'As Dusk Falls' is an 'interactive drama' coming to the Xbox Series X
It looks like playing an animated painting.
As part of today’s Xbox Game Studio event, Caroline Marchal from new studio Interior/Night showed up an entirely new piece of “interactive drama,” As Dusk Falls. The game will span 30 years in the American southwest and, judging from the trailer, it’ll have a pretty unusual art style that I’d describe as an animated painting. It’s hard to say exactly what the story will consist of, but Marchal wrote on the Xbox blog that it’ll focus on “two familes whose trajectories collide in the Arizona desert in 1999.” The trailer definitely plays the story close to the vest, though. The blog post also focuses heavily on the interactive side of this drama, so it sounds like the player will have plenty of agency to influence the story rather than being part of a pre-determined narrative.
Marchal was part of the creative team that created Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls, two games that merged traditional gameplay with more interactive storytelling elements that gave the player more agency and control over the various characters. As Dusk Falls looks completely different from those titles, but based on Marchal’s background and the way she described the game, it seems likely this won’t be a traditional experience either. There’s no word yet on when it’ll arrive, but this will be the first game from Interior/Night.
