Sunset has a great story to it. The problem is that is all that it has. It doesn’t even have a good way to tell that story and it doesn’t make up for it in any other way. It is very rough around the edges in that it has poor performance and some bugs even years after it’s launch. I enjoy walking sims myself, I loved Gone Home, Tacoma, The Station, etc but I couldn’t bring myself to enjoySunset has a great story to it. The problem is that is all that it has. It doesn’t even have a good way to tell that story and it doesn’t make up for it in any other way. It is very rough around the edges in that it has poor performance and some bugs even years after it’s launch. I enjoy walking sims myself, I loved Gone Home, Tacoma, The Station, etc but I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy Sunset.
You start the game as an American engineer who is trapped in a foreign country during the start of a dictatorship. You have to take a job as a housekeeper for a wealthy man to make ends meet. As you perform your daily tasks the story unfolds from notes you find from your employer, radio broadcasts, hearing gunfire and bombs on the street below and your characters own voice as she goes over recent events. You can choose to either perform your tasks coldly to your employer or warmly and begin to grow as more than just an employee/employer to each other. This all sounds great but the tasks you are given take about 5-6 real world minutes to finish for each in game day and your option then is to end the day, which means you may miss some even on the street, radio or from your character or you can literally sit around letting the day play out for another 10-15 real world minutes. You can try to speed it up by sitting down or lying down but it still drags on. I think this game could have worked better as a visual novel rather than a first person game. It would have still had the great story but you could of bypassed the boring part of the days.
Coupling the boring parts of the in game days is terrible performance drops and bugs. Once in a while the game would run at 50-70 FPS but it would usually be 15-20 which is downright terrible for my system. I also had the issue of falling through the world once. The game has had multiple patches since launch yet these issues still persist.
The game lacks manual saves opting to save at the beginning of each day but each day is so short it wasn’t much of an issue. There were 9 graphics options to choose from and an FOV slider that went up to 90. The game wouldn’t save my resolution though. Every time I launched the game it would default me to 1280-720 and I would have to choose 1920*1080 each time. Alt-Tab also didn’t work for me.
I played version 1.06 of the game that I got from the Humble Store and I played on Linux. I got the game on sale for $4.99 USD and I think even that was a tad high. I want to try to keep mentioning that the story was fantastic. The arc you see the main character, her boss, and just the spiral you can see the city go through was great but the game just lacked in so many other areas.
My score: 6/10
My system:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.1.6 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Solus 3 | Kernel 4.18.5-90.current… Expand
Sunset (2015)Your Score0 out of 10User Score
