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.

On 'Low' by David Bowie

Before David Bowie moved to Berlin, he was a mess. He’d shrunk into paranoid seclusion, and was famously reported to have for a time subsisted only on milk, red peppers, and cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine. The Thin White Duke, who openly threw darts in lovers’ eyes, was a dark persona which Bowie ran with during the time of his album Station to Station, getting in hot water for interviews in which he made uncomfortable remarks about Adolf Hitler and the degradation of society. It was ‘performance art’, sure; Bowie was playing the role of this sinister, drug-addled character, but it was also true that at this point in his life, Bowie was himself consumed by druglust while seeming to hold an unhealthily loose grip on the real world. He would later admit to hardly remembering entire years during which his cocaine abuse was particularly extreme.

Moving to Berlin, Bowie wanted a fresh start. He needed to get away from the coke-crusted web in which he was ensnared in Los Angeles, but he also needed to find a way to deal with possessing an alienated soul. Bowie considered one of the perks of living in West Berlin to be a newfound sense of anonymity – the locals didn’t bother him as much as he was used to, and he found he could retreat from the psychedelic excess that his superstardom had brought him, and have a chance to recuperate, and to come to terms with himself. The work that eventually arose from this fresh, undoubtedly life-saving, new chapter in his life was the 1977 album Low, and it’s my favourite of all his many, many, many masterpieces. Rather than speaking from fantastical detachment, as with his time living as the Thin White Duke, this feels more like an album where Bowie expresses himself personally about the miseries he was facing, both with glamorous veneer, and from vulnerable depths of emotion.

You could, if you wanted to, see this album as a bridge of sorts between the smokey guitar-rock of the 70s and the dawning electronic adventure of the 80s and beyond. With the inclusion of Brian Eno to the creative roster, and with Bowie drawing influence from the characteristically chic Berlin underground, the album’s sound is datedly futuristic. Its synth leads sound individually perfect in complementing whichever track they’re on, such as the scally horn-blasts on ‘Breaking Glass’, adding disruption to a song about destruction, or the warm rainbow-falls of ‘Sound and Vision’, or the popcorn texture brought to ‘What in the World’. They give these tracks a flair so as to distinguish these naturally excellent compositions as belonging entirely to Low. On the latter half of the album, of course, the synth moves from a strong supporting role to the dominant ideology, and Eno’s luscious sounds build worlds outside the expected Bowie brand of verse-chorus-verse art-rock.

Indeed, this is an album of two very distinct halves, so let’s talk about the first half, the accessible one with all the hits, the one that sounds like a David Bowie album. Roaring in like a stereophonic train, we open with ‘Speed of Life’, an instrumental, swaggering figment of the sound of the 1970s, acting as the album’s overture, something drunken and braggish, still flagrantly hedonistic, but every now and then pausing in a lull of hesitation, symptomatic of the album’s nervous mentality. This duality of more conventional rock assertiveness with a gaping vulnerability carries on throughout the rest of the first half. ‘Breaking Glass’, again a song with a brusque confidence in its stomping central rhythm, gives way to a faltering moment where the confidence evaporates and the song sounds suddenly unsure of itself, Bowie’s singing turning from brash to simpering. The lyrics are a mix of admissions of failure and begging for affection, with Bowie sounding maybe a little pathetic, or at the very least, desperate.

And this desperation continues, with ‘What in the World’ talking of a downtrodden girl, a depressed creature trapped in hermitage, with Bowie on the sidelines feeling powerless, ‘talking through the gloom’ of his maybe not-entirely-selfless desire. The brevity of these songs magnifies how well-carved they sound, begging for repeat listens, feeling ever-complete but still somehow much too short. I guess there was plenty of space for ponderousness on the other side of the record. But that’s for later. Let’s talk about ‘Sound and Vision’, one of the album’s especially beloved pieces, sporting doo-dooing backing singers, sax, synth, jovial bass work and bright, sighing guitar strums. One of my favourite things in the world is happy-sounding music with miserable subject matter, and I think it’d be tough to find a better example than ‘Sound and Vision’, gorgeously spirited in its instrumental as meanwhile Bowie switches between theatrical vibrato and a monotonous, drab apathy, as he sings of being sunk in a mire of sadness, titularly Low, hoping for sudden inspiration to pull him back into the world of the living.

‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ is a spooky one, dreamy and flange-laden, a song about I think a repeating dream Bowie had of crashing his car, the lyrics describing him literally driving round in circles, comically still checking for oncoming cars and being in the middle of what sounds like a complete mental breakdown. Bowie’s voice is weak with lamentation, and he sounds in no better mood on ‘Be My Wife’, the ragtime-soul screamer that’s a personal favourite of mine. ‘I’ve lived all over the world. I’ve left every place.’ This is Bowie at his most disillusioned-sounding, at least thus far in his career, about the towering spectacle of fame, knowing how he lives a life of luxury and yet is lost with his romantic relationships. It’s got that end-credits dramatic energy that I adore completely, loud and soaring and retrospective. But the real closer of Side A is ‘New Career in a New Town’, another instrumental, with a foggy nostalgic harmonica sailing over a gleeful skip of synth and piano, blowing with the wind and sounding out with a woolly exhaustion, off into the distance in some optimistic direction.

And then – there’s a shift, firm and sudden as the pull of a handbrake. At the break of the ominous hum, we enter Low’s strange, polarising second phase. Until now, Bowie’s expressions of personal alienation have come garbed in catchy, accessible verve. Sad lyrics, fun music. With the Side B opener, ‘Warszawa’, all irony is jettisoned and a sincere, sometimes otherworldly composition emerges from black clouds. Mournful, spiralling, soaring synthesisers tell a tale of woe, completely instrumental unless you count Bowie’s meaningless hums and cries, eerily religious. The entire song sounds like a red sun rising over a dejected landscape. This is the moment the album often loses people, those who came for earthly pleasures of ‘Sound and Vision’, and reading a few contemporary reviews I saw that critics of the time were befuddled by this extreme change of pace, but when considering the album’s spinal conceit, the feelings Bowie wishes to explore on this album, it makes a lot of creative sense, and this sorrowful opener, along with its three successors, bring something wordless and primal to the experience, lending something beyond the rock parameters Bowie is more than comfortable in.

‘Art Decade’ is pensive, atmospheric, a little space-age, signalling maybe a sense of alienation, certainly a feeling of weightlessness, being anchorless, floating above weird, milky sounds and organic calls beyond comprehension. Inherently, it’s hard to get a handle on, and it’s a slow-burner of sorts, with what I’d call a planetarium aesthetic. Marimba clunks and stylophonic synths begin ‘Weeping Wall’, a dreamy blend of wood and steel that gets especially trippy when phrases of ‘Scarborough Fair’ creep into the equation, and the weightlessness started in ‘Art Decade’ rises further from any recognisable surface. If my read of these songs as a continuation of the first half’s concept is valid, this might instil images of a Bowie completely adrift from the world, maybe still beneath the covers as his disappointed mind flutters elsewhere.

Finally it’s ‘Subterraneans’, a dejected elegy of sorts, hissing synths acting as string sections before Bowie’s monastic hums enter the frame and the sound becomes a kind of hymn, spacious and grand, but with that essential humility which accompanies prayer. A little midnight saxophone arrives, along with more unintelligible but purposeful chanting, rising and falling, sounding as if directed towards the sky. And then it ends, rather abruptly, and I turn back to the beginning and listen to the whole thing again. To me, Low has it all – maudlin bangers, strong wailers, surreal loomers – and its cohesive theme, history and attitude are all striking. It’s always such a pleasure to hear a sorrowful album that’s so instantly gripping, in the way that only Bowie (plus Visconti, plus Eno) could make possible. And though Side A’s all-night party might suck you in, it’s the elusive magic comedown of Side B that returns me, as if every time I hear it I’m a different person than forty minutes ago.