As Dusk Falls’ Couch Co-op Makes a Medium Thriller More Memorable

Me and my wife played as as Dusk FallsIn a tense new interactive thriller that recently launched on Xbox Game Pass, we regularly turned to each other on the couch and said, “Coin flip.”

In as Dusk FallsUp to eight people playing together in a local cooperative can vote together on what the game’s characters should do next. think Black Mirror: Bandersnatch mixed with jackbox Multi-player multiplayer brand trivia. similar to jackbox To play, you don’t even need a controller—you can just use your phone (though you’ll need to download a companion app).

mostly As Dusk Falls’ The story revolves around a hostage situation in a motel, and as you might expect, the decisions can be very difficult. In one instance, we had to choose between pointing a gun at someone or dropping it to the ground. Generally, the choice with the most votes is the one the character will actually make, although some major decisions require full consent. If there is a tie, the game will randomly choose between the options.

Throughout our games, we relied on this “coin flip” regularly to add some unpredictability. Will a character act calmly or succumb to pressure? I almost always chose the safe route, but sometimes my wife would make more chaotic decisions to see what would happen. In other cases, some choices will be equally good – or bad – so we will mutually decide to split the vote and let the character “decide”. These coin flips would stress me out, but they also helped the characters make their choices like real people.

While it was a refreshing way to play a narrative-driven game, it’s not an entirely new idea. Supermassive’s 2017 Thriller hidden agenda Similarly turning a gritty drama into a party game. But I expect more sports to take a similar approach. In the case of as Dusk Falls, playing with my wife would have felt like a just-okay B-movie thriller plot into a more memorable experience. There are also plenty of branch routes, so we have a good excuse to return to the game.

And when my wife and I beat as Dusk Falls At about seven hours during some evenings, we still have a very We can go on to the next about the great couch co-op games on Xbox Game Pass. Earlier this year, for example, we had . There was a bang with the first few hours of no one saves the world, a dungeon crawler where you play as all kinds of creatures and characters and mix and match their powers. it really wasn’t Launch with local cooperative; Instead, we faked it with him on the TV and me on Xbox Cloud Gaming on my laptop. since the feature officially added In April, we are in the sense of going back.

Our Xbox Game Pass co-op backlog is stacked with other possible things to play. My colleague Andrew Webster has already written about this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge And how it captures the essence of the classic arcade game. i downloaded puzzle game Escape Academy After reading Ash Parish’s review – my wife and I have never had a physical escape room, but I think we’ll have a lot of fun with the game’s virtual ones. i am excited for it hello infinites Split-screen multiplayer to (finally) come out so we can explore Zeta Halo together.

The rate at which Microsoft adds games to Xbox Game Pass, that co-op backlog will almost certainly continue to grow. But someday, I’d like to come back as Dusk Falls With a Large Group: I wonder how the story can play out with eight people who decide to flip the coin together.

as Dusk Falls Now available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Xbox Game Pass and PC.