As Dusk Falls

Introduction

As Dusk Falls traces the collision between two families — one caught up in a desperate robbery, the other a small-town family taken hostage in its aftermath — across a story the store page explicitly describes as spanning thirty years, told through a distinctive rotoscope-inspired art style and branching dialogue choices. Developed by INTERIOR/NIGHT, a studio founded by industry veterans, and published by Xbox Game Studios, it released 19 July 2022 and sits at Very Positive, 88% across the 1,441 English-language reviews this review reads a substantial share of. The production is a genuine critical success by conventional measures — a BAFTA nomination, the Games for Impact award at The Game Awards 2022, glowing coverage including a feature in Rolling Stone. What this review needs to weigh against that recognition is a specific, checkable, and growing complaint running through the negative sample: the story this game tells is not the story its own marketing promises, and it doesn't end.

What the production gets right

Start with what draws genuine, specific praise across most of the sample. The rotoscope-style visual approach and voice acting are repeatedly credited with elevating the material beyond a typical branching-choice game, and several reviewers explicitly compare the experience favourably to Life is Strange, Detroit: Become Human and Telltale's back catalogue — genre benchmarks that set a real bar. The first half of the story, in particular, draws consistent praise as genuinely strong: relatable characters, dialogue reviewers describe as well-written rather than melodramatic, and consequences to choices that several reviewers specifically credit as making narrative sense rather than feeling arbitrary. Co-op play, letting multiple people make choices together on shared or separate devices, earns its own praise as a distinctive and genuinely fun way to experience a branching story — a format this genre doesn't always support well.

A story sold as thirty years, delivered as roughly half

Here's the complaint that runs through this review's negative sample with unusual specificity and persistence. The game's own store description promises exploring "the entangled lives of two families across thirty years." Multiple reviewers, independently, report that what actually ships covers roughly fifteen years of that promised span before ending on an unresolved cliffhanger — one 36-vote review put the discrepancy in exactly those terms, calling out the gap between the advertised scope and the delivered content directly. Steam's own achievement list corroborates the structural shape of this complaint: achievements are organised as "Season 1, Episode" entries, confirming the shipped game is explicitly one season of what was clearly conceived as a larger, multi-season work. A detailed 2025 review, writing with real specificity about the tension between games as commercial products and as an art form, called this out as the central issue with the whole release: "As Dusk Falls is not a complete game, and yet by all indications" is sold and marketed as though it were.

Years of silence on a continuation

What turns this from a launch-week criticism into a genuinely serious, ongoing consumer concern is the timeline. The most recent substantive update in Steam's news feed addressing the story itself is a "one year on" post from July 2023 — after that, the feed shows only console-port announcements (PlayStation 4 and 5 releases in late 2023 and early 2024) and sale promotions, with no public statement about a second season. Reviews posted well into 2025 describe this silence directly and with real frustration: one 118-vote review, posted more than two and a half years after launch, asked plainly, "Where is Book 3??? How can you release an unfinished game and then make absolutely no effort whatsoever to even let us know if another chapter is coming?" Another, from late 2025, made the same point while noting the game continues to receive physical re-releases and console ports even as the story itself stays unresolved — a studio that has clearly kept working, on this game's packaging and distribution if nothing else, without addressing its best-known outstanding question.

A broken feature, and a specific consumer complaint

A separate, more concrete issue is worth flagging on its own terms: some of the game's multiplayer and "Broadcast Mode" features were originally built around a companion mobile app, which reviewers report has since been removed from app stores entirely, leaving those features non-functional for new buyers. One recent review, invoking the broader "stop killing games" consumer movement around software that stops working when supporting infrastructure is withdrawn, reported being refused a refund after discovering the feature no longer worked. This review can't independently verify the app's current availability, but the specificity of the complaint, tied to a named consumer-advocacy issue rather than a vague grumble, is worth taking at face value.

How interactive the drama actually is

A smaller, more subjective complaint concerns the game's interactivity itself. Several reviewers describe the moment-to-moment experience as closer to a slideshow than a game, with one calling it "an interactive PowerPoint presentation" where meaningful failure states are largely absent and input amounts to selecting between pre-written branches on a timer rather than exercising skill. This is a fair characterisation of the genre generally rather than a flaw unique to this game, but it's worth stating plainly for readers whose expectations lean toward mechanical interactivity rather than narrative branching.

Final Verdict

As Dusk Falls is, by measurable industry recognition and a large share of its own review base, a genuinely well-produced interactive drama with a strong opening half and a distinctive visual identity. What keeps this from a higher score is not a matter of taste — it's a specific, verifiable gap between what the game's own storefront promises and what it delivers, compounded by years of public silence from its developer on whether the promised remainder is ever coming, and a multiplayer feature reviewers say has quietly stopped working. If you go in treating this as a complete, if open-ended, six-to-seven-hour experience and never expect a continuation, there's a genuinely well-made story here. If the "thirty years" on the store page is part of what's selling you the purchase, know that as of this review, more than three years on, nobody at INTERIOR/NIGHT has said publicly whether you'll ever see the rest of it.