- Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
- Release Date: Jul 19, 2022
- Also On: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
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Jul 18, 2022As Dusk Falls is a mixed bag. The story, while certainly not out of this world, provides good characters and a fair amount of drama, but the peculiar art style doesn’t always succeed in conveying the right emotion. The voice-over, and especially the Italian dubbing, also occasionally suffers from the same issue. The multiplayer mode does make the game more engaging, but it’s still an experience with very little interaction. Enjoyment might vary wildly depending on your tastes.
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Aug 7, 2022Caroline Marshall’s first independent project may not have panned out exactly as planned, but it shows enough potential in its story telling to convince some to give it a try, and if you already own a Game Pass subscription then you are just investing your time, which will probably worth it.
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Jul 19, 2022As Dusk Falls is a very unique game with a distinctive art style. Off to a strong and gripping start, it loses its touch on the second half. A game you savor like a Netflix show that you can’t stop binge-watching.
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Jul 18, 2022While As Dusk Falls’ story is full of thriller cliches and tropes, if you can look past the unique animation style, playing around with the well-written characters’ lives can be a lot of fun.
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Jul 18, 2022A tense and dramatic interactive movie with superbly realised characters, a breathless plot, and a still-frame animation style that’s likely to prove extremely divisive.
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Jul 18, 2022We have a lot of gripes about As Dusk Falls, but we’ve still very much enjoyed our time with it. Its story will keep you hooked from start to finish, but some of its narrative gaps will leave you with questions. Should that keep you from playing? No – ultimately, this is a very well-executed narrative drama complete with excellent voice acting and a unique art style. Yes, it could have been better in many ways, but it’s still worthy of your time.
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Jul 18, 2022As Dusk Falls isn’t quite the arty thinkpiece it aspires to be. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun nonetheless. This is a perfect Game Pass experience for a mellow weekend, and probably best enjoyed with an adult beverage in hand — and the company of your favorite like-minded sickos.
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Jul 18, 2022As for me, my little family had a pretty good time playing a chapter each night over the course of a week. And while I doubt I’ll play again — I’m fine with how the story turned out for us — I’m pretty sure my mildly OCD daughter is already plotting to go back and fix all the things I made go wrong with my overrides. Who knows? Maybe she’ll find a way to get everyone through this chaotic criminal saga in one piece. But I doubt it.
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Jul 18, 2022With As Dusk Falls, Interior Night and Xbox Game Studios are testing the limits of what an interactive narrative adventure game can be. It's certainly odd for this to be one of the biggest Xbox exclusives of 2022, but it keenly demonstrates that there's still a lot that developers can do to innovate within a genre that seems limited at first glance.
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Jul 18, 2022As Dusk Falls has a captivating story with more than a few rocky moments, but is as close to feeling “genre” as it can get. It also has a lot of shortcomings that might only be saved by the interesting multiplayer features. It’s the perfect game to pull out for any digital or physical get-togethers, but is otherwise a reminder of wasted potential.
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Jul 18, 2022As Dusk Falls is the non-game narrative adventure for your non-gaming family and housemates. It’s the most engaged I’ve ever seen my lapsed casual gamer partner in a videogame and that’s because it has the familiar story pacing of a six-part TV series and almost no gameplay, which means minimal barrier to entry.
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Jul 22, 2022With As Dusk Falls, a new step is taken in the transformation of classic adventure games into "narrative experiences" intended for a general audience. The INTERIOR/NIGHT studio even pushes the cursor to reach the status of interactive photo-novel, due to a singular artistic direction, based essentially on still images.
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Jul 20, 2022After each episode, you even get a chart highlighting the path you’ve taken with spoiler-free hints at the breadth of outcomes and scenes available. And even with all of that, each new twist and turn feels unexpected. As a slice of brand-new interactive choice-driven narrative drama, As Dusk Falls impresses. But it’s an experience held back by its photo-filter visuals and interactivity that never quite feels like an extension of its many dramatic moments.
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Jul 28, 2022In terms of the sheer variety of ramifications and final outcomes that this interactive drama has to offer, As Dusk Falls is very well written. But when it comes to artistic choices that have been made, for example, in the field of style and direction, it can sometimes fall far beyond your taste. As in the case of the undersigned Naturally Born Azijnzeiker.
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Aug 23, 2022Will you enjoy this story-based game? That, quite unsurprisingly, depends on whether you’re going to like the story. The plot twists aren’t great but if you’re interested in dark topics like PTSD, you could leave satisfied.
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Edge MagazineAug 11, 2022What a shame that a story whose opening promises to wade into deeper waters should resort to paddling in the shadows. [Issue#375, p.118]
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Jul 18, 2022I was hoping for As Dusk Falls to share a place with the best and most respected Netflix and HBO productions, but that would be setting the bar too high. I find it more accurate to position it as those simpler and pure popcorn series, ideal to spend a few hours of a gray Sunday afternoon. An ideal entertainment for when we only need something temporary and fun.
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Jul 18, 2022There's a lot to love in As Dusk Falls. Everything surrounding the game is thoughtful. The multiplayer aspect is very smart, the Twitch integration is well thought, and the narrative tree is well made. Unfortunately, all these great ideas serve a story that has been told many times before, relies on clichés, and misses the mark on many of its more sensitive themes.
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Jul 18, 2022As Dusk Falls is a valiant attempt to tell a good crime drama where actions have consequences. The story went on a lot longer than I expected, as the tense moments at the motel spawned a lot of different threads — both flash forwards and flashbacks — that I didn’t expect. But ultimately the tale failed to move me in the way that I had hoped for. The characters were caught in circumstances where they had nothing but bad choices, and it just made me think that the dumbest thing they did was to allow themselves to be caught in those circumstances. In that way, I don’t think the storytellers succeeded in created the empathy for characters on both sides of the events that they wanted. I would like to see more from this talented studio. But so far the story feels more like a TV show than a stellar movie, and more like a soap opera than a memorable drama.
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Jul 18, 2022If you're a fan of the genre, you'll probably have some fun with this, but it's hardly the revelation that the decision-based, narrative-driven genre feels like it so desperately needs.
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Jul 18, 2022As a narrative-heavy game that settles you in the director’s seat to drive these characters towards their respective resolutions, it feels like INTERIOR/NIGHT forgot to finish the story. I mean it genuinely, this game just stops. I sat in the main menu for about 20 minutes trying to work out if I had fenced myself into an abrupt ending or if there was a giant “continue” button in my blind spot. I went back to what I thought were pivotal decisions and chose the opposite to see if that would change the paths, and it didn’t.
| This publication does not provide a score for their reviews. | |
| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
| These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation. | |
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Jul 18, 2022Its story engages from beginning to end and keeps the player interested in these characters whose lives fall into a spiral of chaos and self-destruction. [Recommended]
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Jul 18, 2022As Dusk Falls represents a bold new future for interactive movie games - a future where games can do away with the supernatural spectacle and thrillery whodunnits to rely on human drama to entertain us instead. And OK, this does occasionally veer into soap opera, but at other times it's gentle and deep and dark, even profound. It shows how well games can handle stories and themes like these when done with care and understanding, and how well it can pull us into the lives of others and invest us in the decisions they have to make. And that's what really stays with me about the game: stories - human stories. They are the troubled, awkward and beautiful stories I can see in the world around me, that I can relate to myself. This is a game that reflects, in many ways, our own lives. Silly as it sometimes can be, As Dusk Falls feels real, and I can't think of a higher compliment to give it. [Eurogamer Recommended]
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Jul 18, 2022With its ability to constantly pull the rug out from under you, As Dusk Falls doesn’t fade into a forgettable narrative experience we’ve seen a thousand times. Instead, it leaves its mark, with a long shadow cast by its sad but understandable characters’ hardships drawn across threads seemingly made of jagged wire. What will haunt you is whether the thread you chose really was the best one at the time. As in life, the answer will likely be: probably not. [Polygon Recommends]
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Jul 26, 2022While it was a refreshing way to play a narrative-driven game, it’s not an entirely new idea. Supermassive’s 2017 thriller Hidden Agenda similarly turned a gritty drama into a party game. But I’m hopeful more games adopt a similar approach. In the case of As Dusk Falls, playing with my wife made what would have felt like a just-OK B-movie thriller plot into a much more memorable experience. There are a lot of branching paths, too, so we have a good excuse to return to the game.
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Jul 20, 2022Even if the gameplay mechanics of As Dusk Falls remain specific to the genre, they are right on point. Its unicity comes from its artistic direction and the quality of its writing. The software leans back and forth between an interactive movie and a narrative game. The quality of the dubbing and the soundtrack are just the icing on a skilfully produced and savoury cake. With a substantial lifespan and almost infinite replayability, the title should be a well-deserved triumph. The possibility for co-op sessions or playing with one's community will certainly contribute to this.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 198 out of 278
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Mixed: 41 out of 278
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Negative: 39 out of 278
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Jul 31, 2022
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Jul 20, 2022Its a very good experience overall I dont think it deserve all the bad reviews, just look at the game like a narrative one
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Jul 23, 2022Good story game hope to see more games like this in the future keep up devs