I was born in the mid-2000's, a time that I can barely remember. I can still recall vague memories from the pop culture of the time; from the music video for Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood" to the oddly distinct memories of an otherwise forgotten PS2 skating game. But other than that, the entire period up until around 2014 is fuzzy to me. I bring this up because I was born too late to experience the last seemingly "soulful" culture, a time when humanity's general interest in art - even down to the common level - was something generally agreed upon to have at least a fraction of humanity in it.
Our modern-day culture is something defined by three things - the ever-invading presence of Capital trying to make profit, the bitterness towards the world in response to this now-apparent invasion of Capital, and the apathy towards it all caused by a severe degree of burnout from being bitter towards everything. It also seems that our culture is slowing down in development. 2023's general "pop culture" is very similar to that of 2018's - if my memory serves me correctly. This is despite several world-changing events, from the obvious pandemic to the overseas war tomfuckery the powers that be love to toy around with.
A great example of this is funnily enough the Grand Theft Auto series, with each game after the third (As in, third in title, GTA III) being an, albeit romanticized, timepiece that displays the pop culture of the time. We've seen the series represent the 1980's, then the 1990's, the 2000's, and finally, the 2010's - cynicism and Capitalism gone mad included. We still are in the world of Grand Theft Auto V; a world that's a cost-cut plastic shell of its former self, still bearing trauma from 9/11 but now in crisis after a bunch of morons in suits decided to hand out mortgages like condoms at a Planned Parenthood clinic.
That's what brings me to the subject of this poorly-written and pretentious article: the 2018 cult-classic, Dusk. A creation by the sick mind of David Szymanski and released by New Blood Interactive, Dusk is a first-person shooter that fashions itself after games in the genre that was released before the 1998 release of Half-Life. Half-Life is considered a bit of a "turning point" in the design and development of first-person shooters, as that release introduced - if not popularized - many things that are considered staples of the genre; reloading, environmental storytelling, the concept of gameplay realism, etc.
Dusk casts aside all of these notions that developed around the turn of the millennia. The most striking thing someone entering Dusk blind will notice is the lack of reloads, as in-game armaments don't draw from clips or magazines, but rather from an ammo pool specific to each weapon. Speaking of weapons, Dusk has more than its fair share of firearms for the player to fuck around with. From the two melee weapons, those being the sickles and the sword, to a big ass machine gun, three total shotguns - two lever-actions, wielded a la Terminator, and a double-barrel boomstick - two explosive weapons, pistols akimbo, a hunting rifle, and a fucking magical crossbow. These weapons don't cover much territory in the realm of uniqueness, and at times can feel a little underpowered, but a combination of quality sound design and good visual aesthetics leads to them being fun to use.
This ties into the next thing Dusk has grandfathered in from shooters of days gone by - the movement. In shooters of its style, Dusk has movement that is incredibly unrealistic. The player, by default, runs at a remarkably fast speed. This is only made quicker by the definition of grandfathering something in when it comes to video games: bunnyhopping. Due to some old buffoonery in the source code of the 1996 release Quake, the player in that game was able to remove the acceleration cap that traditional running had by timing their jumps correctly. This mechanic stays in many video games that were released as recently as 2009 - to my knowledge. The mass majority of these are games released by Valve, including Counter-Strike (and its many sequels), Half-Life (and its many sequels), Team Fortress 2 (and Team Fortress Classic for that matter), and even Left 4 Dead (Both 1 and 2). Although the mechanic is generally disabled, it can be re-enabled using console commands (To my knowledge). This is due to all of these games using either the GoldSrc or the Source engine, both of which trace their codebase back to the original 1996 Quake engine.
Dusk's imitation bunnyhopping is something made much easier by the use of autohop (A mechanic where a player simply needs to hold down the spacebar to begin bunnyhopping.), as unlike the games that initially had this mechanic, bunnyhopping in Dusk is an intentional mechanic and not a bug that the community welcomed with wide and open arms. This fuses with the guns, with their infinite ammo pool, to create a gameplay loop that primarily consists of hopping at mach speeds with a gun in hand, essentially doing an on-foot "drive-by" that consists of approaching an enemy, shooting them, and then speeding away. This is only furthered by the sheer level of vertical movement that Dusk provides the player. The traditional explosive jumping seen in many first-person shooters is in Dusk, but this is amplified by the player's ability to rotate their entire camera a full 360 degrees vertically, which essentially means that you can do a roll mid-air.
Something that also ties in quite well with the gameplay of Dusk is its storyline and means of expressing the lore behind the game. Dusk takes a page out of the books of games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, wherein the story is considered more of an afterthought in the overall design of the game. Contrary to what that may imply, however, Dusk seems to tastefully add elements of environmental storytelling - an element primarily given prominence in the first-person shooter genre of Half-Life. For example, the levels of Episode 2 - The Facilities - display various experiments performed by the vaguely defined "cult" that acts as the antagonist faction of the plotline. From enemies that you see in-game being suspended in test tubes, to messages written on the walls providing context for the game's events, there is some rudimentary, but still quite good, usage of environmental storytelling. Might I also add that environmental storytelling is not much of a "retro first-person shooter" thing, but more of a "modern game" thing. Dusk isn't too afraid to introduce new concepts and ideas.
A good example of this would be the enemy design. In "retro first-person shooters", I'm talking Doom and Quake primarily, there's a general menagerie of different enemies who use a combination of melee-based, projectile-based, and hitscan-based attacks. Dusk's enemies, on the contrary, only include melee-based and projectile-based enemies. There are no hitscan attacks in Dusk. This helps contribute, to a significant degree, to Dusk feeling not like another game from the 90s, but something new entirely. In Doom or Duke Nukem, there was always a chance a stray hitscan would end your game. But in Dusk? There's no time for that. The game quickly devolves into a bullet-hell-like gameplay loop, but it is manageable with the aforementioned movement.
Funnily enough the gameplay loop of "perfect fairness", where there are no elements players can consider "bullshit" like the Chaingunners of Doom 2 fame, mixed with the sheer power of the player has a very small amount of ludonarrative dissonance; that is to say, the gameplay fits well with the storyline. Spoilers, but in Dusk you essentially are playing as a new candidate for "Elder God's Physical Body" tryouts, which you end up coming out on top - obviously. That leads me to the theme of Dusk. While Doom was Heavy Metal and Satanism, and Quake was Gothic Cthulu, Dusk leans heavily into Satanism and Cthulu. There the elements of Heavy Metal in it that Doom embodied, yes, but Cthulu and madness mixed with dark secrets that humanity uses to exploit others are heavy themes in the plotline and aesthetics of Dusk. These fit in quite well with the overall feeling that Dusk's gameplay gives you, that of being some sort of God who is bringing judgment to the unworthy, compared to the feeling that proper "retro first-person shooters" gave you, which was more akin to a well-endowed (Physically, like, in the realm of strength and all that. Get your mind out of the gutter.) gladiator facing an army.
Now you may wonder why exactly I was so casual about spoiling the plot of Dusk. Well, it's because the storyline isn't the focus of Dusk. Every game has its "killer focus", like the killer feature of software the "killer focus" is a specific aspect of a game that is the most interesting and unique, it is what brings a mass majority of the enjoyment of a game. For Doom, it was its heavily varied roster of enemies and powerful firearms. With Duke Nukem, it was the extremely varied firearms with an interactive world. With Half-Life, it was the environment; Half-Life's protagonist isn't Gordon Freeman, but rather Black Mesa and the stories it had and is telling.
In the same vain that, for example, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy carries on the focus on the environment and atmosphere of the game that Half-Life pioneered, taking some elements that didn't contribute to this focus out and adding new ones in, Dusk carries upon it the legacy of Quake's focus on the levels. Quake's focus on the levels came from two things, one was that the enemies weren't particularly varied. Two was that the weapons, although experimental for the time, in retrospect are quite bland. But Quake was released as one of, if not the first "mainstream" 3D video game - Super Mario 64 be damned. Because of this, ID Software put a heavy focus on each level, handcrafting them to take advantage of the newly acquired 3rd dimension.
Dusk carries on this tradition that Quake began. With how the weapons only cover a relatively small fraction of the spectrum of potential weapons - as there's no true equivalent to, per se, the BFG-9000 of Doom or the Voodoo Doll of Blood - and how the enemies are perfectly balanced, the levels become the focal point of Dusk. Each one is a handcrafted experience that truly is what defines the variety in the gameplay. This is why I refuse to talk about the levels, as they're best experienced blind. From their progression to their aesthetics to their small setpieces, it's a food best enjoyed hungry.
All in all, Dusk is an excellent progression of the first-person shooter genre wholesale. Looking back, the first-person shooter genre had a crossroads at the release of Half-Life, where the design of the game had to answer one simple question at the beginning: "Is the player a part of the world, or is the player a God?" Although most first-person shooters take the route of the former, making the player more grounded in reality and overall weaker, Dusk chooses to lean into the latter, and pulls that off with great success. Although many can consider it a homage to games of the past, I refuse to think that way. Dusk is a progression, it's a legitimate push by a passionate developer to further the design of video games wholesale. And I love it. So please, I encourage you to waste $20 of your hard-earned dollars on this experience, you won't regret it.