Sunset review: Flawed and not always fun, but also smart, daring, and worth playing
Fri, 06/12/2015 - 09:58
Sunset is the sort of game we need more of.
But that doesn’t mean it’s flawlessly designed. Or even that you’re going to have much fun playing some of the time.
Similar to 2013’s excellent Gone Home, it’s a first-person exploration game. You’re not going to shoot people or solve puzzles. Instead, player agency is focused on moving around, interacting with objects, and triggering events that spur on a gradually unfolding story.
That story concerns an African American woman born and raised in Baltimore named Angela Burnes. She’s travelled to – and, thanks to the local regime, is now stuck in – the fictional South American country of Anchuria circa 1972. Trained as an engineer, she finds herself working as housekeeper to a mysterious, wealthy, well-connected man named Gabriel Ortega. Angela looks after his lavish downtown penthouse as civil war breaks out and is openly waged in the streets below.
Tale of TalesIt’s a curious concept for a game.
Angela arrives at the apartment at five o’clock each day, the sun already well into its descent. It’s fully set by the time she leaves, an hour later. There’s usually a list of things that Gabriel needs done during those 60 minutes posted to the elevator wall. She may need to iron, wash the windows, clean up a mess from the night before, or drain the pool.
Each task takes just a single click, but you’ll need to hunt down its location in the suite before you can click it. Plus, tasks consume time. The quicker you get them done, the more time Angela has to curl up in a comfy chair and write in her diary, or wander around looking for other stuff to do – like maybe jot a quick response to one of Gabriel’s notes, gradually building their relationship the only way she can (he hired Angela without meeting her, and is never home when she’s there).
And so each day goes over the course of nearly a year. The challenge faced by developer Tale of Tales is in keeping this repetition interesting over the course of the game’s five or six hour duration.
They only partially succeed.
Tale of TalesThe apartment itself is dynamic, subtly sophisticated, and beautiful. It starts off completely empty – Many of Angela’s early tasks involve setting up furniture and unpacking boxes – and slowly evolves into a lived-in space filled with beautiful retro modernist furniture (imagine the space station chairs in 2001: A Space Odyssey) and technology fully deserving of our interest and examination. This evolving space is the unsung star of the game.
Angela, on the other hand, feels erratic and muddled by comparison. Her monologues and diary entries cover interesting subjects; the country’s upheaval, her brother’s rebellious nature, her thoughts on growing up black in Western society, her emergent fascination with her beguiling, charming employer. But while these thoughts and themes are provoking on their own, they never quite coalesce into a clever whole. She simply pours out her feelings, often disconnected and without resolution, and we listen.
And she does so a very non-colloquial, almost academic way, relentlessly peppering her speech and journal entries with terms and metaphors that feel unnatural and forced. It made me feel like I was listening to a nervous grad student lecturing on Nietschze and Bacchus. It’s hard to listen to and at times can even be difficult to parse.
What’s more, Angela would often start off on new and sometimes alarming topics without introduction or explanation, making me feel as though I’d missed something – perhaps a radio broadcast on the stereo, a note from Gabriel, or a newspaper headline. I felt as though I was constantly catching up, that I wasn’t getting the full story. I’m still not sure if I missed things or if the narrative was purposefully designed to be disconcerting.
The biggest problem, though, is simply the routine of showing up, doing chores, and writing a diary entry day after day. After my 30th or 40th trip to the penthouse it really started to drag. This feels like a tale that could have been told more effectively – and more engagingly – in two or three hours rather than five or six.
Tale of TalesBut I said at the start that Sunset is the kind of game that we need more of, and I meant it.
Despite its issues, it has worthwhile ideas that it wants to communicate. Stories about African American women are rarely told in video games, and I’m not aware of any that attempt to dive so deeply into their heroine’s mind. And in exploring a small but influential country’s civilian uprising the writers examine everything from the role of art and culture (or lack thereof) in authoritarian regimes to ’70s-era American foreign policy – which will seem all to familiar to modern audiences.
More than that, Sunset is that rare game endeavours to challenge players to be entertained by something other than action. It wants us to engage a higher level of our minds, the part reigned by curiosity, empathy, and analytical thought. It doesn’t always completely succeed, but it has several emotionally powerful moments – like Angela learning of her brother’s arrest, or finally gleaning the meaning of Gabriel’s obsession with art – that work wonderfully and will stay with you in ways most other sorts of games simply don’t.
I wanted to like Sunset more than I did, but I’m still happy to have played. And I hope more game makers are brave enough to venture similar undertakings. Because the only thing better than a good story is a good story that’s interactive.
