The Sun Sets on Tale of Tales
By: Omar (@siegarettes)
Sunset is a game about being caught between worlds. Told in half hour segments before sunset, it tells the story of Angela, a Black university graduate from Baltimore living as a housekeeper in a Latin American country on the verge of revolution. It’s a narrative both reverent and stumbling. Ambitious and vibrant, but still finding its way.
Those familiar with the prototypical “walking simulator” will find themselves somewhere recognizable here. Sunset is about exploring a space, and tracing change in both the characters and setting through the environment. Each day you’re given a set of chores to do at will, with a two approaches for most of them that creates divergent paths. A warm approach brings you closer to the tenant, a neutral one to maintain distance.
Immediately, Sunset imparts its appreciation for detail and aesthetics. The interface is styled as an extension of the elevator controls, the task list on sticky notes. The camera movement itself is smoothed and slowed, imparting a sense of weight and gaze. It presents a contrast from the typical first person camera: weightless, immediate, and mechanical, a child of the first person shooter genre. (Think of Gone Home, a game that for all its notable differences against the format, very much showed its developer’s roots in first person shooters in the way it had you navigate spaces).
These details change daily, with documents, records, and magazines imparting a sense of narrative by their placement, and their pairings with the few messages left from the owner. Here Tale of Tales directs your focus with your daily tasks, blocking off areas, and setting you seek certain corners of the house. As I played it I developed a routine: checking the magazines and tables for news and artwork, getting to my tasks, and brightening up areas of the house.
Here it begins to feel incongruous. The days are accompanied by Angela’s inner dialogue, thoughts of home, the circumstances that led her here, and reflections on the man who runs the house. Playing along reveals a space in her head that doesn’t align with the one you inhabit. Especially if you choose to play “romantically”, her tone within the world and the messages to the tenant feel incoherent, as if two versions of her exist. It’s further complicated by inexplicable judgments placed upon certain actions in the house. Why is leaving every light and faucet in the house on considered romantic? I started to develop two ideas of Angela in my head, the character she actually was, and the one that players were forcing up on her.
As I mulled over all this however, I was interrupted by a message from the developers themselves. Tale of Tales was leaving videogames. It’s a story that we’ve become used to hearing, as both developers and critics slowly bleed out of an industry that has long been inhospitable and unsustainable. This particular departure was deeply felt for me, however, as I’ve slowly become invested in the experiments they’ve built within the restrictive space of this medium.
Like Sunset, even when I haven’t enjoyed their games, or even been put off of them, they’ve never failed to engage me. They’ve had me reconsider definitions and examine what it was about their work that brought out those reactions, and what that said about both me and their games. For all the accusations and rejections of format I’ve seen writers throw at them, there was one thing they have never been: uninteresting.
And so Sunset feels like a finale for their career in games, multi-faceted, evocative and ambitious enough to fail forward when it does. I think that’s more than enough. I think that was worth our attention.