English
Gamereactor
previews
Sunset

Sunset Hands-on Impressions

Tale of Tales are readying a different kind of war game. We got hands-on with a short demo, and came away wanting to find out more.

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ

Intriguing. That was what we thought about Sunset when we interviewed Tale of Tales' Auriea Harvey at the tail end of last year. It's based around a unique concept, with what sounds like an immersive story. Now, having played a short demo of the game, our interest remains well and truly piqued.

There's a fairly simple setup at play here. Imagine something akin to Gone Home, but with a more pronounced chronological narrative. The player controls Angela Burns, an American cleaner working in a fictitious 1970s South American city called San Bavón. It's a city in the grip of an increasingly volatile civil war. Everyday, at sunset, Burns heads up to the fancy apartment of the mysterious Gabriel Ortega, and in-between cleaning ashtrays and sorting through his papers, experiences a subtle story involving Ortega and the escalating conflict outside.

In the short preview build we played we experienced three days in Ortega's apartment, during which time, via our first-person perspective, we saw an evolution in the environment. The change was more pronounced given that the three days were plucked from different parts in the game - it's likely the shift will be more subtle in the full game. The change doesn't just manifest itself in terms of the positioning of furniture in the apartment or the partitioning off of different areas; looking out of the window and taking in the city vista also reveals a changing landscape. Relative tranquility makes way for fire and smoke and the chug of passing helicopters, while inside furniture shifts and items come and go.

Throughout the apartment there's messages left for Burns, with Ortega engaging his cleaner via asynchronous conversation. "This table feels empty," says Ortega. "You should invite someone round for dinner," replies Burns (maybe not exactly, we're paraphrasing, but you get the gist - interestingly, we went back into the demo for a second and third pass to find the exact wording, but we must have failed to replicate our footsteps in the subsequent walk-throughs because the note on the table never reappeared). The dynamic between the pair isn't clear, but there's a subtle chemistry there that we can't wait to find out more about.

This is an ad:
Sunset

There's also something quite enigmatic about Burns, and we're sure there's much more to her place in the overall narrative. She announces herself as an activist early on, but why she's cleaning this particular apartment, and why she is able to drum up a rapport with her wealthy employer, remains to be explained. Perhaps innocuous, perhaps not, there's plenty waiting to be discovered.

Moving through the apartment Burns has a couple of jobs to do each day, and these menial tasks punctuate the exploration of the environment. There's plenty of objects to interact with, although sometimes getting the various items in the apartment to respond was trickier than it should have been. That said, there's a variety of things to inspect, and on different days there was alternate points of interest, so exploration should remain important throughout.

However, it's the setting and narrative that has us most intrigued. The narrative is interesting, and those among you who enjoy subtle spy stories and old-school thrillers should certainly keep an eye on this one. Equally interesting is the war-torn setting. As Harvey told us back in December: "Violence is the backdrop," but this is not "a hero's story, it's more about someone who's simply living in a time of conflict."

This is an ad:
SunsetSunsetSunset
Sunset

It feels like a game born of counter-culture. There's a rising interest in titles such as this; games that prize narrative and character over action-orientated set-pieces and explosive Hollywood-style storytelling.

"We were looking at all these war games, Call of Duty and whatnot," Harvey explained, "and while we were playing them we were like ‘this is interesting' but we always wanted to know what's the game like from the other perspective."

"I guess the whole genesis of the thing was when we were playing Half-Life 2 a long time ago, and we saw these like, you know at the beginning and there's two people sitting on this couch huddled together, and you're going through as Gordon Freeman shooting stuff. And we wondered what's the game like from their perspective?"

It's this element that has us most excited. This is a game about war, but not about fighting. We'll have to see how heavy-hitting the overall story is, whether it doesn't pull its punches like similarly-themed games such as Valiant Hearts and This War of Mine, or if it's more subtle and enigmatic. Either way, this is shaping up to be, at the very least, an interesting and thought-provoking title.

According to the details sent over with the demo, players can expect, depending on their approach, between ninety minutes and six hours of game, and the soundtrack is by Austin Wintory (Journey, The Banner Saga, Monaco: What's Yours is Mine). It's also, as of today, available to pre-order. There's a few rough edges in the build we saw, but there's still time for Tale of Tales to iron out the last of the kinks and apply some spit and polish. Sunset is down with a release window of "spring", so we're not exactly sure when we'll get our hands on the finished product. However, whenever that happens, we're looking forward to seeing and uncovering more about this most intriguing of titles.

HQ

Related texts

0
SunsetScore

Sunset

REVIEW. Written by Fabrizia Malgieri

"The new game by Tale of Tales is a welcome surprise, a very important cultural offering that once again serves to elevate video games."

0
Sunset Hands-on Impressions

Sunset Hands-on Impressions

PREVIEW. Written by Mike Holmes

Tale of Tales are readying a different kind of war game. We got hands-on with a short demo, and came away wanting to find out more.



Loading next content