During the 2022 Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase rolled around, I expected to see games like Redfall and Forza, but As Dusk Falls was not something I considered. Its unique visual style grabbed my attention, but I was worried about the gameplay, as choose your own adventure games can be hit or miss. Having now spent time with the game, completing the story, or at least one version of it, I can safely say I was right to be concerned.

The story in As Dusk Falls is hard to explain, mostly because the actions you take and the choices that you make will have an impact on events, later in that same scene and even decades later. The basic premise is this, Vincent and his family, his wife Michelle, daughter Zoe and father Jim, are driving down Route 66, through Arizona, as they make their way to St Louis. As they are driving a group of local cause them to be run off the road and given Arizona is full of rocks, the car is badly damaged, leaving the family to walk towards the nearby motel, the Desert Dream. At the same time, the group in the other car are heading to a house to rob it, but things don’t go to plan and they have to make a quick get away and they opt to hide out inside the same motel and thinks go off the rails from there.

I will say this about the story, or specifically the characters, they are all flawed people, except Zoe she is just a child, but the rest, well they have their issues. Vincent is a man who feels lost and his wife Michelle is trying to hard to be happy, whilst hiding something. In supporting roles, we have a Sheriff who is a little more Butch Cassidy than anything else, a recovering alcoholic maintenance man and more. The problem with the characters is that the game tries to cover as many of them as it can, giving you background on each of them, showing events that lead to this moment, the problem is some of them are just not interesting. Learning why three people have opted to rob a house and then take hostages, should be interesting motivation, but none of them is interesting on their own, so connecting them to a larger narrative never connects, at least for me, so making a choice for them, had little impact on me.

The game is all about your choices, no matter whose point of view you are seeing things through, as Vincent, do you take actions against the guy with the gun, in the hopes of ensuring your family remains safe. Or perhaps as Jay, you opt to hide things from your family, in the hopes of doing the lesser of two evils, no matter the perspective the choices you make will impact everyone involved. The other thing about the choices you are presented is that some of them will indicate a crossroads, meaning your choice will make an impact, on something, the catch, there is no telling when that will happen, it could be right away, or hours later. Once you complete the episodes, you can see the path you took and where other choices may have lead, well the pathway at least, if you want to know how those choices may have played out, you have to play the game again.

The problem with the choices is that you may not agree with all the ones presented to you, one specific example is that Vincent is given the choice to sign some documents or flip over the table and neither of them appealed to me. As the game is pegged as ‘you make the decisions’ having options that were not interesting, seems counter productive to the point and when I opted not to make one, the game just chose for me anyway. Making a choice is pretty simple, you just need to move the cursor over the option you want, sometimes they are presented in a list, other times they are split across the sides of the screen. Whenever the game gives presents you with a choice, that will have consequences for someone down the line, it will pulse the screen, giving you a sense of importance to what is happening.

On the flip side, other choices are usually required to be made quickly, as the game will present a timer, giving you 10 or 15 seconds to make the choice and once you commit, you are done. That timer will also appear when you have to complete the quick time events, you know those things that we really should have left in gamings past. Sometimes these events will have you press a button, other times you have to repeatedly press it, or move a stick in a direction, or any other number of prompts. Thankfully, they are not complex, meaning you won’t need to be glued to your controller, in fact you don’t even need a controller to play the game, as a mobile phone can be used as well. My issue with the controls though, is that there are times when you can go minutes without making any input and then out of nowhere it throws up a few prompts, requiring you to be on the ball, it just seems odd.

During my time with the game, I did encounter some weird bugs that caused some problems, there were occasional issues with the graphics, texture work not loading in right, but the bigger issues were more than that. One example was that a gun failed to render into the scene, so having a character talk about waving their gun around and there not being one was weird. The worst issue were the lock ups, the game would at times not register my inputs, which is an issue, but not the worst, that goes to the time the game refused to provide me with options, leaving me to see a scene and just hear the characters sighing and breathing. To resolve that one, I had to quit out of the game and go back, which sadly resulted in some lost progress, making me relive out a lengthy sequence of events.

If we take a look at the games presentation, things are weird and not good weird, but weird weird and it never gets better. The first thing you will see, either in the screens attached here, or via any footage of the game, is it looks a lot like the 2006 film, A Scanner Darkly, which had actors acting things out, before the film was giving a comic book style covering. The problem is that the movie is in motion, so the lines and effects are always moving which results in the unique look, the game however feels like it’s the animatic for that movie. The same basic effect was done here, actors were filmed acting out all the scenes and then they were animated over afterwards, except they went for a motion comic effect, meaning the characters don’t move. They do move, but its like they warp around the scene, Vincent can be sitting on the couch and then that fades out, fading in a drawing of him standing up in front of it. While I do get the effect that they were going for, the problem is that it never connects, leaving the action to be handled by the audio, because of the disconnect from the characters to the world.

This isn’t because of the art style, whenever the game stops moving characters around, you could easily take what is on the screen and print it in a book, giving you a real comic, as it does look great. But rather, the lack of connection to the world is driven by the fact that you have no control over your character, you might be able to point them in a direction to investigate something, but other than that, they are completely static to the screen, but when they do move, its like they are layers on top of the image, rather than part of it.

I mentioned before that the audio was helping to drive the game forward and that is for a good reason, the entire audio track is wonderfully done. Most of that credit can be given to the actors, as the detail in their performances is incredible, from Jim asking to speak, to Jay trying to convince someone to help him via a collect call. Even the characters that I couldn’t connect with, were still brought to life by the actors playing those roles. Another aspect that helps it shine is that there is no music in the scenes, well there is music, but it doesn’t just play for the sake of playing in the background, so if your character has to make a decision, you won’t hear some random music there, just your characters heartbeat.

As Dusk Falls is an interesting game, it tells a story that is shaped by the choices you make, some of them are pretty simple and fun, others are hard and can lead to character death and you don’t get a do-over. The problem is that the moment-to-moment gameplay is all static, meaning for a lot of the time you are just watching, which isn’t an issue per say, except when you are forced to interact with the game, you are given choices that you might not appreciate. The game does support 7 players, so perhaps playing it with a room full of people may make things more interesting, but that is something that is hard to test when the game is not publicly available. The visuals look great when stationary, but their attempt to create a motion comic just looks weird and breaks any immersion the game has built up. If you are someone that is one the fence for this one, I can’t recommend it, not because it is bad, but more that is not really a game for everyone. The stories do beg for a repeat playthrough, but with some less than interesting characters, forced choices and gameplay that is lite on the play, As Dusk Falls is a game in name only.