New game: "As Dusk Falls" playthrough!

New game!

The last time I played a game together with my wife, we put in over 100 hours spending 65 in-game days in Blue Prince. Then we gave up, because the conditions we needed to meet to make further progress were just too out of this world. When she said she wanted to play a new game the other day, I was ecstatic and tried to find something to her taste. In the past, we had fun with Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, so I figured perhaps As Dusk Falls, a game that has been sitting in my library for several years now, might be a good fit.

Now where could that hidden safe be...

First a small disclaimer: we played the game in Dutch, which you will see in the screenshots I posted. Sorry about that. It wasn't really a concious choice; the game just automatically started up that way, and since we live in Belgium and are used to translated subtitles, we kept it that way.

Do I stop the woman, or quiet the dog?

Anyway, the choice of game was a good one. With a similar gameplay style as those Quantic Dream titles I mentioned, As Dusk Falls is an interactive thriller/drama about a burglary gone wrong and two families colliding. It's mostly about making choices, giving dialogue replies but also bigger decisions on which path to take when there's a fork in the road. Then there are also some QTE's, but they're very easy and you have plenty of time to respond. I think I only ever failed one simply because I really wasn't expecting it... Well, easy for me to say, of course...

Should I do my chores, or step outside for a bit?

The most astonishing thing about the game is its graphics style. The main characters are played by real actors, but they are presented as static photos moving around in a kind of slideshow manner. Sometimes they are slightly animated, for instance when their hair is blowing in the wind. The game is fully voiced as well, though there's no lip syncing since the lips of the characters aren't animated. It looks a bit weird perhaps, but it works. Any motion in the background, however, is fluently animated, like doors opening and closing, cars driving by, rain falling, and the scenery changing in the window when you're inside a moving vehicle. It gives the game a very special animated graphic novel feel.

An overview of the community's choices

As Dusk Falls consists of six chapters, and after each chapter you get an overview of your choices, and how many of the players made the same choice. You could compare this to the Life Is Strange games, except here it's shown in a neat timeline where you can also see the forking paths, which makes it easier if you want to go back and do things differently. After five hours, my wife and I have two chapters left to go. I don't know when, since this is different from my regular gaming schedule, but I'll try to write a final post about the game when we've finished.

You can find As Dusk Falls on Steam and on GOG! There are also Playstation and X-Box editions.