten tenure. On their way through a small country town of Two Rock in Arizona they narrowly avoid a car crash with some locals, spinning out and wrecking their car on the side of the road. In the distance they see a nearby motel, where they figure they can stay for a night or two while they get their car fixed. The near miss of the car crash though is only the beginning of an ordeal that will last them days and, for some, the rest of their lives.
The animation that initially turned me away from As Dusk Falls turns out to be one of its stronger aspects, using photorealistic styling to portray the characters whilst relegating everything else to a more stylized aesthetic. The animation on people is low, maybe a frame or two every couple seconds, although it’s usually done in time to the emotional beats that are playing out on screen. There are other 3D elements scattered around although they definitely look out of place when you’ve been engaged in one of the many lengthy dialogue sequences the game has. So it’s definitely not the turn off I originally thought it’d be, even if it’s still somewhat quirky in its implementation.
As Dusk Falls is essentially a choose your own adventure game, giving you a number of decisions to make along the way that influence the story’s progression. Alongside that is the usual array of quicktime events which, I believe, do have just as much influence on certain events should you pass or fail certain things. Then, at the end of each section, you’re given an overview of your choices, the storylines you followed and the relative percentages of players who chose similar paths to your own. There’s also a co-op mode with an option for up to 8 players get involved, allowing you all to vote for certain actions and even override the team’s decisions. I only played single player however so I can’t comment on the co-op experience, but it does seem well geared to an interactive movie-night style format.
The good news is that none of the quick time events are particularly challenging, meaning that it really is up to you how to craft the particular narrative. This means that you can, if you want, deliberately fail certain things to guarantee a particular outcome or prevent a character from taking a course of action that you’d rather they didn’t. Of course there’s only so much influence you have, and the game will use a number of tricks to get you to react fast rather than smart, but it is fun to know that you really do have a good amount of control in the game.
The implementation does leave a few things to be desired though. The lack of widescreen support is an annoyance, not least of which is because the game appears to have hard-coded resolutions in it making it look weird on my ultrawide. Input detection also feels quite mushy, both in terms of clicking directly on things (like when you’re exploring a room) as well as in the quick time events. Quite often I felt like the game would either not register my inputs properly or would register them a good half second after the fact. Given I was playing in singleplayer I figured there shouldn’t be any issue with server communication or anything like that, but it definitely felt like there was some communication delay in there which made everything feel just a little off. Given the game has been out for sometime now though I don’t believe these things will ever get patched or changed, but I’ll hold out hope for future titles.
The narrative though is where As Dusk Falls shines however. Player choice has big impact both on how the story plays out and how your characters interact with each other. Additionally a lot of time is devoted to developing the main characters’ backstories, giving all of them ample time to develop over the course of the game. This is, of course, guided by your hand and you’re free to mold them how you see fit. This can lead to some rather hilarious situations where the characters can act in wholly irrational ways depending on how you’ve set them up but this is a challenge all branching narrative games face. Suffice to say the reason I kept coming back to play this game was because I wanted to see it to its end which was very satisfying.
As Dusk Falls gets filed right alongside the numerous games from last year that showed me I needed to relax the rules around what I play and how I judge games as being worthy of my attention. Whilst the game could use some polish in certain areas to really tighten up the experience as it stands today it’s a fantastic interactive narrative that’s worth playing start to finish over a couple of sittings.
Rating: 8.5/10
As Dusk Falls is available on PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S right now for $45.95. Total play time was 5.6 hours with 54% of the achievements unlocked.
