I've written many pieces on video games that stand the test of time, and now it is the moment to speak on a modern classic that sheds the mistakes of the present industry to build a new way forward. Today, we're going to dive into 2018's Dusk, made by developer David Szymanski, composed by Andrew Hulshult, and produced by New Blood Interactive. Yes, it's recent, which should tell you how good it is if I'm talking about it like this.
That's right, instead of a game over 20 years old, we are going to discuss one made not even released half a decade ago, though it did take some time to get off the ground. You might be asking why exactly I chose to speak on a video game released in 2018. This is because after a recent playthrough I feel it has reached that elusive classic status and deserves to be spoken about. Though you might not quite understand why that is if you only look on the surface and see just a horror game of shooter.
In order to talk about Dusk, we're going to have to talk about the one man behind its original origins and design, David Szymanski. Back in the 2000s, Mr. Szymanski had lower end hardware (like a lot of us did at the time) which led him to mainly playing older games on his PC, like DOOM instead of the growing AAA trend of the time period. By the time he started work on Dusk in 2015, the sorts of games he played then were not in vogue anymore. The FPS genre at this point had fallen far from the glory days of the '90s and had been long replaced by movie games of the sort mentioned in the post I wrote specifically on the genre. Read that one if you want more back story on the time period. It is paramount to understanding why this game is the way it is, and why it was necessary to be made.
By the 2010s, the FPS had basically been gutted of anything that made it what it once was and became little more than cookie-cutter 5 hour movie cutscenes and ADD-addled multiplayer sessions and DLC. It looked like the Golden Age was long gone and never coming back. AAA had long since hollowed the genre out.
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| This list only contains 50 classics. There are many more. |
Around the time the first HD generation came around in 2005, the genre had basically become cinematic and narrative focused, less on adventure and wonder or centering on the player's gameplay experience above all else. You can even see the shift happen very slowly in the above chart towards narratives coming before design. By 2005, nothing above the above chart remained any longer. Much like every other medium and genre, the FPS had been absolutely subverted from its original intent. And it didn't look like it would be ever be coming back.
This was the era when retro gaming first really began coming into vogue. It had always existed before, but it was a lot more prevalent, game stores even beginning to raise prices for classics that could have been bought for less than a Happy Meal now costing as much as a lavish steak dinner. With hindsight, we can now see why that was.
So around 2015 when Dusk began development, no one had any idea what it would actually be. I'm sure many believed it would be another gimmicky one hour walking sim or something like throwaway experience. Those sorts of products were very popular for a time in the '10s, and they gave indie games a label for a long time as being little more than jokes. I have no idea what Mr. Szymanski thought would be the reception of his project when he began, but I doubt he thought there was much of a scene for it at the time when the genre was heading in the opposite direction.
It wasn't until DOOM (2016) came out the year after he began development that it proved that there was an audience for more than the movie-like "experience" the genre was being dumbed down into. The success of this one game (itself scrapped from a hokey project that was little more than a generic Call of Duty with demons) sparked a resurgence and interest in the genre of the kind AAA has still ignored to this day, but smaller middle market and indie developers have jumped on to their benefit. The scene sort of sprang up overnight as gamers realized they were finally getting what they wanted again. The long winter was over.
In essence, games like Dusk coming around in the wake of DOOM (2016) resurrected the genre. However, Dusk is the game that topped all of them. Yes, it even topped id Software's franchise revival itself. How did this one game do that? Well, we will get into it right now. This is how Dusk became a modern classic.
First, we shall began with the launch trailer at its release in 2018. A project mainly be one man (with a composer and producer helping out), Dusk was quite an impressive release, even for the time it came out. You didn't get games like this in 2018:
For those who can't tell, what makes Dusk so good is that is unapologetically old school in every single facet of its design and the intent behind it. While the popularity boom DOOM (2016) gave to the genre definitely help stoke a desire for different sorts of FPS beyond cinematic, it was Dusk that brought it in for a touchdown. One can now find scores of new classic FPS designed games to the point that the AAA string has not only been dwarfed, but is more or less dead now. The genre is back in the hands of those who love it.
Dusk succeeds for three main reasons. These three include the rule of cool, atmosphere and wonder, and pure craft. The aspects make the classics hold up to this day, and it is what Dusk traffics in heavily to its own benefit.
The first thing to mention is the rule of cool. Everything in this game is "cool" before being "realistic" which is how all video games were meant to be and where they started from. Part of the appeal of playing a game is that you can experience things you can't easily do in real life and the interactivity gives you a level of immersion in it. This is the main appeal of playing one. Dusk is very focused on making the player feel cool at every opportunity.
The guns not only offer good feel when being shot, but they all offer varied functions for different situations. Everyone will have a favorite, but not one will you be unhappy to go without (aside from the default sickles, which can be upgraded to a very powerful sword if you look hard enough) and even feature a spin button instead of a reload, because reloading would slow the action down and spinning weapons looks cool.
The Y axis also isn't limited, and bunny hopping exists, which means you basically fly around and flip across the screen with enough speed, and do almost anything you want. If you search hard enough you can even find a hidden bar of soap in every level that can one-hit kill everything, including bosses. Not to mention you can eat food (or cook meat on fire), or drink beer to gain some morale. Go easy on the booze, though. You don't want to get inebriated! Whatever is cool comes first, and it makes the experience that much more involved.
You are supposed to feel powerful while also feeling like one slip up will lead you to a messy, violent death. Be cool, or be dead! This has always been the staple of the classic First Person Shooter. Eventually you become the cool main character on the box by playing well. In essence, this is the secret of its immersion and why it has endured over time.
What also helps is the fact that the lower-poly environment and horror atmosphere lends itself to the player filling in the gaps in the visual design themselves. The more detailed game graphics have gotten, the less they manage to give off the weird uncanny valley effect old horror games could give and the more the need to rely on jump scares to keep you on your toes. In a game like Dusk, every location feels like a real place you might meet in life, but slightly off. You want to know more about this place. It encourages exploration for secrets and not only for that but just to see what weirdness lies behind every corner.
You see, there is a story in Dusk, but it works because it is entirely in the background of your goal from getting from point A to B. You are a treasure hunter just known as the "Dusk Dude" (a wink to "Doomguy" from DOOM) searching through the cult-ridden town of Dusk and into its depths where things are a lot worse than you initially thought they were on the surface. By the end of the game, up is down, down is up, and where you'll end up is far worse than what you might have thought. This slow descent into insanity is perfectly maintained throughout.
The mystique is maintained mainly by the fact that the only voiceover is from some mysterious entity taunting you the closer you get to it. The common human enemies only repeat odd mantras and insults when they spot you, if they are even human to begin with that is. The jury is still out on that one. The music maintains creepy ambience with spikes of hard rock of the sort we haven't seen since the original Quake back in the mid-90s. You are always on edge, leaning around that next corner and hoping that thing you heard isn't more than a crazed leatherneck with a chainsaw.
In essence, walking into Dusk is walking into horror, and you need to be tough enough to get through it and reach the literal light at the end of the tunnel. All you have are your guns, treasures (which give morale, this game's version of armor), and health packs, along with Hallowed Health in the form of shining holy crosses that give you a huge boost in vitality. All of that sets a tone that carries through the 33 levels ahead of you.
Other than that, you're on your own.
A good review of the final product
What also helps with Dusk is how balanced the entire experience is. Since they released it old school, the game was put out like the ancient shareware episodes once were. You first get one episode which is ten levels (and a secret one!) which on its own gives a complete and satisfying experience.
This also allowed the developer to focus on polishing and balancing pieces of the game and allowing it to ramp up in complexity and difficulty as it goes along without having to focus on one giant 33 level project at once. Each episode, as a result, is its own little project that ramps up and adds to the whole at the same time. The episodic format was where this genre started, and what gave it so much of its character, and it is nice to see that it has returned to the genre again. Dusk, it should be mentioned, is one of many newer FPSes that get this right.
This is a surprisingly tight game, design-wise. Every piece works to bolster the whole experience and make it sing.
The entire design is the crown jewel here because it gives plenty of elbow room (and priority) to the rule of cool (immersion) and the atmosphere (wonder) before anything else, and then puts full use of the craft to buoy those things above everything else. The craft is as good as it is because it knows what matters the most, but doesn't skimp on lesser things either.
The level design in Dusk is great, but it is always done in a way to emphasize the player's involvement in the environment first. You want to be here, and not only do you want to be here, you want to conquer these evil horrors and stomp them into the dirt. The game knows this and will give you every reason to stick around doing what you want to do.
Every one of these 33 levels are all immaculately designed, and they do get more complex as they go, but they are never boring. I can't think of a single level that annoys more than challenges or one that stands out from the pack as inferior at the same time. Never do you feel like you've been put in an unfair spot and want to give up because of annoying design choices. Despite the intense speed, the threat of horrors around every bend, and the daunting path ahead, you always want another go at conquering this madness. This is the mark of a well designed game. The other more recent game I remember nailing this was Cuphead. Different genre, same idea.
Lastly, I should mention the real reason I'm talking about Dusk here instead of any other old school classic FPS like those in the above list from the Golden Age. That is because this was a deliberate and conscious decision not to follow a trend, but to make a piece of art based on what worked before. I am using the proper definition of art as a craft made to a standard, and this is exactly what Dusk is. It realizes why the FPS genre became big in the first place, and decided to make a stamp on the entire scene. Everything I'm talking about here also applies to what makes those classics stand the test of time. Dusk merely reminds you that it's not a fluke.
It can still be done today!
A more in-depth look at what makes Dusk good, through gameplay!
But I'm not going through this game piecemeal. That would be selling it short. Art succeeds because of the whole the pieces strive to reach.
One can pick apart and deconstruct pieces of why something works, but explaining the whole is another thing entirely. There are certain things you can never quite adequately explain why they work so well even though you know deep in your bones that they do. I could explain why I like a song, but I could never tell you why I think this song specifically does what it does better than other songs with the same instrumentation or a similar composition style or genre. This is because the most important part of any piece of art is the whole that reaches for something higher than the base, more than formulaic hackwork or expectations.
As an example, there are plenty of songs that share similar elements to the song "Unsatisfied" by the Replacements, but none of them hit as well as it does. I couldn't explain why when the elements to it are not original, but they come together to make a final product that transcends the bits and bobs that make it work. This is the same with Dusk and its place in its own medium and genre. Despite its roots as a "throwback" or whatever gimmicky moniker you want to give it to explain away why it works, the game becomes its own thing. It is simply Dusk, and nothing else is quite like it. This is why you are reading about it right here, right now.
There have been other really great shooters coming out of the middle market and indie space that I could talk about (Ion Fury and Amid Evil are particularly strong and well worth your time), but I think it was Dusk that really hit that perfect storm of everything the genre once was and needed to be again for it to thrive again. It is the best of the past and the present, pointing towards a better tomorrow. This is what makes it one of the best video games ever made.
I've never let it be a secret that the FPS is one of my favorites genres (it's part of the trinity with platformers and beat 'em ups), but to me it takes a special dose of imagination and wonder to really nail what made a genre's Golden Age work while also building on it and showing new ways forward from the dead ends it was left in by poor caretakers. But Dusk does this, and does it perfectly. Still does, because I still get cravings to replay it every now and then for the entire experience. That is the mark of a classic and one that justifies the medium itself.
That might sound hyperbolic, but we are talking about art and entertainment. This is what it is supposed to do. This is why we're all here in the first place, isn't it?
So give Dusk ago, if you still haven't. Since Steam will almost certainly have it on sale soon enough, you can go get it there, or find a DRM-free version on GOG. Either way (or even on your Switch, if you want, because it's also there!) it's quite an experience. This is probably, as the above video says, the Game of the Year for 2018, but I'm willing to say it's Game of the Decade for the entirety of the 2010s. It is the perfect example of why we love this medium to begin with.
And that is all the reason you need to play one of the best video games ever made. They rarely get better than Dusk.
One of the earliest trailers!
I need to play this.
ReplyDeleteIt is worth it!
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