Rising Dusk is 🎵 chill lo-fi beats to study to 🎵 in game form
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Rising Dusk
- Developer- Studio Stobie
- Publisher- Studio Stobie
- PC, Itch.io
[TRANSCRIPT BELOW]
Rising Dusk is an atmospheric, anti-coin collecting puzzle game. You traverse Japanese landscapes while dealing with various yokai. You can only fail by falling offscreen, so despite the spooky theme it’s not violent one. Blocks in the environment will react depending on how many coins you’ve collected, becoming boons or traps depending on the context. But mostly traps.
This results in interesting challenges, like a rainy level where you dodge coins falling from the sky, or one where you climb a mountain, being forced to collect coins along the way so that the footholds below will disappear if you fall.
It’s also a gorgeous game. It’s got clean pixel art that’s free of most modern graphical effects, barring some subtle alpha transparency. There’s a strong use of color to set mood and tone. Dithering is used almost like hatching, giving environments and characters texture. And detailed parallax layers help create the impression of open vistas. The combination of chunky puzzle blocks and naturalistic landscapes is bizarre, bringing to mind early arcade games like Bubble Bobble or Buster Bros, and surreal platformers like Umihara Kawase.
Special attention should be paid to the music, which combines Japanese folk themes with hip-hop. The combination of traditional instruments, drum machines, and synths sells the chill, and sometimes tense, moods of Rising Dusk.
It’s one drawback is that I sometimes felt I didn’t have the full picture, and had to go through some trial and error to understand when to collect coins or not. It mostly works to set up additional challenges to return to, but a few times it felt like it was intentionally setting me up for failure.
Otherwise, Rising Dusk is a clever and chill puzzle game with a gorgeous world, something easy to get lost wandering in.