I like adventure games in general, I like when game stories are deeper than they usually give us, and I also like when developers try something new. With that in mind, it’s perhaps no wonder I’ve been looking forward to As Dusk Falls, an adventure that offers a seemingly nightmarish tale set in a small Arizona town. A typical city where the long arm of the law has not yet fully arrived and where its residents wage a daily struggle.
The main idea of the adventure is to give us a broader perspective on the story, which begins with the Walker family being forced to move to Missouri for various reasons during the course of 1998. As this is a very, very spoiler sensitive game. I thought I’d just tell you about the things that happen in the first hour or so so you can experience the adventure for yourself. To quickly summarize the base, the Walkers don’t make it to Missouri as planned after the car breaks down in the Arizona desert. In the first few minutes we meet a trio of unpleasant people who will soon play an important role in the adventure, but at this point they disappear.
Luckily, the Desert Dream Motel isn’t too far from where the Walker family – a father, his wife, a very young daughter and a grandfather – decide to go. What looks like a relatively successful mishap, after the car is towed by a helpful motel attendant and the family’s rooms are searched, soon takes a major turn.
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The aforementioned trio, who we will soon know as the Holt brothers, have decided to pull off a heist. But they didn’t choose a bank, not even a shop, but the local sheriff’s house. It might seem strange, but it was hinted early on that it might not be as random a target as one might think. However, the crime does not end well and everything in the Desert Dream degenerates into a hostage situation.
It looks exciting! On top of that, of course, I have to constantly make decisions and also facilitate Quick Time Events to solve various things, which can be anything from packing crates to picking locks to fighting. Everything we do has consequences, and periodically the rewards for my choices or actions are revealed. There are often two, three, and maybe four possible outcomes for each scene, and sometimes they surprisingly combine later on. However, I am not shown exactly what the other options would have been, just told that they are there so I can go back and do things differently.
So far everything is pretty good in As Dusk Falls. Of course, a game where the story can unfold in so many different ways isn’t as well structured as a more direct story, but that’s what makes a game like this so appealing.
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Unfortunately I’m not completely satisfied, because there is a very big bug that would have been easy to fix. For those playing the console version (like me), As Dusk Falls is very poorly optimized in terms of game controls. Controlling the mouse pointer with an analog stick is never satisfying, but that’s what we’re doing here, and it’s not well done at all.
However, the developer Interior/Night has tried to fix this by adding support for smartphones, allowing us to play with a touchscreen instead of an app. Connecting this solution is very easy and works smoothly, but the screen stutters a lot and sometimes doesn’t respond at all, which is why I decided to use the controller instead. Also, I have to add that having a smartphone screen glowing in front of your eyes in a dark room is not very comfortable, and there is the additional problem that it is difficult to watch TV while drawing circles or lines on the phone.
Since Dusk Falls also suffers from another problem. Its unique graphic style is meant to look realistic yet cartoonish. It’s a bit like reading a well drawn graphic novel. But it’s like the interior/night studio doesn’t really know how to use the technology, and switched frames so often that it looks like horribly sloppy animation most of the time. And that other parts are fully animated correctly. Although the brain seems to get used to this strange solution, the optics are never quite convincing. In fact, it would have been a better option to let the frames stand more often, rather than using about one animation per second during key scenes.
These negative aspects make it unnecessarily difficult to enjoy the story, very dark and unexpectedly adult, which is in fact so dark that a warning appears before entering a specific chapter. I won’t spoil anything of course, but it details what’s happening and you can choose whether or not to participate, which made me wonder “when does it happen?” during what should have been a terrible surprise. I know games can be controversial, but I prefer a general pre-adventure warning and appropriate age rating over this solution.
As a result, the adventure never really feels comfortable, and it doesn’t help that the narrative is a bit slow. I find the controls difficult to deal with, which bug me more than the challenges themselves, and the crude mouse pointer movement with the analog sticks further drags out an already slow narrative. It also doesn’t help that, as I said, there is such a good story here that I wanted two perspectives on it and am considering playing it for a third time, and that the voice acting is mostly very good (except for young Zoe, who is played by one grown woman, which sounds funny).
As Dusk Falls is a title that falls short due to the developers’ inability to make a good game out of its story. The shortcomings of the adventure controls could easily have been remedied by binding each selectable option to a button rather than the solutions we have here and the graphics could have been fully animated or more graphic novel-like and the narration could have been more apt meant to be.
What remains is a very capable foundation for something that could have been insanely good in the right hands, but only gets an above-average touch thanks to the gripping story, which really dares more than we’ve come to expect from the world of games and ensures that no two games are the same.