Sunset (2015)

Sunset is a complex and adult video game full of facets, which deserves the title of art work.

The world of this game is full of story, art and drama, but waives hurry, judgment or putting the player under the pressure of an ideal decision. Instead you get a beautifully crafted world that gives you the feeling of a virtual existence.

A flawed, but hugely intriguing experiment in interactive storytelling. Despite the somewhat clunky writing and binary choices, what Sunset does in terms of atmosphere, world-building and theming is very much worth exploring. [Sept 2015]

What starts out as merely unpacking boxes, very quickly begins to feel like more of a private peek into someone’s life.

Sunset might ultimately be an unsatisfying game but the only way for a player to decide how he feels about it is to play through at least 15 days as Angela and see whether he starts to fall in love with her story.

The game hangs like a pendulum, waiting for the player’s hand to send it this way or that, to pass through the darkness of civil war, and cast their own meaning—like sunlight—upon the action.

The game will rob your identity, embroil you in a spicy relationship and expose you to a great danger. Sunset is one of the few games that you are not playing, but directly experiencing. Despite some imperfections, fans of the powerful stories should not miss it.

Tale of Tales is famous for their art meets games projects and those are not always as accessible. Sunset changes that, because you can pick it up easy. It offers a solid, clear story, without losing its power.

It could look like a "domestic life simulator" at first, but there's much more beneath the surface. It's a love and war story that happens in a small apartment, told in an unique way.

It's one of those games you either love or hate, and we really enjoyed it. It's a more adult-focused experience, deep and different, but you should try it before buying it.

Taken slowly, Sunset is a beautiful, fascinating experience.

It's a unique take on the war-based theme, and will evoke your inner voyeur, dazzling in its moments of exposition as well as its suggestive junctures.

Sunset creates a beautiful and sometimes-unnervingly artificial platform for the alienating role-play bound up in employer-employee relationships, staged against a backdrop of historical revolution that threatens to spoil it.

Sunset isn’t like many games you have played before. While it has some pacing issues at times, the game’s portrayal of its themes and narrative are intimately personal and, wholistically, deeply effective.

I'd be hard-pressed to think of a game that tackles class, race, politics, and Capitalism so effectively with a light touch. Unfortunately, their attempts to replicate the drudgery of blue-collar labor might have been a bit too effective—certain sections of Sunset had me feeling absolutely listless.

Though the story is peppered with periods of inactivity that are detrimental to the pace, Sunset acts as a thoughtful, pensive walk through social themes and struggles not often explored in this medium.

Sunset's themes, setting, and plot are plenty interesting, but the player's interaction with them feels incongruous.

Sunset is that rare game that endeavours to challenge players to be entertained by something other than action.

Sunset survives as the antithesis of contemporary narrative construction, but lacks the confidence and vitality to thrive inside of its admirable periphery. It's all support with little regard for structure.

Completing a task is only a matter of finding the thing in the apartment and clicking it. It's a terribly mechanical design, and the process of merely playing is, at times, glitchy and shaky. But the experience of Sunest is role-playing that goes both ways. And it's rich.

Sunset has big ideas. At all times we have understood what Tales of Tales wanted to convey, but unfortunately, in few moments we’ve actually felt it. And there’s nothing more dangerous in a work than catching the creator's intentions rather than succumb to his deception and let yourself be fooled by its story.

Sunset is refreshingly original in putting players in the role of a housekeeper, but with poor instructions and no real choices, it never meets its ambitions.

The gorgeous soundtrack and clever use of lighting in the environments cannot conceal the fact that the game is written to accommodate only one particular playstyle, whilst offering the illusion that a different path is possible. This results in wild inconsistencies between player agency/actual gameplay and the protagonist's monologues and eventual culmination of events, making us feel like outside observers, instead of active participants. For the right, extremely limited demographic, Sunset could provide plot-related thrills but for the vast majority of players, this will feel like an exercise in style who lost it's way.

Sunset has some great elements, especially in terms of diverse characters and intriguing subject matter, but that doesn't excuse its shortcomings. As beautiful and contemplative as the writing is, I spent too much of the game frustrated by glitches and bored by exploring the same surroundings.

Sunset struggles with pacing, technical performance (movement is a tad wonky and it can run sluggish), and a disconnect between how its lead is written and, occasionally, what she does, player depending.

It becomes an overbearing checklist of simplistic social commentary. [Issue#163, p.109]

An overcast day in gaming history.

An interesting idea lacking the interaction or writing to make it anything other than a labour to get through. [Summer 2015, p.69]

While everything of interest is taking place on the streets, we stay indoors and clean up stuff. [Sept 2015, p.83]

Highly intelligent concept was successfully transformed into an equally intelligent game, but the collaborating developers failed to pack it into a great game.

In Sunset, Tale of Tales decided to construct something that looks like a traditional game instead of their usual half-abstract interactive installations, and then it became clear – oh my God, these people have no talent for making games at all.

The game is so amateurish that I’m not sure whether its few good moments were intentional or incidental. [08/2015, p.53]