Games that are meant to be callbacks or love letters to earlier legends fall into a dicey gambit, since the comparison to its predecessor comes in the form both of how much it evokes the original and what it does differently - Or not similarly enough. This leads to Dusk, a shooter that doesn’t need much viewing to decipher what games had inspired its look, feel and speed. Despite such clear inspiration, Dusk manages to be its own entity instead of being a mere love letter for the sake of lazy comparisons. The fact it’s also fun and plays fantastically doesn’t hurt, either.
It’s always hard to explain why a game feels ‘good’ unless you can actually sit down to try it yourself, and Dusk is no exception. While the game plays very quickly and initially feels loose and and unruly, there’s a certain surgical precision amidst all the madness - Once you get a grasp of the mobility and aiming along with it. It will most certainly take a few levels to get adjusted to the speed of movement, but excluding a few charging enemy types, it’s comical how your character can run dozens of laps around enemies and they’re unable to do a thing about it. This is most certainly an asset when surrounded at all angles or facing a firing squad, so the real learning curve is learning how to zip about like a madman but also be able to hit a target. While other shooters prompts the player to prioritize targets to avoid getting killed, Dusk encourages lots of rapid hit-and-run warfare inbetween bobbing out of cover. While playing carefully does get the job done, the game excels when played like a deranged speedfreak, hopping around the environment and never letting go of movement keys.
At the time of writing, Dusk has two episodes available to play that features rather pleasantly deceptive level design, and I don’t mean that as an insult. The early levels are somewhat linear with expected side paths to find secrets, with later levels becoming larger and more complicated to navigate. In both cases, they’re still quite small if you were run from start to finish without stopping, but they ‘feel’ bigger during skirmishes when dodging enemy fire and returning your own. Navigating each map would certainly be ire inducing if it wasn’t for the speedy character movement, a blessing in itself when trying to dig everywhere for secrets and having to backtrack. This leads to my only current, big issue with Dusk so far; enemies spawns are set and limited, but even with some levels littering over a hundred bad guys, enemy placement occurs in occasional pockets, individuals or large battles - I can’t help but feel like there isn’t enough combat which sounds bizarre for a game like this, especially with said big battles ending almost as quickly as they begin if one plays offensively. My other minor gripe is that in a couple levels your flashlight becomes broken due to a long fall, which drops visibility in a game that already loves putting the player into dark areas. This would be a fine way of raising tension for the sake of the creepy, eerie environments while being beset by baddies, but these lightless sections are just inconveniences rather than a set piece. Bumping around in the dark and using pistols as temporary flashes of light isn’t much fun, but luckily this element is used sparingly.
If those are my only major gripes excluding some personal issues of my own (like the aesthetic jump from episode one to two), then it should be clear how Dusk succeeds as a shooter. It plays fast, great and the level design lends itself to being quick to navigate through along with not being gargantuan mazes. I finished the current two episodes in just over four and a half hours, and while my comat fixin’ could be solved by the Endless mode, it is a bit shallow in terms of being a cramped arena where loops are run over and over. I most certainly am looking forward to the final product of Dusk along with the third and final(?) episode, and it goes without saying that I can give it a solid recommendation.
(Early Access note: My playthrough didn’t merit major technical issues despite its developmental state. At worst, I had encountered moments of sound dropping due to multiple sound effects playing at once and lighting bugs when moving some objects from lit to unlit areas. The game is very much functional and stable at this time. And good - Did I mention it was good?)