Review: As Dusk Falls

To say that FMV (Full Motion Video) games have been around for some time is a bit of understatement, with the genre appearing first nearly forty years ago in arcades. Of all the gaming genres out there, though, it has always been the one to never really return to the public consciousness, instead relegated to peoples nostalgia for old, half forgotten consoles. 

In the last few years though, games like Her Story have rode that nostalgia wave while also creating compelling narratives to push the games along, embracing the limits and opportunities of the genre in equal measure. There have also been games best described as FMV-Like, and this is where As Dusk Falls comes in. 

The first game from Interior/Night, a studio made of former Quantic Dream and Sony veterans, As Dusk Falls is best described as a thriller - think of those old movies where the bad guys end up in a standoff with the cops and you kinda know how it's gonna go, cause that's the way it always goes. 

Thing is, you don't know this time. As Dusk Falls’ choose your own adventure style means your decisions in certain situations matter, with the story adapting to those decisions and crafting your own version of the story. I like games like this, where your run is your run, and might not be the same as the next person. Of course, you can go back and see everything, but that is self-defeating in my book and games like this are best played once and you take the unwritten rule that the story you get is your version of it. 

If you do this, there will be a lot of content you missed. The end of each chapter shows you a timeline of events, but only fills in the path you took, so you can see the other branches if you had taken the other option, but no specifics, just lines leading to blank boxes. It’s amazing to see just how much you have actually missed out, but also brilliant because it reinforces that feeling of ‘this is my version of this story’. 

There isn’t really a singular main character, as the game spreads out over a cast that each feel fleshed out and real. You might have seen the archetypes in a hundred movies over the years, but that still means they are better written than many in other games. There is the devoted dad, the violence loving member of the gang of ‘bad guys’, the mother who cares for her sons no matter what they do and more. This cast is the game's main strength, and chances are you will resonate with at least one or two. For me it was the Dad, Vince, for obvious reasons, but also a young man named Jay who is caught in his older brother's wake. 

As the story progresses there are some genuinely emotional moments, and you can get really invested in it, feeling for some characters while hating others and it is really cool to see, marking the game as a definite highlight of this genre and a future cult classic. I have definitely been thinking about it long after completing it, always having to force myself to remember that I had my run and that’s ok. It’s so good though, the temptation is high to go back and choose the other paths. 

I said at the start of this review that it is a ‘FMV-Like’ game, and what I mean by that is that the art style has actual, real life actors, but isn't full motion. It's more like moving through comic book frames but without the frame while being rendered to look like paintings. It’s striking, evocative and genuinely different to the point where I couldn’t tell you another game that looks quite like this. The downside is that it's a style that could instantly put some people off, and honestly, if you told me this makes you feel motion sick I can see that being a thing too, so be warned that your mileage might vary here. 

At around six hours long, assuming you only do one run, the game is the perfect length, feeling more like one of those limited run prestige TV shows you get through streaming services and it works perfectly for what the developers are going for. If you go back and see everything you can easily double that length, probably get even more out of it. You shouldn’t, but that's on you. 

As Dusk falls will leave you wanting to see every aspect of its story due to the strength of its characters and writing while also thinking about it for some time after you have stepped away from its events. Resist. Take the version of events at the Dessert Dream Motel as cannon and enjoy your time with it.

Review: Twelve Minutes

2021 is definitely the year of the time loop. Lots of games, a few films and TV shows all showcase the mechanic this year and one of the ones that I was personally looking forward to was Twelve Minutes, the new game from developer Luis Antonio and publisher AnnaPurna Interactive. I then, unfortunately, played the game. 

Twelve Minutes is a game with a striking look, with a top down perspective set in the smallest apartment known to man and features just three characters, the Protagonist, his wife and a mysterious cop. What starts out as the, quote “best night ever” quickly deteriorates as the cop bursts in, accuses the wife of murder and eventually kills you. 

The loop resets, and its time to figure out why he shows up, why he accuses your wife of murder and exactly what he is wanting. In terms of mechanics, it is a fairly standard point and click style game with objects that can be interacted with and combined with various others and the three characters to create differing results and hopefully get to the truth of the matter. The problem is that there are enough things to interact with and logic to follow that the possibility space becomes way, way larger than what the game actually wants you to do. 

Que many hours of frustration as you constantly bump up against what you think you can do, and what you can actually do. Your brain will say that, logically, doing this with that will result in this, but what actually happens is you just receive the same bit of dialog again over and over until you finally fumble into the right interaction and move the story forward. This game is supposed to be about six hours long, but because of this problem with possibility, it took me ten. 

Some of this is down the UI, that can make it difficult to realise you need to do something else with an object or click a dialog option more times to get different results. I finally beat the game once I realised I had to click on an object I just picked up to trigger some dialog that will grant me a different path of conversation when talking to the wife and it says a lot that at that point I was looking up guides that said just pick up the object, not pick it up and click on it, almost like even they didn’t realise you had to do that. 

Twelve Minutes suffers from something that just about all time loop games suffer from: repeat dialog. Now, it might seem harsh to criticize a game with such a system for having to get the same dialog to the player over and over but with the other issues it out stays its welcome long before you can complete the game. 

It’s not all bad however. The all star cast does a stellar job with a script that isn’t exactly stunning and I honestly, without being told it was, couldn’t tell that the protagonist is played by James McAvoy and his wife by Daisy Ridley. I can tell the cop is Willam Dafoe, cause it's Willam Defoe, hiding that iconic voice is almost impossible! 

The script just doesn’t make sense at times, with reactions and dialog which can instantly throw you out of the game because frankly, people just don’t interact like that. It’s partially the nature of getting dialog recorded in different sessions, sometimes thousands of miles apart, to work together properly, but also the script just does a bad job of those interactions. It does go some places in terms of the plot though, and some are pretty wild, eliciting an out loud “WTF?” from me personally, but it definitely has its problems. 

Twelve Minutes unfortunately isn’t as good a game as its premise might suggest. The issues with the possibility space and a script that could have been so much better bring down what was an arresting idea, one that could have stuck with people for more than just the bad areas. As it stands, if you do remember this game, it will be mainly because of the extreme levels of frustration it provided. Fans of the genre will get the most of it, the rest of us beware.