Release Date: 19/07/2022
Played On: XBO
Available On: Win / XBO / XBSX
Time Played: 5h 4m
Progress: Completed
Developer: Interior Night
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
When I was younger, I had dreams of writing and drawing my own comic book (or 'graphic novel' if you will), but it always seemed like more work than I was willing to put in. I wasn't the fastest artist in the land and producing that much art regularly and quickly enough to keep the whole thing moving was a bit overwhelming. Although, I'm not one to be put off so easily, and I tried out a few alternate methods, which came with their own levels of success and complication.
The one I was super keen on was rotoscoping images, but using digital photographs and Photoshop filters instead of painstakingly drawing over each and every frame. It's important to note that this was before smart phones that put a HD camera in everyone's pocket, so I saved up and bought a little Canon digital camera that I used to take endless snaps of everything I could.
I must have spent hundreds of hours at home after school messing about with photo filters and digital editing before I got a result that could be replicated and run in batches. Somehow I managed to set up a combination of actions that would turn any photograph into something that looked like it had been inked and coloured like your everyday comic book. All I needed now was to plan out a series of photos that would tell a story and allow me to easily create the comic I had been dreaming of.
Needless to say, it never really got off the ground and after making a couple of short comic-like stories, I moved on to other things. The result was good, but it never held a candle to actual illustrations and art, which I was nowhere near practiced enough to execute. My shortcuts were able to produce decent looking graphics, but it never ended up paying off quite as well as I thought it would.
It's about now that I relate this back to the game we're talking about in this post, so let's try and do that. In fact, it doesn't take many screenshots to realise that As Dusk Falls is a game that uses a similar form of photo manipulation that I was trying to achieve a couple of decades ago. All the characters (and I have to assume the locations) are clearly real life photographs that have been put through a few filters to flatten out colours and give the whole thing a graphic novel kind of aesthetic. It's the same idea that I thought would work for my comic book, but just like my comic that never met the standard of actual artistic illustration, the character graphics in this game become increasingly off-putting the more you look at them.
It's not just the appearance of real people who have been edited to look more 'graphical', but the animations are a bit too simplistic to really keep the suspension of disbelief alive and well. Character movement in the game is done via a series of keyframes that transition from one static image to another. So when a character is talking, their facial expression changes every dozen seconds or so, but their lips are never moving. It's like they're messing about and just holding random poses while someone else speaks their lines and talks to the other characters in the scene.
On the surface it kind of sounds like a good idea, if only because it would be easier to render these kind of graphics than working on full animations or using FMV instead. Actually, I think this game would have been an excellent candidate for the FMV treatment, and I would expect to have enjoyed it a lot more if it had. Nevertheless, what we end up looking at for the vast majority of the game, is an awkward slide show of characters transitioning from one pose to the next.
Meanwhile, there are parts of the world that have been animated in a more expected way, which only makes the weird slideshows look even more out of place. Cars in particular have been 3D modelled and their movements are animated at a decent framerate that looks like they're fluidly moving when they do. It kind of feels weird to look at the people driving these vehicles and realise they're frozen still until their next change of pose, as if paper dolls were interacting with the real world, but unable to cross over and make themselves part of the space they're in.
I suppose there will be minor spoilers here, but if you want to remain entirely spoiler free, why are you even reading this? I always try not to give away anything important, but I also like going into everything blind, so go play the game if you don't want to read the very minor spoilers ahead.
So far It might sound like I didn't like As Dusk Falls, but I actually enjoyed myself overall thanks to some interesting complexity that comes into play as you get deeper into the story. The basic idea is that three brothers in a small town decide to rob the sheriff's house before hiding out at a motel nearby. Meanwhile a family travelling interstate and the motel's employees all get caught up in a hostage situation, before everything kicks off and the whole cast either ends up on the run, in custody, or dead.
This is all within the first couple of chapters of the game, and it's in this time that the story shows how well put together it is, while simultaneously jumping the shark hard. That is to say that when everything inevitably goes south and the brothers have to get violent with their hostages and the police, the plot takes a hard turn away from realism and heads straight for over-the-top drama and action. Which wouldn't be all that bad if the dialogue didn't try and take itself so seriously, creating a lot of dissonance between what we're seeing happen on screen and the way the characters react to it and talk about the events that unfold.
The upside is that there is quite a complex dialogue and choice system in the game that allows for an impressive range of outcomes. At the end of each chapter we're treated to a graphical representation of the choices we made along the way, which reveals many paths yet to be taken. It reminded me a lot of the complex trees that Detroit: Become Human showed off at the end of its chapters, and I think it's perhaps the strongest element of this game.
Even though I'm never all that keen to replay a game and find different pathways through dialogue trees, I do get a kick out of seeing what percentage of other players made the same choices I made. Throughout As Dusk Falls I played it pretty fast and loose, not worrying too much about the consequences of my decisions and focusing more on what seemed right at the time. Suffice to say that I ended up on some paths that only a small percentage of other players had chosen, which honestly felt pretty cool. Although, I probably could have saved a few more people and not led everyone to their death one way or another.
Like I said, this is where the game is at its best, as the decisions you make along the way actually do have a significant impact on the path you end up taking. I don't know how many endings there are, or how many variations to the story you can actually get, but when the everything finally wrapped up I really felt like I'd brought everyone to that conclusion through my own actions. It's great to feel like I was in control of the story for a change, instead of just making meaningless choices that never end up influencing anything worthwhile.
Although, my other big bug bear with the game had to be the controls, which constantly frustrated me despite being minimal and infrequently used. Let me just say that if you have the option to play this game on PC with a mouse, make that choice and never look back. Sadly, I wasn't aware of what I was doing when I decided to play this on my Xbox One, but I ended up hating everything about the terrible controls and never want to experience anything so cumbersome and unresponsive again.
The thing is that you have the option of using your gamepad, or the touch screen on your mobile device as a controller. Seeing as most of the game's inputs are done with a mouse-like pointer, I opted to use my mobile phone, as I hate using analogue sticks to control a mouse pointer on screen. As an alternative method, the touch screen idea can work really well and I've experienced similar input methods in other games that have used it to their benefit.
Not here though, as the game decided to connect to my mobile phone through the device's internet connection, instead of using a local network. Other games that have used my phone as a controller have always connected via the local network and as a result there wasn't any input lag to make things awkward. Apparently, As Dusk Falls had different ideas and connected via the world wide web, meaning that every input I made on my touch screen appeared in game almost a full second later.
This might not sound like a whole lot of delay, but when a large part of your inputs are related to quick-time-events, you kind of need something responsive. The only way I managed to get it working at all was to go into the game's settings and turn on accessibility options that slow down the timer on reactive events. Of course, this meant that everything was far too easy and I never failed another input thanks to having just about all day to get them done.
I realise I could have gone back to the gamepad for a more responsive input, but then my gripe would have been with trying to select dialogue options with an awkward mouse pointer that I have to control with an analogue stick. After I'd finished playing, I checked out a couple of streams of the game online and saw that even people playing with their mouse were having input lag issues. It seems like the controls for this game have just been poorly implemented and there's no real way to avoid the terrible inputs. In my own game I couldn't find any way to completely avoid the awkward controls that only added to the awkward animations and awkward dialogue.
In fact, I think that kind of sums up my feeling about As Dusk Falls, as it ended up being an interesting and relatively entertaining game to play through, but at the same time it felt very awkward to play. I can only guess at why the developers chose to use the horrible slide show graphics, or why I had to use a weird mouse pointer with my gamepad, but none of it did them any favours. Perhaps it was a way to spread out resources and focus on the excellent branching paths and all those scenes that I never saw because my choices took me elsewhere.
I hope that the presentation of the game was a purposeful decision and not based on saving time at the end of the day. When I tried using photos to make a comic so many years ago, it ultimately failed because I was cutting too many corners and it was easy to see the difference. If the choices made about As Dusk Falls were deliberate, then I can happily accept that they don't suit my own tastes, which is fine because sometimes we just don't like a thing for no other reason than… we don't like it.
Aside from the input lag there's nothing all that wrong with As Dusk Falls per se, but for my money I'm glad it was released on Game Pass and I didn't pre-order it for full price like I had previously been considering. In that context, this was a fine little game and I'm glad that I played it, because at the end of the day these developers were trying something different. They knocked it out of the park with the branching paths and choices that guide the direction of the story, but from my perspective they struck out on the overall presentation, writing, and those terrible controls.
Perhaps it just reminded me of how my own little comic project back in the day never worked out and I wish I'd just sat down and drawn something in the first place. Just goes to show how subjective our experiences can be, and how anyone reading posts like this one should take it with a grain of salt and make up their own mind. There are definitely problems to be found in As Dusk Falls, but I can see how a different player might not care so much about the stuff that got on my bad side.
I'm all mixed up over this one, but I think it boils down to the fact that I wish I liked this game more than I did. I wish I enjoyed the writing more, then the story might have been more enjoyable. I wish I liked the overall aesthetic, then I'd be digging those slide transitions instead of waiting for them to end. There's nothing more disappointing than that glimmer of great potential that's often snuffed out by unsatisfying execution.