Dusk Review – Getting Old Schooled

Big-budget, triple-A experiences have never been better, but modern games have no shortage of long cutscenes and hand-holding tutorial sequences. In contrast, Dusk is a nostalgia trip that strips away modern expectations and delivers distilled FPS thrills. Dusk doesn't mess around with leveling mechanics or a sprawling narrative; it hands you a shotgun and lets you loose on a demon army. This simplicity is Dusk’s greatest strength, because this no-frills shooter is an excellent crash course in basic game design.

Dusk doesn't hide its homage to '90s corridor shooters like Doom and Quake. These straightforward, boxy levels are relatively short and filled with colored keycards and hidden monster closets. But, given its graphical constraints, Dusk’s environments are incredibly well-realized. Animated scarecrows stumble out of cornfields while rundown barns teem with hooded cultists and demonic goats. Each level features its own twist on folk horror, seemingly inspired by films like The Wicker Man and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. With sparing detail, Dusk establishes an ominous tone that completely sucked me in from level one.

One of the biggest reasons to explore every nook and cranny of Dusk’s short levels is to gain access to powerful weapons. Early on, I fell in love with dual-wielding shotguns, but another favorite go-to became the rivet gun, which fires off super-heated construction rivets that explode like miniature missiles. Unlike many classic FPS games, I constantly rotated through Dusk’s arsenal thanks to each weapon’s specialization. For example, the hunting rifle is a long-range tool that packs an incredible punch, while the crossbow fires magical green arrows that rip through multiple enemies and even fire through walls. Each weapon is incredibly satisfying, and thanks to an ample supply of ammo scattered on the ground, my magazines rarely ran dry.

 

Mastering Dusk’s arsenal is important, because the action is frantic. Every firefight feels like a dance as you rotate through insanely powerful weapons and strafe dozens of incoming foes. Most enemies do little more than stand and shoot or run straight at you, but given the sheer number of foes and the fact that different projectiles move at varying speeds, I was constantly on my toes. Dusk is a shooter with no reloading, no cover, and no nonsense, so every skirmish is an absolute thrill ride.

Dusk’s intensity also pairs well with its oppressive atmosphere. You rarely have time to think about the horrors you’ve witnessed because the game is continually tossing enemies at you and letting you burn off that nervous energy in combat. Dusk is at once nerve-racking and cathartic.

 

After you finish the extensive single-player campaign, you can jump online for 16-player multiplayer mayhem. While the online action remains fast-paced, deathmatch is the only multiplayer mode, and it only has a handful of interesting maps. I had no trouble jumping into online matches, but I did have trouble getting a full 16-player match going. An in-game link to a community Discord channel helps coordinate play sessions, but this feels like papering over a problem rather than providing reliable and robust matchmaking. Given online multiplayer's lack of options and intentional lack of progression, this mode feels more like a novelty. Fortunately, the single-player campaign is more than worth the price of admission.

The first-person shooter has evolved a great deal since Doom popularized the genre in 1993, but, in spite 25 years of innovations, Dusk proves that many of the old tricks still work incredibly well. Dusk might look and feel like a Quake mod, but it's so polished it feels modern. Anyone with even a hint of nostalgia in their bones for classic shooters should dive headfirst into Dusk.

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Gris Review – Not All Who Wander Are Lost

The protagonist of Gris charts her own way out of sadness, and while grief is often navigated alone, that is not necessarily the case here. Her path isn’t straightforward, but the game’s well-designed gameplay and levels don’t make you feel helpless and isolated, instead delivering catharsis.

The visual style immediately stoked my interest. It’s arresting and stylistic, accented by interesting and appropriate movements of the camera. The graphics’ clean lines are still expressive and often a fundamental part of the puzzles, instructive in how players can move about the world and interact with it. With that also comes enriching aural flourishes that further pull you in and changes of color that help express the protagonists’ progression.

 

Gris’ unnamed protagonist does not have a lot of powers in her arsenal, but make no mistake: This game is not just a pretty-looking, light platformer. What abilities she does have to influence environments build throughout the game, such as her dress becoming weighty or flowing to burst through or float across levels. The use of these powers is meted out to produce satisfying moments and to make sure there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to problems. One of my favorite reoccurring sequences involves reverse gravity areas, a nice confluence of the game’s form and function that also shows off Gris’ ability to deliver precise platforming.

I appreciate how Gris’ level design encourages exploration without sowing confusion, frustration, or leaving you lost when it comes to the larger tasks of solving puzzles or advancing the story. It’s not easy for a game to both give players a sense of exploration while still maintaining a framework for levels and puzzle gameplay that doesn’t make you feel like you’re simply moving from one task to the next. Even during backtracking, in Gris it’s like you’re seeing things for the first time because of the flow of the levels and the art style. This keeps it from feeling like you’re a rat enclosed in the walls of a maze simply bumping into things until you get it right.

Gris’ story is open to a range of interpretations, and it’s not important that you arrive at a specific meaning. Instead, in creating a well-constructed game, developer Nomada Studio has laid the foundations by which you can find your own sight and voice.

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Desert Child Review – Just Scraping By

Desert Child casts players as a desperate young man who can barely make ends meet as he strives for glory as a hoverbike racer. But even when you get first place, you aren’t showered with prize money; sometimes you’re lucky to win enough to maintain your bike and get a decent meal. The slow struggle to amass wealth is an unconventional subject for gaming, and Desert Child conveys it well. However, when it comes to providing fun and depth, this stylish title doesn’t make it across the finish line.

You experience the world of Desert Child in two ways: racing and wandering. The races are short one-on-one affairs that make you weigh your boost and ammo as you try to stay in the lead. Though you can pepper the screen with bullets if you want to, the most lucrative strategy involves shooting certain hazards (like TV monitors that drop money) while trying to bash other hazards with your bike. The process isn’t complicated, and once you get the hang of it, the races don’t demand new tactics. Unfortunately, because your winnings are so meager – especially early on – you need to race a lot to earn the money to compete in the final contest. That may be in service to Desert Child’s overall message, but without any meaningful evolution, action quickly grows stale and repetitive.

The only major source of variety is what upgrades you install on your bike. Working within the confines of a grid, you place mods of different shapes and sizes, then junction power to them to enhance their effects. This can result in things like a higher ammo cap, more money, and bigger bullets. However, because the total upgrades are few (and the upgrades you can equip at once even fewer), you don’t have much opportunity to develop different playstyles. You can technically use various guns, but that choice is made at the very beginning and set in stone, so you need to start a whole new game to experiment with those options.

The shallow racing puts the burden on your off-the-track activities to keep you invested, but those also fall short. While roaming the city, you can pick up other jobs (like pizza delivery and kangaroo herding) that are just different spins on the basic racing formula. Otherwise, your time between races is spent walking slowly across multiple interconnected screens in a routine of simple tasks like repairing your bike, buying some food, and depositing your leftover money in the bank. The distance between these errands is frustrating, because you don’t have anything interesting to do in the world as you make the rounds.

 

Though Desert Child doesn’t always succeed in its ambitions, it usually looks good in the attempt. The pixel art and soundtrack create a slick retro atmosphere, and unique camera angles give you surprising looks at certain parts of the city. But again, it all feels superficial because the minimal story and dialogue mean that you never get a good sense of the futuristic setting beneath its junky, dystopian veneer. Some of it is good for a chuckle (like how all food is just called “burger”), but don't expect to form any attachment to characters or the world around them.

Grinding for slim rewards during the few hours it takes to finish Desert Child  encourages you to think broadly about financial hardship. While that’s a worthwhile topic to consider, the inert world and thin gameplay aren’t enough to translate Desert Child’s core concept into an entertaining game.

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