Dusk Review

 

They say they don’t make them like they used to. But when they do? They make a game like Dusk. 

Tale from the Crypt

Dusk is a loving homage to the first generation of true 3D shooters. Loud, fast, violent, playful and a bit grungy. Graphics are deliberately low-poly, the particle effects delightfully pixelated. The tone and aesthetic is that of a gloomy metal album cover. If Quake retired and moved out to the country this is the grandchild of that line. 

Your first lesson: MOVE

The game gets right to the point. You are “Dusk Dude” and you wake up on meat hooks in the kind of basement you find people up on meat hooks in. A guttural voice growls “Kill the Intruder” and three burly fellows wearing burlap sacks over their heads come racing out of the dark revving chainsaws. Act fast.

Every element of the design is deliberately, proudly old-school. You can carry every weapon simultaneously and none need manual reloading. Movement is blisteringly fast and mastering the bunny-hop allows for feats of tremendous speed and agility. Enemies ignore allies in their line of fire and are quick to in-fight. Every attack can be dodged, health does not regenerate, and falls from any height do no harm. 

Creepy Klan-esk cultists are the most common opposition.

Dusk is not afraid to be playful either. Most objects can be destroyed, for a brief tactical advantage or the sheer joy of destruction. Ambiguous chunks of meat can be roasted and devoured to restore health and beer bottles quaffed to improve morale. Crates can be stacked into make-shift stairs and bars of soap hurled to gibb enemies on contact. Almost everything can, of course, be flushed down a working toilet.

Spilling Blood

Combat is happy to reward speed, precision, and aggression, though it’s certainly possible to hang back and cheese some encounters if that’s your idea of a good time. You’re faster than most foes and hit-scan attacks are completely absent. Weapon switching is speedy and all are tactically useful, giving a strong incentive to seek out the many secrets and expand your arsenal as soon as possible.

Ludicrous gibs, like God intended.

Weaponry is chunky and powerful, immensely satisfying to use. The double-barreled shotgun sounds and feels appropriately devastating. Most of your selection is workman-like, but a magic crossbow pierces whole conga-lines of enemies and even kills through walls. The Riveter rocket launcher can rip through even the meatiest boss health bar (and its ammo stock) in seconds. 

The campaign is split into three acts, each with a distinctive setting and tone. In true classic shooter fashion each is a self-contained experience (complete with secret level) that starts you with an empty arsenal and builds to a climactic boss fight. While there’s an obvious narrative arc and difficulty curve the acts can be played in any order.

Passion Play

Act One has a strong rural-horror vibe, with its quaint farmhouses and dreary woods. These places were normal, lived-in, once. Before the force below the town warped the minds of the inhabitants to murderous devotion and madness. The setting is reminiscent of Build engine classic Blood, with a hint of the distant banjos of Redneck Rampage. 

Bloody scarecrows with glowing red eyes? Perfectly safe.

Act Two is more industrial, militant in tone. The soldiers and scientists here were trying to understand and harness the power they discovered, not just worship it. The tone and setting owe much to Half-Life. Mundane warehouses and loading-yards give way to labs where the fabric of reality is first teased, then violently torn. Glimpses of a greater weirdness leer through the rips. 

Nice to see the old Black Mesa staff are still getting work.

Act Three is pure Quake, as you leave behind our reality for an eldritch fever dream. Impossible cathedrals stand on endless plains beneath a bloody sky. You tread the frozen surfaces of worlds where the sun itself has been devoured. Concepts like relative size and gravity become arbitrary. The journey becomes less physical and more metaphorical. Are these the memories of the Dusk Dude? The dreams of a sleeping god? And at the end, the voice of an old friend greets you.

Such Sights to Show You

While you pick through plenty of rusty corridors and run down rooms Dusk has a real sense of spectacle, especially once you enter the less grounded later acts. Many levels have a genuine “Wow!” moment. The sky splitting open to reveal the scale of the underground space you inhabit. A walk down an elevated path into an industrial meat grinder of dizzying speed and ferocity. A crimson tornado the size of a skyscraper bearing down. 

Not every in-door space is claustrophobic.

Almost jarringly, Dusk is more than happy to let you treat it as a toy rather than a carefully curated experience. The game is a speed-runners delight, its only demand that you reach the level exit. Whether you do that by carefully combing the level for every secret, item, and enemy or get there in thirty seconds through a cunning combination of bunny hopping, prop manipulation, and rocket jumping is up to you. Even bosses can be neatly side-stepped, with bonus achievements for finishing a level without killing anything. (Or killing everything.)

Feel the Noise

Dusk owes its atmosphere to strong environmental design and sound work. The game is far more action that horror, but there are effective quieter moments amid the carnage. Moving through gloomy autumnal woods to skittering dried leaves like claws down your spine. Creeping through catacombs with a broken flashlight while the gurgling gasps of unseen horrors fill the darkness. Slower, tenser sections never wear out their welcome, but do much to pace game-play. 

The witching hour

The music is just about perfect, plenty of thumping aggressive guitar supporting the grimy industrial synth and crunchy metal. It’s by Andrew Hulshult, a man making a well-earned name for himself in classic shooter soundtracks. Give this sample a listen.

While the campaign is the reason to buy the game, the “Duskworld” multiplayer is a more than welcome addition. As expected from a game taking its cues from Quake, map control and mastery of movement are the keys to victory. If you’re not bunny hopping to build speed at all times you’re doing it wrong. An endless wave based horde mode rounds out the feature list.

Reasons to Play: Excellent old-school true 3D shooter design. Three episodes of escalating gameplay challenge and creative mapping. High speed Quake-style death-matching. 

Reasons to Pass: Allergy to low polygon counts.

 

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Nefarious Review

Not many games let you actually play the villain. Not just choose the selfish or cruel option on a conversation wheel, but step into the boots of the villain of the story. Any thug can bully the weak. Conquering the world with style and vision is not so trivial a task. Nefarious is a welcome entry into a lightly populated field, earning a place alongside such black-hearted classics as Dungeon Keeper and Overlord.

Nefarious is an affectionate parody of the classic hero/villain rivalries of gaming. Playing as Crow, latest in a long line of bird-themed air pirates, your quest is to travel to each of the lands of your world, defeat the resident hero, and kidnap the resident princess. Once you have enough of them to run your royalty powered doomsday device you can finally give the world the conquering it so richly deserves. 

Each level has a clear art direction and theme. Tsarist era Russia and dwarves go together well.

Least the story appear a bit regressive it quickly becomes clear that each princess is a character in their own right, not just a McGuffin. The narrative has a lot of fun with the classic trope, giving it due homage without becoming too predictable or dull. In some cases what Crow insists is a kidnapping looks more like a rescue. Other princess are formidable enough that Crow looks more like the one who needs to be saved. 

Villainy Victorious

Nefarious is also a much needed example of the Kickstarter model of development done right. This is an era when other high profile projects like Mighty No. 9 land with a resounding flop, and John Romero himself can’t get a project funded. Despite just barely hitting their funding goal of a modest 50k the team at Starblade delivered an excellent final product. It’s encouraging to see somebody pulling off a success and delivering what was promised, avoiding cardinal sins like bloat, feature creep, and the abyss of forum drama.

A good villain bestrides worlds like a Titan, planetarium models or otherwise.

Nefarious’ core gameplay is classic 2-D side-scrolling platforming. Crow runs and jumps his way through levels, disposing of enemies and obstacles with a swing of his oversized mechanical fist. More intriguingly Crow can launch bouncing grenades from a limited but automatically regenerating supply. 

Crow takes no damage from his own grenades, but when carefully timed their explosions send him hurtling through the air. Grenade jumping takes a while to get the hang of, but once you manage it makes movement an explosive joy. Speed runners and collectible hunters will find mastering the technique worth their time. 

Not every level is pure platforming.

Nefarious is also un-afraid to shake up its core mechanics. Once kidnapped each princesses changes Crow’s abilities for the duration of your escape. This can be as simple as a floaty jump or as complex as letting your grenades create short lived platforms. A few levels, such as a mellow undersea exploration sequence, change up gameplay entirely. 

Like a Boss

Boss fights with heroes cleverly reverse the traditional formula. Crow, after all, is a videogame boss himself. When he goes toe to toe with a hero it is inevitably from the cockpit of some sort of giant death machine. These fights are short but sweet, quick to learn and tremendous fun. For once you’re the one trying to to crush, smash, or vaporize a smaller, more nimble opponent while protecting your giant obvious weak point.

It's nice to be the one in the giant robot, for once.

The difficulty curve is sharp. While the opening level might lull you into a false sense of security, the platforming skills and reflexes demanded to progress quickly become demanding. The optional levels and alternate ending boss are just straight up Nintendo hard, though this is certainly appropriate given the source material. 

Fortunately you have unlimited lives. The checkpoint system is challenging but not sadistic. Deaths tank your rating for a level, but this is only relevant if you are going for the related achievement. Death also shaves off a modest percentage of your current cash, but this can be recovered simply by reaching that point again. Generally you can hurl Crow into the acid/lava as many times as necessary to memorize a sequence and finally get it right.

Late game levels can get quite demanding.

Much like the early platformers it pays homage to, Nefarious is not a lengthy game. Most first runs are unlikely to take more than 4-6 hours. Multiple endings, optional levels, and a host of challenge based achievements add a lot of value for the dedicated. The tight scope and design keeps the game from wearing out its welcome.

Devils and Details

While voice acting is quite sparse the character portraits that accompany dialog are crisp and full of personality. A few of the in game characters can look a bit crude or even fuzzy by comparison. Hitboxes are also slightly wonky, especially when Crow is lugging a princess over his shoulder. Crow himself has just a touch more momentum than I like in a platformer that asks for this level of precision.

Between mission interludes occur on Crow's command ship, the Sovereign.

These minor polish issues are likely a result of Nefarious’s modest indie budget. To be fair I only really noticed them because I was having so much fun with the game I gave it a second playthrough. More seriously some achievements were not awarding properly, and one strange bug left the Sovereign (Crow’s skyship and mission hub) almost un-populated on re-loading a saved game, interfering with progression and access to some of the optional missions. 

An excellent sound-track and surprisingly strong writing and characterization rounds out the experience. Some tracks are quite catchy (Give the train robbery level music a listen below), and each does a great job setting the atmosphere of the level. Characters are coherent and consistent. Crow himself is amusingly aware of the tropes that govern his world and how to navigate them to his advantage without it coming off as obnoxious.

If you have any appetite for platforming I highly recommend Nefarious. While the reverse boss battles alone likely could have carried the game, Nefarious works hard to deliver compelling gameplay within its tightly controlled scope. The game handles its source material with respect and affection while being unafraid to build its own memorable world and cast. 

Reasons to Play: Clever use of premise and reverse boss battles. Excellent sound track. Indie Kickstarter development done right.

Reasons to Pass: Slight polish issues. Sharp difficulty curve.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.