Study Sunset’s premise and count how many times it subverts the setting and action of a traditional game. You play as Angela Burns, an African-American (!) woman (!) stranded in a fictional South American city (!). She’s found employment as a part-time housekeeper (!) for one hour each week at the apartment of a wealthy playboy, Gabriel Ortega, sometime during the 1970’s (!), all under the backdrop of a rising insurgent revolution (!).For one hour every week, Gabriel’s apartment is yours.
The sheer nonchalance at which Sunset divorces itself from modern game tropes is astounding. Sunset’s characters and themes don’t exist for the sake of active defiance, but rather as honest constructs for the intended narrative. Angela arrives at Gabriel’s apartment one hour per week, just before sunset, and is given free reign over her activities there. Gabriel usually provides a list of a few tasks he needs completed, but you’re intended to go snooping around the margins of his openly non-humble abode. The choices behind your actions influence Gabriel and Angela’s relationship, or lack thereof, and ultimately strive to affect the wider revolution encompassing the fictional city of San Bavón.
As a concept, Sunset is the sort of game I’ve strongly ached to play. Indigo Prophecy, amid its treasure chest of flaws, introduced me to the idea of figuring out who a person is by the simple act of going through all of their stuff. Part of it is a fleeting voyeuristic attraction, but there’s a more substantial draw to assemble a picture a person based purely on their empirical environment. Gone Home found a way to flesh out this concept into a (mostly) linear narrative by funneling the player through a solemn residence laden with personal artifacts. Sunset aims to play in the same space, but rather seeks to alter or rearrange the relics of its central character. Every day, Gabriel’s apartment is generally the same, but a few things may have changed in the week Angela was away.
Objectively, Angela is intended to enter the apartment and take care of a few different assignments. This is accomplished by walking to the area in need of obvious (and sometimes not so obvious) attention and spending the time to complete the task. If the place needs tidying up, specific areas will have garbage all over the floor. If dinner needs to be made, some food and cooking supplies will be arranged haphazardly in the kitchen area. You don’t actually have to do any of these. Nothing is there to stop you from entering the apartment and then walking right back into the elevator (and I’m curious as to what sort of personal and objective narrative that approach would build).
More often than not, Angela can add a degree of personalization to her assigned tasks. She can complete them warmly, in an effort to impress Gabriel’s human sensibilities, or coldly, in a far more literal approach to the matter at hand. Arranging books, for example, can either be completed by cleverly styling the literature in playful stacks, or by merely building shelves for a more utilitarian display. It’s a binary choice, but one that Sunset seeks to assign a sense of agency toward. Does Angela see a human side to Gabriel and his role in the inevitable government revolution, or is cleaning his apartment a simple side job until Angela can find a way out of San Bavón?
Sunset adds another layer with the items Gabriel chooses to leave lying around. Sometimes it’s in the form of books he’s reading, but eventually he starts leaving notes directed to and for Angela. She can choose one of two ways to respond, mirroring her warm and cold decisions in completing her daily tasks, which further builds her relationship with Gabriel. Occasionally this even manifests in extraneous objectives, like an escalating record collection (which you can play on one of Gabriel’s turntables) and even an implied asynchronous game of chess between the two.
Judged purely by its intentions, Sunset sounds like a grand overture in narrative design. It seemed to be exactly what I wanted, and felt loaded with the tools and materials to properly build its world. Playing Sunset and engaging its systems, however, reveals a cloudier picture. Everything it needs is there, but it’s arranged without the delicate care required to achieve any sort of relatable sentiment. I didn’t want complete control, but I did expect some detectable form of agency over Angela’s choices.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that what was happening in Sunset was incongruous with the choices it was presenting to me. I would complete my tasks warmly and often leave vaguely flirtatious notes for Gabriel to find. He seemed to respond in kind, but Angela’s diary entries, which she narrates every day upon stepping into the apartment, were condemning both Gabriel’s lifestyle and his role in the government. At one point she voices, “Ortega has the options I am denied and he has the privilege not to use them,” and then Sunset presents me with the option to leave sweet notes in his living room. It’s an uncomfortable disconnect between game and player.
Suspicions of a narrative rattling off the rails followed me throughout the bulk of my time with Sunset. At a certain point Angela’s brother becomes involved with the revolutionaries stalking the streets of San Bavón, and the circumstances that surround him become a focal point for her relationship with Gabriel. This didn’t seem to have a tangible effect on how I treated Gabriel’s assignments until it weirdly resurfaced sometime later, seemingly as a throwaway moment. Sunset’s narrative feels like it’s built around a few tent-pole plot points, but can’t account for the mindset every player may bring to Angela’s desires. This sounds like a fault with story-heavy games reliant on player-choice, but really it’s a lack of viable or consistent options provided to the player. I have no idea why Angela would ever even like Gabriel for any personal reason, and yet I pressed on with warm responses hoping for something reasonable to happen.
Around my twentieth day I also started growing bored with Sunset’s central conceit; I wasn’t doing anything interesting in the apartment. I’d canvass the whole thing in an attempt to complete my assignments—a process somewhat expedited by the developers deliberately closing off certain rooms—but eventually I stopped feeling any sort of ulterior motivation. Rather than see where Gabriel and Angela’s relationship would go, I just wanted to get my tasks over with and leave the apartment. Sunset was quickly turning into busy work.
Thankfully, Sunset has a few surprises to mitigate the perceived monotony. San Bavón is subject to a terrifying amount of unrest, the likes of which occasionally manifests in ways that directly affect the apartment. These instances are a sudden shock to an otherwise serene environment, and added a much needed pulse to Angela’s day-to-day routine. One time a phone started ringing and I was never able to locate where in the exact hell the phone was, but, generally, these sequences of suspense and surprise compose some of Sunset’s strongest moments.
It also doesn’t hurt that Sunset is drop dead gorgeous under its extremely hospitable lights. Anyone invested in photography knows dawn and dusk bring out the best and most absorbing shades of light, and Sunset responds by bathing Gabriel’s apartment in a variety of appealing hues. Warm pinks and purples set against turquoise, translucent glass makes for constantly picturesque setting. Draping the apartment with contemporary 70’s styles, including a neon yellow staircase that almost comes alive at a certain light, is one of Sunset’s more striking features. Angela, visible only through reflection, even plays along by sporting then-modern fashion options. In painting a time and place, it’s hard to imagine how Sunset could look any better.
If only there weren’t so much to drag it all down. Why does the dialogue sound like it was recorded without a pop filter? Furthermore, why does the writing contain lines as cringe-worthy as, “I burn through him with my screams”? Why in the world was a personal note written to conceal rape photos, when there was zero context to account for it? Sunset is loaded with puzzling writing choices that make for an experience that’s, at best, manic and, at worst, elusive and unclear. Despite absorbing as much of the narrative as a possibly could, I rarely had a good idea of who these characters were, or what, if anything, I should be feeling for them.
Performance is also a puzzling issue. My machine easily exceeds the minimum specs, but at any setting Sunset was subject to crashes, strange frame drops, and all-around stunted behavior. Coupled with Angela’s considerably slow walk speed (which makes total sense, you wouldn’t want her running around the apartment like a maniac) and some bizarre furniture arrangements I often got stuck inside of, Sunset was more of a plodding experience than I expected.
Still, there’s something here that has to be worth appreciating, and I think I’ve found it inside Sunset’s disorienting narrative. It represents a time before the availability of on-demand information, when living in a country with a volatile government was subject to terrifying periods of surreal unrest. Sunset plays with the paradigm of a stranger in a strange land, and shares the sentiment between Angela and the player. I don’t know if this was Tale of Tales’ intention with the narrative but, dispensing with failures in building a personal relationship, it resolves to make Sunset a worthwhile experience. This feeling of detachment that’s nearly impossible to experience in our modern and connected society, and it’s strong enough to make you wonder what Sunset could have been if this inescapable tension were its consuming focus.
