The interactive story As Dusk Falls contains all the ingredients of a thrilling crime thriller: a family on a long car journey with a long-lost relative, a single mother in a remote motel in a quiet desert town, and three young robbers on the run. For three chapters we have to guide these people through their increasingly precarious situation. By the time the police are at the door, you as a player are against the ceiling. Have you handled this well?
As Dusk Falls nestles in a growing collection of similar story games, in which the player basically watches a movie and occasionally has to intervene through choices in the dialogues. However, this game doesn’t do that via 3D characters, but via very expressive drawings that jump from one moment to the next like a kind of storyboard. Certainly at the beginning it has a somewhat alienating effect, but it offers maker INTERIOR/NIGHT the space to build up tension in a completely unique way.
The studio goes further than the recent The Quarry – in As Dusk Falls, your decisions don’t just determine who survives the confrontation. More important are the mutual relationships, which means that the choices can be intriguingly complex and difficult.
These relationships form the foundation for the second ‘book’ with three chapters, in which we follow the emotional aftermath of the offending desert night. Despite an interesting line about trauma processing, As Dusk Falls unfortunately doesn’t hold the attention so strongly anymore, it becomes predictable. The possibility of playing the game together with two or more people turns out to be more food for argument than thinking.