As Dusk Falls Review – Gripping Family Drama

If you’re even slightly considering getting and playing As Dusk Falls, you should first brace yourself for the fact that even in the realm of interactive movies, Interior/Night’s debut lacks playability. The titles from Quantic Dream, whose veterans are part of the new studio, will probably remind you the most. But Supermassive Games or Don’t Nod can also be a source of inspiration for them. While the games of all the teams mentioned at least once in their lives try to give the player control over the characters, in As Dusk Falls de facto you will only observe and decide the fate of two diametrically different families.

• Platform: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S (Verified)
• Publication date: 07/19/2022
• Developer: Interior/Night
• Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
• Genre: Interactive Drama
• Czech localization: Yes
• Multiplayer: Yes, locally and online for up to 8 players
• Data to download: 51 GB
• Game time: 6 hours
• Price: CZK 749 (Xbox), €30 (Steam), game available on Game Pass subscription service.

As Dusk Falls really teeters on the edge of concepts the game as well as interactive movie (or series) more than anything. But first, let’s take a look at the moments when the authors try a little games serve.

First, it is a kind of point-and-click transitions. However, there is not much imagination hidden in them. Don’t expect puzzles or truly adventurous elements. Most of the time you go through all the hotspots until you find the right one. Sometimes you won’t get to everyone, but only because the rest are not important for the continuation of the story. Sometimes you need to act quickly, but then it may happen that your decision at that moment is made by chance. Interactive elements are not marked in any way in the environment, so some options may not appear at all. Searching for an area with the cursor is not fundamentally a problem, but to some extent spoils the described impression just lookingbut does not add any additional functional elements.

if you are crushing fives and turn the levers fun, you will find your way.

All actions here are decided by quick events, and there are quite a few of them. if you are crushing fives and turn the levers fun, you will find your way. Although I am not an ardent opponent of such a solution to some situations, as a mechanism that makes up about a third of the entire gameplay, it does not seem completely ideal to me. Especially when the game is very lenient and you have multiple tries for most actions.

Let’s say we’ve come to an agreement about what a game is and what it isn’t. The first thing that will surely interest you is the visual side of the action. The smaller studio cleverly sidestepped potential character animation and lip-sync issues and inserted 2D characters into a 3D environment. Fortunately, my fears that the scenes would be static did not materialize. The developers took great care of the characters, the images often change, for example, the hair often moves, and over time you completely stop perceiving the specifics of the visual presentation.

The game looks beautiful as long as it focuses on cartoon characters. It plays with depth of field and therefore the player doesn’t perceive the environment very much. The environment itself makes the worst impression. Boxed models, merged textures, special animations or cloned greens. You begin to notice all this as soon as the characters disappear and the environment starts to play primly, this is not a tragedy, because very quickly the camera focuses again on the beautiful, but it is probably impossible not to notice this.

I won’t reveal more about this story other than that it follows the fate of two families who, by an unfortunate coincidence, get into trouble. The plot is divided into two bookseach book contains three chapters. The history is good. It’s fun, from serious to dark, demanding, there can be death, and at least on your first playthrough, you have to weigh every decision.

In the course of the six-hour story, we will play as several characters, although we will spend most of the time with two of them. The first book was perhaps too intense and drawn out for me, it introduces the characters through flashbacks that interrupt a very exciting event. I understand why the writers chose this method over a longer shutter speed, so I don’t complain too much about them. In any case, the second, more calm book, took root in my heart a little more. So if you’re confused by the first half of the story, you might be more interested in the second half, as I am.

I already talked about the solution. It is very difficult to assess their impact. At the end of each chapter, you’ll see a decision tree where – again, like in Quantic Dream games – you can see how many other situations you haven’t seen, and what percentage of the players have seen the same scenario as you. This is a nice bonus that also has a very practical function. Each tree has several locations from which you can start the story over, and the game also gives you the choice of whether you want to overwrite your current position, create a new save, or just go through scenes without saving.

I beat the game once, then cleared some parts again using this feature, and by the third time I was about halfway through the game in local multiplayer (we’ll talk about this later). I came to the conclusion that the impact of the decision is not fundamentally different from other titles of a similar nature. Some are really key, others are just masquerading as key. Some events will happen regardless of the player’s intention, while others can happen in a completely different way. At least two playthroughs of As Dusk Fall are definitely worth it.

Home players will especially appreciate the full subtitles and lyrics in Czech. For this, the developers deserve a big plus.

The overall tone of the story is also helped by a very good dubbing, which adds another pinch of life to the already visually interesting and in character characters. Home players will especially appreciate the full subtitles and lyrics in Czech. For this, developers deserve a big plus, because a game of this genre would be completely unplayable without knowing the language. Perhaps, only in a few places it is not entirely clear who is concerned with this or that decision, which can be given by the translation, but also by the wording of the original text.

As Dusk Falls includes a multiplayer mode in addition to the single player mode. The authors conceived it differently than, for example, the recent The Quarry. Whereas in the games from Supermassive Games, players divide individual characters and then control and make decisions for them, in the title from Interior / Night, decisions are voted on. Whether you play locally or online.

In both cases, up to eight players can participate in the game. You can only play with friends online and everyone must own the game (or download it as part of Game Pass). Four gamepads can connect locally, while the rest depend on the mobile app. It is very simple, works like a touchpad, all actions take place on the game screen. But it is fully functional, connection by code is fast, there is no significant response to gestures. Everything works as it should.

Although not exactly As Dusk Falls a party and only a few will discover the full potential of multiplayer, this is a nice mode.

I don’t have experience with the full number of players, but I have to wonder if it won’t be confusing on screen with eight cursors, even with fewer you can get lost for a moment. After all, putting on the cursor and using the gamepad is a bit strange, after all, there are more “console” control methods for games of this type, but you can get used to it.

The fun of multiplayer mainly comes from whether you play with people who literally join your game. The writers want you to discuss solutions, which violates the frequent time limit a bit, but not so severely that it ruins the whole concept. And while it’s not exactly As Dusk Falls a party and only a few will discover the full potential of multiplayer, this is a nice mode.