7.7 KiB
| title | date | score | game_release_year | howlongtobeat_id | howlongtobeat_hrs | game_name | game_developer | game_genre | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DUSK: Something Went Wrong, Better Kill Everything | 2023-10-31T11:39:00+01:00 | 5 | 2018 | 50829 | 7.4 | DUSK | David Szymanski | FPS |
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Something Went Wrong: Better Kill Everything it says on the back of the dark red box that's decorated with looming fiend-like skeletons called Wendigos guarding a dangerous looking cathedral. What a promising start! Better kill everything indeed: DUSK is a retro-inspired shooter where fluid constant movement is a requirement to survive the swarms of horrifying enemies, just like the nineties shooters you know and love. DUSK doesn't beat around the bush: booting it up, you're greeted with a fake DOS prompt where assets are being loaded in just like you'd load Duke, DOOM, or Quake. Designer David Szymanski openly states that DUSK is heavily influenced by said games.
The danger of riding off the retro vibe is always whether or not newcomers without shooter experience will love it. The answer here is without a doubt a resounding yes. DUSK instantly became one of my favorite, if not thé favorite, shooters I've played in the last decade---retro or otherwise. It's astonishing that such a small development team can effectively blow so-called AAA games out of the water. This makes me incredibly optimistic as small teams keep on proving that the future of video gaming is bright.
DUSK's environmental storytelling is both horrifying and masterful. You'll find creepy messages written in blood on walls throughout the campaign, unsettling paintings and hunks of flesh rotting in corners, and yourself hung on a meathook that both starts and ends the game. The three episodes are classically divided into ten levels (plus one secret) each, but contrary to DUSK's progenitors, the game manages to neatly intertwine one level with the next, giving the player the increasingly worrying feeling that indeed something went very very wrong as you make your way towards the heart of... something that's simply indescribable.
Episode 1 starts out "normal" enough with farmlands reminiscent of Redneck Rampage, but once you make your way through the abandoned city of DUSK, you find yourself in an industrial zone inspired by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that contains far too many meat grinders. Then, in episode 3, everything is cranked up, where the game's levels start messing with your head. The level design is---besides E3M9, you'll figure out what I mean once you get there---simply flawless. By carefully studying DOOM and Quake, Szymanski took more than one cue from John Romero, and it shows. The architecture is recognizable, the backtracking is painless, the obligatory three keys are still fun to collect, and each level is stuffed with secrets that can even help you progress without needing to kill anyone, although I'm not sure why you'd want to do that.
Contrary to Quake where the design is excellent but the continuity is a mess, I just can't get enough of the levels in DUSK. But that's not everything that makes the game so awesome: the satisfying weapon design and the fairly large enemy variety are also top notch. How about picking up two handguns or shotguns? Oh yes, the super shotgun is present and feels great to put to use. At a certain point in the game, after having lost it for some time, picking it up again shows the message "welcome, old friend", and that's exactly how it felt.
Although there's enough weapon variety, some of them feel a bit clunky to use, such as the mortar, and the riveter, a more unique looking gun, in practice is just a rocket launcher. The weapons do not cross conventionalism like in Build Engine games such as Blood or Shadow Warrior. I didn't mind. I did feel the need to frequently switch to a different gun depending on the enemies the game throws at me, which is another good thing. Sometimes, the game even pushes the player to do so, as certain ammo or weapon types are strategically placed as big hints.
New enemy types are also gradually introduced: every episode has its own unique enemies but some do reappear in the last few levels. Episode 1 has scarecrows that jump to life and shoot at you with shotguns, episode 2 has possessed militants that constantly yell flank him! or enemy spotted!, and episode 3... *shudders* you don't want to know. The difficulty doesn't change the frequency of enemies but the speed at which their projectiles come flying towards you. None of the bad guys are cheap hit scanners: if you master bunny-hopping, you can avoid even the fastest rifle blast, and if you keep up your morale, you can deflect certain projectiles with your sickles---a very fitting melee weapon, by the way.
The game isn't very long and depends on your skill level: it took me a bit less than ten hours to complete the campaign, which is more than the experienced FPS player will need, and I didn't even find half of all the secrets. On top of that, the Switch version comes with an "endless" mode, where waves and waves upon enemies want you dead, if that is your kind of thing. It's a fun way to keep you busy, but I'd rather revisit the excellent levels to hunt for more secrets.
Speaking of the Switch version: the port is excellent! It almost felt like a miracle happened, since most shooter ports are shoddy at best. DUSK for Switch runs flawlessly at 60 frames per second, has gyro aiming, and comes with a bunch of additional support and graphic options. The only thing I didn't like was the placement of the crouch button: you have to press the left analog stick. In tense fights, I regularly accidentally crouch. If you want to build up speed to avoid bullets, that's a bad thing. I couldn't find a way to remap the controls (and it took me 10 minutes to figure out pressing was crouching: the help infographic was very unclear).
For me, the quality of the level design yet again confirms that procedurally generated levels like in Nightmare Reaper simply aren't that much fun, let alone revisit. Both DUSK and Ion Fury, new games inspired by old ones, showcase excellent level design and build upon their ancestors. They both try to do their own thing, and Ion Fury actually runs on Duke's engine while DUSK emulates the look & feel using the modern Unity engine, so they're hard to compare, but in terms of storytelling and coherent feel, DUSK wins hands down.
We haven't even talked about the superb sound design of the game that is another major contributing factor to the overall creepiness of the world in and below DUSK. The musical score is taken care of by Andrew Hulshult who also was responsible for Nightmare Reaper's banging metal track, only this time, the more ambient tonal range is wider and the metal suddenly appears and vanishes as enemies do. The soundtrack is not something I'd frequently listen to outside of the game, but one that makes the disturbing image and jump-scares even more disturbing.
In case it still isn't clear: DUSK is an amazing game. Anyone who grew up playing nineties shooters owes it to themselves to play this game---ideally around the Halloween season. Good luck. You'll need it.
