Sunset has a lot to say. It talks of war, of art and culture, family, home and responsibility. It talks of race, gender, wealth, privilege and society as a whole. It talks of love. In a fashion comparable to Gone Home, Sunset is less a game and more an interactive narrative – and whether that’s a criticism or not will come down to your personal tastes. As with Gone Home, you’re tasked with exploring an environment, uncovering often mundane details to build a sense of character and watch relationships build and unravel.
As an American engineer finding herself working as a housemaid in the fictional Latin American country of Anchuria as it becomes embroiled in civil war, your role in the game is simple: visit the penthouse apartment of one Gabriel Ortega once a week, tick off various tasks he sets and – ultimately – let the story play out. You have some semblance of interaction; though you never meet Ortega, his identity can be found in the home as you respond to notes or interact with objects. The game terms it as ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ responses, essentially binary choices between professional or emotional. Do you clean away the toy soldiers, or arrange them into a pyramid? Will you dust the trophy of merit, or the artifact of culture? Often these actions ignore the fact that player character Angela Burnes is a paid housemaid, but for the sake of the narrative it’s easy to overlook her either/or decision making. Move the telescope or the small statuette? Technically it should be both, but that’s not an option here.
It’s all an illusion, sadly, and not one that plays out all that successfully. The apartment itself is small, restricted even more by automatically locking doors, ensuring you don’t waste any time in rooms that don’t feature new content. It means each new week is a hunt for the few new interactions available, turning Gone Home’s sense of exploratory reward into something a little more tiresome. It’s the lack of reward or notable responses that leave you feeling underwhelmed; when asked a direct question, there should be a recourse of some kind for your answer. When devoting time to learning the piano, is it not fair to hope to gain more than a small grey box telling of a Steam Achievement being unlocked? Sunset offers little of that, turning each week into a list of chores to complete. There’s no sense of reward, thereby making interactions all but useless, inevitably leading to a sense of boredom. And as important as its points are, it’s just trying to say too much; it becomes an overbearing checklist of simplistic social commentary.
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