As Dusk Falls (Xbox)
By: Interior Night
WHILE games have been cashing in on crime for many a year, the player is usually pulling a trigger or swinging a baseball bat. As Dusk Falls instead looks to Netflix-style prestige drama for inspiration (or at least to when Netflix was a mark of quality).
An interactive pot-boiler that nods like a puppy to classic genre fare, everything from Fargo and Dog Day Afternoon to Pulp Fiction and Road to Perdition is ransacked in its generations-long tale of a crime gone wrong.
Taking place over 30 years, As Dusk Falls follows the lives of two families whose fates intertwine following a botched heist in rural Arizona. When their robbery goes south, Jay Holt and his brothers hole up in the Desert Dream Motel, taking Vince Walker and his family hostage. The game tasks players with making split-second decisions in order to guide the grim narrative, which spans several decades, towards its best possible conclusion.
Developers have been attempting interactive dramas for decades, from the bad old full-motion-video days of the 90s to recent swish 3D blockbusters such as Heavy Rain and Until Dawn. But rather than ape Hollywood, As Dusk Falls plays out like a flashy visual novel, told through dialogue and one-shot vignettes where real actors are painted over for that comic book vibe. Think A Scanner Darkly on a shoestring.
Though billed as an interactive TV show, the "interactive" part generally takes a backseat, amounting to little more than advancing text and selecting responses. In fact, the closest As Dusk Falls gets to raising a pulse is during quick-time events that require hasty button mashing or directional swipes of the control stick.
With a branching narrative full of rapid-fire decisions, it can be played solo, though is best enjoyed with family and friends, who'll use multiple controllers or even mobile phones to play, each voting for a preferred response, and with the majority winning.
Unlike previous interactive movies, where bloated budgets were invariably blown on sci-fi or horror, As Dusk Falls attempts to muscle in on our love of box-set TV, with six hour-long slices of score settling that'll pass a rainy weekend rightly. Better still, it's free for subscribers to Game Pass – so even if it's no Breaking Bad, it's at least Breaking Cheap.
