An interactive crime drama across thirty years
As Dusk Falls is an interactive drama from INTERIOR/NIGHT about two families whose lives stay tangled for three decades. It opens in 1998 with a robbery gone wrong in a small Arizona town, and from there the story moves through betrayal, sacrifice and resilience. You make the calls, and those calls decide whether characters survive and what kind of people they become. The story is told across two books, and it can end in very different places depending on what you choose.
Playing it as a group
The whole campaign can be played cooperatively by up to 8 people at a time, whether you are sitting in the same room, playing online, or mixing both. Everyone votes on the choices, so the group decides together which way the story bends, and the votes can push against each other when people disagree. The companion app on a phone or tablet is used to cast those votes, which keeps the decision-making simple while the scene plays out. Playing this way also surfaces what each person actually values, since the reasons behind a choice tend to show up in the discussion around it.
How it looks and what to expect
The performances come from real actors that are digitally rendered into a stylized art format, so it plays more like a motion graphic novel than a traditional game. Expect a dialogue-heavy, cinematic experience with dark and violent material, along with sexual content, since it is an uncompromising crime drama rather than an action game. Choices matter throughout and lead to multiple endings, so replaying is the intended way to see how differently things can go and to find the nuances hidden behind each decision. Going in, the useful mindset is that you are steering characters and relationships rather than controlling them directly, and that the group's shared decisions are the point of the run.