On DUSK

I was born in the early 1990s, a decade in PC gaming which was the formative, some might say golden age for one mighty genre: the first-person shooter. As well as essential, landmark titles like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Half-Life, we had Wolfenstein, Blake Stone, Unreal, Rise of the Triad, Shadow Warrior, Heretic and Blood (a personal favourite). While the FPS genre is far from dead, as internet connections improved and the gaming industry grew like Tetsuo Shima into a corpulent, disgusting colossus of greed, it transformed dramatically, with the Halo and Call of Duty franchises pushing gaming into a lucrative new chapter of online multiplayer, where international Fortnite tournaments turn kids into millionaires.

Having the complicated relationship with social interaction that I do, the move in the zeitgeist from single-player towards multiplayer was extremely unwelcome. Playing by yourself or playing with others is often what divides the medium between art and sport, and while there is of course nothing wrong with sport, I’ve always been more of a fan of what feelings games can provide beyond the thrill of mere challenge. What I loved about those games of the 90s was the incredible settings and atmospheres that they created; often frightening, like Doom’s flickering corridors, or at least incredibly moody, like Duke 3D’s seedy urban pastiches. But I also liked the absurdity of the action in those games – tearing around at 100mph blasting rockets at monstrous foes as they explode into giblets by the dozens. They were often a perfect blend of psychotic fun and clever craftsmanship.

But though it might sound like I’ve been lamenting the changing of the seasons in the evolution of first-person shooters, we also happen to be living in an age where nostalgia still holds tremendous cultural power, and the age of the frantic, bloodthirsty shooter is having a bit of a renaissance. Bethesda’s Doom has been rebooted into a successful rework of its run-and-gun mechanics, Blood has been officially re-released for modern PCs, and just recently Ion Storm, formerly Ion Maiden, is the first game to use Duke Nukem’s still-excellent Build engine in twenty years. One game in particular, though, proved to be even better than I expected from a nostalgia-tickling tribute to the shooters of yore. New Blood Interactive’s Dusk could easily have been a simple retread of the same old concepts – running, shooting, red keys, blue keys, etc. But having only just finally gotten around to playing and finishing it, it was a delight to realise that Dusk is an exceptionally well-made, effective and memorable game in its own right.

The game follows the old familiar format of the Doom era of gaming – three episodes, each with a dozen or so levels with the objective of getting from the beginning to the end. Despite this point-A-to-point-B format, the levels aren’t exactly linear, folding over themselves through shortcuts and passages and their progression being structured via having to find coloured keys that correspond to coloured doors. With its concept being the most basic of basics, this leaves a lot of possibilities that can be hung on this basic skeleton, and the levels have a lot of variety in how they transpire. As you explore around, looking for keys, items, and of course secret places, the rush of the gun battles is supported by the wonder and curiosity of discovery that all exploration-based games seek to satisfy.

And that’s another factor common to these games that has been somewhat lost to time: level design. Since the proliferation of open worlds as the default template for most modern games, when was the last time anyone talked about level design, or even the concept of levels in general? With the level-by-level structure, each segment of the game becomes an insular creation following the vision of its (often) singular designer. Each level has its own character or conceit that makes it particularly memorable, whether it’s the tentative ‘realism’ of the farms and factories, or the dark and dingy castles and labyrinths, or the levels where space and logic are warped like an Escher sketch, there is so much careful thought put into the environments you go blasting through that you’re compelled to carry on if only to see what happens next. I was so entertained to see what new challenge awaited behind each door, or what abomination lay at the bottom of every pit I was nervous of dropping into, or in the traps, surprises, and insane boss fights that kept me on my toes whenever they burst into motion. As the game carries forward into the final episode, its creativity soars and the last stretch has such a wonderful succession of twists and turns that take it above and beyond its simple retro-shooter conceit.

The soundtrack, by the maestro Andrew Hulshult, helps a lot in cementing the tone. Unlike in the olden days when there was often one track per level, the music in Dusk is extremely dynamic, lulling into tense synth pieces for the ‘quieter’ moments and erupting into industrial, distortion-soaked mayhem whenever a particularly dense battleground has been entered. In fact, playing this game with headphones is a must as the sound design as a whole is completely perfect, both in the mechanical sense, where you rely on the sounds of your enemies to judge their distance, actions, and mortality, and in the purely aesthetic sense, where the sounds of an incoming creature in a particularly dim area can sometimes reach pant-shittening levels of tension. One of my favourite monster designs is the wendigo, a fast, antlered demon thing that aside from its pants and grunts is completely invisible until the moment you shoot it and it appears with a sudden musical sting, providing many an ‘oh-shit’ moment from its introduction onward.

There’s so much to love about the creativity employed in the game, taking inspiration from all the aforementioned 90s classics and fusing the best bits into its DNA. There’s even a powerup that replicates the entire concept of 2016’s Superhot, slowing time to bullet-dodging pace where the enemies only move when you move. I also like the Crystals of Madness, glowing rocks that you smash on the ground which cause the enemies to start attacking each other, strategic in a lot of ways but mainly just a shitload of fun. There’s also a strange sense of humour throughout, with every level providing a piece of soap somewhere on the map that can be thrown to kill any enemy in one hit, including bosses. And while references to old titles are naturally abound, the game doesn’t wallow so much in the past that it can’t be enjoyed by someone who hasn’t played the plethora of titles that this game bites off of, which is always welcome in a nostalgia-fuelled project such as this one.

But the thing I liked most about Dusk is probably its application of one of my favourite tools of the artistic trade – horror. I was surprised that Dusk turned out to be one of the scariest new games I’ve played in a long time. Much has been written on the classic survival horror games and the modern run-and-hide games such as Amnesia that much of their horror comes from the player’s comparative weakness, such as how in Silent Hill 2 the player is slow and inaccurate, fighting with planks, pipes and guns with limited ammo. What’s so interesting about Dusk is how it somehow brings you a riveting power fantasy, slaughtering foes with an absurd amount of speed and ferocity, yet manages to retain intense moments of serious fear. Through a combination of the ghastly sounds, freakish low-poly enemy design, and meticulous level curation that remains one step ahead of your expectations, Dusk is as much a horror game as it is a jet-fuelled murder marathon, with some sections in the later levels leaving me wincing with apprehension in a way usually reserved for overtly ‘scary’ titles.

I love Dusk as a faithful reimagining of some of my favourite games from my childhood, but even if you’ve never taken a ride on that train, if you have any interest in either high-octane action or tenebrous atmosphere I highly recommend that you play it. Coming in at maybe nine or ten hours from start to finish (for me, at least), Dusk comes from a tradition of sharp, focused gaming experiences where pure, visceral fun is its top priority. Simple yet vivid, puerile yet frightening, mindless yet particularly clever, it brings me immeasurable joy to see devoted fans of a specific period look back to the gaming elements that have stayed with us for decades and bring them into the modern age with an originally unoriginal work that has a personality all of its own.