DUSK

DUSK sends a lone protagonist through mystical backwater cultists, possessed militants, and darker forces lurking beneath the earth, channeling Quake, Blood, and Doom through three hand-crafted campaign episodes of fast, brutal combat. It entered Early Access in August 2017 and spent over a year in active development before reaching 1.0 in December 2018 — the storefront's own listed date reflects only that later milestone, but the developer's own event history confirms the true original release well over a year earlier. Across that development window, it built an enormous, devoted following — 97.5% Overwhelmingly Positive across 17,005 English reviews — and is widely credited as one of the titles that kickstarted the modern retro-FPS "boomer shooter" revival.

Atmosphere and gunplay reviewers overwhelmingly praise

The praise for DUSK's core experience is consistent, detailed, and near-universal. One reviewer writes: "Dusk's atmosphere is phenomenal. It feels so tense, unwelcoming, and otherworldly. I'm a big fan of Quake 1's atmosphere, so I liked Dusk's a lot... The combat is very fun & the double barrel shotgun feels amazing to use." Another, more succinct: "Extremely good boomer shooter. One of the first wave of them to boot. Extremely atmospheric fun gunplay and an incredible soundtrack." A third calls it plainly "one of the best fps games i have ever played in my life." That's genuine, specific, repeated agreement across a huge review sample on exactly what the game gets right — tense atmosphere and satisfying combat built with real reverence for its '90s inspirations.

Specific enemies reviewers say cross the line into frustrating

Set against that overwhelming praise is a smaller but specific, recurring complaint about particular enemy design choices. Multiple independent reviewers single out the same enemy type by name: one writes "remove cowgirls from the game lol" listed among specific complaints, while another separately calls "the stupid cowgirls" infuriating during a difficult stretch. That's not a vague difficulty complaint — it's the same specific enemy, named independently by different reviewers, suggesting a real design imbalance in how that particular threat is tuned relative to the rest of the game's otherwise well-received combat.

A difficulty spike reviewers say drove them to quit

The most serious structural complaint concerns a specific boss encounter. One reviewer describes it directly: "Started out great, then hit the end of episode 2 and the guardian is impossible to beat. Tried over 50 times and died faster each time. How on earth is that fight supposed to be fun?... Uninstalled." A separate reviewer frames the broader episode-quality arc similarly: "ep1 is okay but kinda boring, ep2 is [expletive] amazing and then ep3 is absolutely awful besides the mirror match at the end." Checked against achievement data, this complaint holds up concretely: the Episode 1 completion achievement sits at 44.7% of the playerbase, dropping to 25.4% for Episode 2 — a meaningful fall-off consistent with a genuine difficulty or engagement wall between the two episodes, rather than simple attrition.

A save system reviewers call genuinely broken

A separate, detailed technical complaint concerns save reliability combined with a non-functional developer fallback. One reviewer's frustration is worth quoting at length: "the cheat code for noclip is bugged and i cannot open the dev console so its [pointless] if youre stuck/softlocked and you have to either load an old save or start the level over. I HAVE BEEN STUCK FOR [...] HOURS TRYING TO GET THIS TO WORK." A separate reviewer, coming from the more recent Ultrakill, makes a related point: "this game is incredibly clunky and frustrating to play. the save system is outright awful." Together these suggest a real, specific risk for players who don't save frequently and manually, since the game's usual escape-hatch tools don't reliably work when something goes wrong.

A claim the patch record clearly disproves

One reviewer's pointed question — "Is this the only game New Blood every really finished?" — deserves the same scrutiny given to similar claims elsewhere in this fleet's research, and here it doesn't hold up at all. New Blood Interactive's own event history shows substantial, continued investment in DUSK years after its original release: a full "DUSK HD" visual remaster and Steam Workshop integration in late 2023, new "Endless" mode maps in 2024, and further content as recently as December 2025. This is a case where a critical claim, checked directly against the record, is simply inaccurate — DUSK is among the more actively supported titles reviewed in this lane.

A vocal minority pushing back on the consensus

Given how overwhelmingly positive the overall reception is, it's worth documenting the genuine dissenting view rather than treating it as noise. One reviewer states it bluntly: "Overhyped game. Strange level design, poorly made enemies... I thought at least a brutal soundtrack could save this game, but... most of the game is silence/ambient. So the trailers are very different from what the game actually is. It's better to save money on a really good game from the same developer (Gloomwood)." Another, more succinct: "maybe the most overrated game OAT. play quake 1 instead." These aren't isolated one-line pans — they're detailed enough to suggest a real, if minority, audience for whom DUSK's particular blend of atmosphere and combat doesn't land the way it does for the overwhelming majority, and worth weighing for anyone whose taste in the genre already skews toward its more recent, more mechanically dense peers like Ultrakill.

Verdict

DUSK earns its reputation as a defining entry in the modern boomer-shooter revival, delivering tense atmosphere and satisfying gunplay that an overwhelming share of its enormous review sample credits without reservation. A smaller, specific set of complaints — particular enemy frustration, a genuine difficulty wall at the end of Episode 2 corroborated by achievement data, and a save system that can genuinely strand players — are worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, even against such a positive overall reception. Recommended strongly for retro FPS fans, with a specific heads-up to save often once Episode 2 nears its end.

Sources: Steam store page and appdetails API (release date, pricing, platform data); Steam's aggregate review data (query_summary totals, English-language sample); individually read user reviews, both positive and negative, sorted by helpfulness and recency; Steam's global achievement statistics API; New Blood Interactive's own partner-events history from 2016 through 2025.