RPS Feature BloodQuake
A lot of people are comparing DUSK to Quake. They’re not wrong to do that; there are enough brown polygons and chunky weapons to bring back memories of nailguns, ogres and Trent Reznor’s ominous drones.
My mind turned to Blood though. DUSK begins with b-movie horror tropes as chainsaws whirr and cultists shriek threats, and from there it takes a tour through pretty much the whole of nineties shooters, as I remember them.
Here’s a (partial) list of the things that explode in the early access trailer for David Szymanski’s retro FPS Dusk: demonic cattle, soldiers, cultists, wizards, skeletal moose and a zombie ghost farmer. As in, a farmer that looks like a zombie ghost – I’m not sure what he spends his time farming. Souls, probably.
Dusk released on early access last night. Dominic Tarason reports that the preview builds he’s played have excelled at scratching his old-school shooter itch, so this may well be one worth checking out.
RPS Feature the sun is setting
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
David Szymanski makes short games that experiment with interactive storytelling in ways that are usually fascinating and often creepy as heck. On the rare occasion I meet someone who has played through his back catalogue, The Moon Sliver is usually the game we spend most time discussing. I find my mind returning to A Wolf In Autumn more often though. It’s a very strange game and I don’t think it’s entirely successful, but it’s a beautiful and thoughtful thing well worth playing.
Update: To clarify, if you buy the game now you’ll receive access to episode 1 & 2 immediately, although the episode 2 launch isn’t officially happening until January 11th, when everything moves to Early Access.
Between Devil Daggers, Strafe, and the seeming eternal renaissance of Quake & Doom modding, it feels like gaming as a whole has come to terms with the idea that 90s FPS design wasn’t an evolutionary point that we’ve moved past so much as its own genre, which many are still experimenting with to this day.
One of the most promising of this fresh wave of neo-retro shooters is Dusk from solo developer David Szymanski and published by New Blood Interactive. The game had already impressed many critics with its first episode (available to play now if you preorder), and as of January 11th, the second act of the game will officially launch as the game transitions into Early Access.
Hello, murder fans. We’ve already played DOOM and QUAKE and OTHERS, but the demand for caps-locked first-person shooters with gibs and chaos somehow seems to grow. So here is DUSK [official site], an FPS from publisher New Blood, which is paying tribute to the classics of the genre the only way it knows how: by killing everything in sight with shotguns, scythes and explosives. It looks like the hellish speed of Devil Daggers combined with a more traditional homicidal experience. If you’re a fan of quick-paced killing, there’s a trailer down here.
