Is As Dusk Falls Worth Playing?
| By Yaroslav Moklyak
Visual Novel games have always had a special place in our hearts and for a variety of good reasons. They help us get away from traditional gaming and offer a way to live inside a movie or TV show where every decision matters. As Dusk Falls follows the same concept although… more ambitiously than others.
I have played a ton of visual novel games over the years but As Dusk Falls still manages to bring something new and unique to the table. It’s a new narrative-driven adventure game that focuses on tragedy, family values, and much more. But is As Dusk Falls worth playing? Let’s find out!
What is As Dusk Falls?
Developed by Interior/Night, As Dusk Falls is a brand new narrative-driven visual novel game where the fates of two families are intertwined after a robbery goes wrong in a small town in Arizona. The game has you making difficult choices while putting you in wacky situations. Each decision you make has grave consequences for the two families and paves a path that leads to unexpected surprises and secrets.
The story stretches over 30 long years but how it ends depends entirely on the choices that you make. As Dusk Falls tries to portray a mature story about family, loss, grief, and trauma while giving you the power to shape this journey however you want. The game also features the classic time-intensive choices that we see commonly used in many visual novel games.
However, it all sounds good on paper but as soon as we dive into the gameplay, things start to fall apart.
Using mature elements to tell a realistic story has a nice ring to it and As Dusk Falls does a decent job at making it as gripping as possible. And while it does manage to create some tension, it just fails to hold it. The game just doesn’t let players absorb the game-changing moments like death, which makes them lose their meaning.
As a result, there’s always this feeling like there’s something missing and it just fails to hit the right spot. And I think the developers knew the risks of making a game that heavily relied on immersion and a gripping narrative that glued the players to the adventure.
Is As Dusk Falls Worth Playing?
As Dusk Falls might have failed in some places but it’s still a great visual novel game with a great story, decent characters, and amazing voice acting that gives quite a lot of freedom to pave your own path at your own risk. With each and every decision carrying so much weight, players do get this sense of tension as they try to sketch out all the possible outcomes their actions could trigger.
So everything that makes a visual novel worth playing is there, except the game sometime misses to uphold the story, carry the tension forward, and abruptly changes the pace. And it doesn’t help to see the game coming out with a rather big price tag for an experience that is not a game-changer by any stretch. And there are a few other things that I wouldn’t get into as they might spoil things for those who are willing to give As Dusk Falls a try.
However, if you happen to have Game Pass by any chance, this game is definitely worth playing. But if you don’t, I think it’s better to invest your hard-earned money into something else like a Steam account that can have the game in it or simply wait till this game has a discount offer.
