As Dusk Falls

As Dusk Falls is an interactive drama following two families bound together by a single unfortunate night at an Arizona motel in the late nineties. One thread belongs to Vince, a man who has just lost his job and is moving his family across the country; the other to Jay, the youngest of three brothers who decide to pull off a robbery that immediately goes wrong. The hostage situation at the motel grows into a story spanning decades, and the player makes decisions for both sides, gradually coming to understand the motivations of people standing against one another. The two threads keep intertwining throughout, and what you do for one side lands on the other.

The game doesn't work with classic gameplay — it's a sequence of decisions, quick reactions, and exploration of static scenes. Decisions converge into a branching tree you can view at any time, seeing which paths you took and how many remain unexplored. Playing together is essential: up to eight people can join in using their phone as a controller and vote on the next step, which makes the game a surprisingly good social experience even for people who otherwise don't play games at all. Mastering quick reactions isn't a requirement for progress, either — failure just pushes the scene in a different direction, so the story never gets stuck.

Visually it's an unusual hybrid — actors were filmed and their performances converted into stylized, seemingly painted images, between which movement plays out in soft transitions. At first it feels unusual, but after a few minutes the style works and lets the game maintain a high quality of expression even on older hardware, including Xbox One. The music is restrained, with American guitar-driven motifs. Reviews were favorable and praised mainly the script and the acting performances. Today it's an ideal title for a shared evening where, instead of playing, you mostly discuss what to do next. The whole is split into two books of several chapters each, and one complete playthrough takes roughly six to eight hours.