Incline Dusk, by New Blood Interactive: a frenetic FPS inspired by olDoom and Quake (2017)

[Mastermind]

afaik the game is made by 1 guy who is prob not a real artist, you have no clue what it takes to make graphics for a video game. the graphics quality is somewhere between quake and blood, only without the latter's great artistic sense. quake's style got old really, really fast

Quake style got old so fast they are still making maps for it to this day, more than 20 years later.

Maybe you would have more credibility if you just refrained from saying stupid shit like that.

it's a shitty, boring game, easily the worst of the classics.

DraQ , please school this bitch ass.

Ironically, this game looks like Quake almost more than anything else. Lel.

DraQ is an autist, so you're just proving my point.
And my fisking of his shitty autistic opinions on videogames has been absolute.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

Wow they included some of our very own GD members in the game as an enemy type:

 

[schru]

Quake still is and always will be a good-looking game because it has good colour and form aesthetics, composed with the graphical limitations in mind. Increasing the resolution and adding filtering can actually spoil that. Another game with very good graphics from that period is Azrael's Tear. Many PlayStation games qualify too.

Dusk certainly doesn't have that kind of aesthetic either in colour composition or models.

Edit: It's also worth mentioning that pixel graphics were originally designed for low CRT resolutions, which made the pixels blend and diffuse colours, creating much smoother details and even translucency effects. That doesn't come out on LCD monitors at all, and pretty much all retro graphical styles get this wrong.

 

[Boleskine]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/01/17/dusk-fps/

DUSK is a delicious cocktail of nineties shooters

By Adam Smith on January 17th, 2018 at 9:00 pm.

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.


Currently in Early Access, DUSK is unashamedly retro. It’s a first-person shooter like they used to make ’em, or at least that’s the intent. The good news is that it manages to avoid being the retro game equivalent of an observational comedy stand-up, hoping that simply jogging your memory will provide sufficient entertainment.

“Remember rocketjumping?” Such a character might say, sweating in the club’s cheap floodlights and nodding to a chap in the front row. “They discovered how to do it by accident, didn’t they, sir? The players. It wasn’t intended to be a workable tactic.”

Somebody at the back of the room scoffs.

“This lady just remembered the first time she telefragged her old man. What a palaver, eh?”

DUSK has too much energy to fall into that trap. As soon as the first scene fades in, you’re being attacked. No build-up, no plot to speak of, no table-setting. There are angry people trying to murder you in a basement.

And then there are coloured keys to collect and secrets to discover, and hordes of monsters to kill. Hordes might be a bit strong actually. DUSK has open areas where you could pack in masses of its murderous scarecrows or Satanic goats, but I’ve been spending most of my time indoors and underground, squeezing through corridors and tunnels, and taking on what I’d describe as gangs of enemies rather than mobs.

The main difference between this and Quake is the setting. If I were to ask you what the setting of Quake is – the first one, not the Stroggy sequels – what would you say? It’s crusty, rusty, Lovecraftian medieval sci-fi, isn’t it? There are teleporters and lightning guns, but there are also knights in armour with swords, and those ogres with grenades in one hand and a chainsaw in the other. The level design is fairly abstract. Sure, this place might be a lab or a storage facility, and that might be a castle, but what do any of them really have to do with one another?

DUSK is much simpler. There are farms and churches and houses with working sinks and toilets. It’s using a relatively lo-fi visual design to describe real places, and I like that. It’s fun to shoot a cultist in a kitchen and then throw a block of soap at a goat, just or kicks.

What is lost, in that leap toward more recognisable environments, is the convoluted maze-like architecture that sometimes defined Quake. As the levels roll by, DUSK does start to explore stranger places, but it feels more straightforward than many of its inspirations, for better and for worse.

And Blood is absolutely one of those inspirations. DUSK isn’t as cheeky as the Build Engine splatterfest but it’s soaked through to to the bone with many of the same horror tropes. It’s neither a spoof nor seriously scary, but it feels sincere in its embrace of the tasty schlock that makes up its environments and enemies.

But you probably want to know how it feels.

It’s hard to describe ‘feel’. I can say that Quake was fast and just the right side of floaty, but I think the level design plays as much a part in that as some nebulous ‘feel’ to the movement and shooting. A badly designed level can kill the feel as quickly as my nineties mixtapes* can kill a party.

DUSK’s levels aren’t badly designed. The more I play them, the more I think they might be very well designed. At one point, I fought my way through cellars and caves, found an underground temple-dungeon, and figured I was near the end of the current level.

To my surprise, opening a door led me back to the beginning of the level. I’d found a secret and gone through the whole thing backwards, tying myself in a knot.

I love that. The levels sometimes seem quite simple, a few buildings connected by paths and open spaces, but there is so much to discover beneath the surface. And the open spaces are often imaginative as well, particularly an early cornfield in which the scarecrows absolutely definitely do not re-enact that one recurring nightmare I had when I first watched the Wizard of Oz.

The odd thing is that for all that I like about DUSK, and there is a lot to like, I’m missing something. Maybe it’s ‘feel’. Maybe I won’t be able to put my finger on it, but I’m going to try.

Quake, Blood and even Rise of the Triad made me feel like I was teetering between godhood and death. In a split second, I’d go from almighty dispatcher of demons and other bad sorts to a stain on the floor. They were empowering even though death could come quickly, and there was a fragility to my character.

DUSK feels much more methodical in comparison. It’s more ambitious than it looks, seemingly planning a grand tour of all the first-person shooters you might remember rather than trying to emulate one of them. It definitely isn’t that comedian I described earlier, simply riffing on nostalgia, but it does feel a little reconstructed. Not formulaic, because it has its own tone and some wonderfully inventive level design, but there is a predictability about it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I am very much enjoying rediscovering my reflexes, and DUSK is as good a take on the games of my youth as I’ve played in a long time.

But I don’t find it thrilling; I find it comforting. And that’s a very odd thing for a game about killer cultists to be.

That’s the singleplayer though. The multiplayer, which I haven’t explored all that much, seems like it might be very thrilling indeed. It’s much more demanding, because people are quick and unpredictable, and makes use of verticality in ways that I hadn’t even considered while playing the campaign.

I’m going to rope someone in for a few games so we can deliver some kind of verdict about just how good that multiplayer feels.

DUSK is available via Steam for Windows and is in early access.

*The Longpigs feature heavily

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Durandal]

 

[Ash]

Art style still sucks ass. Game's a bit unimaginative (except the level design). Seems to lack quite a bit of polish (for example, notice only one death animation and one pain grunt sound for the main mooks). Soundtrack is also typical modern blandness.
However, core gameplay and level design seems decent, which is what matters most.

Yeah it's early access but it's been like this since ep. 1 and I doubt it will change.

 

[Big Wrangle]

Seems to lack quite a bit of polish (for example, notice only one death animation and one pain grunt sound for the main mooks).

I don't think variety is how polish's defined pal.

 

[Durandal]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...otgun/steam+(Rock,+Paper,+Shotgun:+Steam+RSS)
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...otgun/steam+(Rock,+Paper,+Shotgun:+Steam+RSS)

Chunky retro FPS Dusk rises from early access on December 10th

31st October 2018 / 7:03PM

Channelling the dark spirits of Quake and Blood and packing a mean shotgun, Dusk is one of a handful of new but pointedly old-school shooters I’m excited for. It’s been in early access for a while, and you can play the first two episodes now, but the last, weirdest chapter of the game now has a release date – December 10th. While the final few levels are still in production, dev David Syzmanski and publisher New Blood let me take an early tour of its netherworld. It’s good, weird and playful stuff – take a peek at it for yourself in the new Halloween’y trailer below.

While the first episode took a little time to get up to speed, the latter two episodes ramp up much faster and get a lot more creative. While episode two was ostensibly about military bases and industrial facilities, it quickly got into weird Quake-inspired territory. Episode 3 (the little bit I’ve played so far) starts at Quake and gets wild from there. Fractured worlds, pocket biomes and deep dives into volcanic chasms abound. While episode one’s maps felt a bit too chunky and low-fi at times, the third’s more abstract nature works in its favour – it’s playing to Dusk’s strengths.



While I’ve not encountered any new weapons yet, the third episode does bring some fun new enemies, including a charging melee monster that I’m still trying to decide is brilliant or incredibly stupid. If nothing else, it’s a very imaginative design, and while I’m loathe to spoil it, you can get a peek at it here in today’s patch notes. Looking at the stuff in the trailer above, I’ve clearly got a few more surprises ahead of me. Blood tornadoes, rune-etched ruins and apparently a reality-bending, zero gravity boss battle await in the final cut, and I can’t wait.

As an aside and a treat for those hungry for old-school pixelated gore, Blood mega-mod Death Wish updated again for Halloween, refining levels and adding co-op and deathmatch support, designed for play via the recent BloodGDX source port. Grab Death Wish here on Mod DB and BloodGDX here. You will, of course, need Blood to play – the game, not the bodily fluid, though that helps too.

Dusk is out in Early Access now on Steam and Humble for £15/€17/$20, and contains the first two thirds of the game. When the final episode launches on December 10th it will be briefly discounted to $16.66 (cute), but go back up to $20 afterwards.

 

[Siveon]

That's probably the only good RPS article they made in years, and it still reads as fucking obnoxious as ever.

At least they linked this Blood mod I never heard of. Looks decent. Oh, and Dusk is good too looking forward to it around Christmas season of all things.

 

[LAO]

l love quake 1,i played Dusk and i liked it,best part of Dusk in my opinion are the physics.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Review: DUSK
2018-12-10 11:00:00by Peter Glagowski

Party like it's 1996

It has been an excruciating year for me. When I took a look at DUSK in early-access back in January, I was in love. The game was everything I had wanted from a first-person shooter since the '90s passed. No regenerating health, no hit-scanning enemies and no guided tours through levels that might as well be hallways. This was a replication of the games I cut my teeth on in my youth.

Teases of the content in DUSK's episode three eventually gave way to me playing a very early build in April. After that, I was given a more in-progress build that featured final refinements but lacked the ultimate finale. I kept digging through these levels and finding new secrets, concocting faster paths and honing my skills. I was ready for the conclusion to DUSK, even if I never wanted to stop playing.

I can safely say that this journey has been well worth it. DUSK may just be the best shooter I've ever played.

DUSK (PC, Switch)
Developer: David Szymanski
Publisher: New Blood Interactive
Released: December 10, 2018 (PC), TBA (Switch)
MSRP: $20.00

Plot isn't why you'll be playing DUSK, but I'll try my best to summarize what is going on. Occupying the boots of the aptly titled Dusk Guy, you set off on a journey through a demented farmland to stop some eldritch terror from destroying the world. Getting in your way is a multitude of various enemies from the likes of chainsaw-wielding brutes and cloak wearing cultists. Later on, you'll start to see some really messed up shit that wants nothing more than to eviscerate you.

Your quest starts pretty humbly before it gets grander and grander. Using an episodic structure similar to genre classics, DUSK makes sure each segment of gameplay feels distinct from the last. The overarching theme in episode one might be more realistic, but it eventually gives way to wild level designs that defy logic and take first-person exploration to boundaries it hasn't been in a long time.

Unlike classic shooters, DUSK actually saves the best content for last. The first episode is quaint in comparison to what comes later and as such, does a fantastic job of introducing to you how DUSK plays and what you might expect to encounter. DUSK is anything but predictable as each new level focuses on a different concept that gets played up to its fullest extent.

While I could pick any number of levels to highlight, the most exciting one has to be the "Escher Labs" in episode two. Themed after the paintings of M.C. Escher, the level begins like any other scientific themed lab before it starts to screw with your perception of reality. You’ll walk forward only to be greeted with the beginning of the level and everything tilted on its side. This keeps getting more and more contorted before you're jumping through walls and seemingly going up by dropping down. It's a real brain twister.

Episode three, though, just steals the show. It may feature a horde like level where you do nothing but kill, but the puzzles and eye candy contained are beyond what I imagined DUSK could achieve. Earlier levels start to make a comeback in a Groundhog's Day styled fashion and there is a level set in a "Xen" like universe from Half-Life that really plays with gravity in some interesting ways. Unlike "Xen," the level doesn't suck, so it has that going for it.

Let me tell you, I'm surprised at how creepy some of the levels can be. Coupled with the excellent sound design and soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult, DUSK could possibly pass as a horror game at times. Arenas will get pitch black, bugs will be crawling around the ground and monsters will be moaning while you're stumbling about in an unfamiliar place. I honestly jumped a little when a certain invisible enemy popped up the first time (despite knowing he was there!).

It is rare you'll ever get lost in DUSK, however. This isn't because the game is easy, but more because levels have specific architecture and set-pieces to keep you from getting confused. Unlike older shooters that had limitations on the number of textures or models that could be used, DUSK has wholly unique level sets that are visually different. While the lack of a map screen might put people off, it never feels necessary with how well the game organically guides you through its demented corridors.

None of this would really matter if the weaponry was bad, but DUSK has that on lock. All of your weapons feel important and have a use against specific enemies. Big hulking brutes will go down in a single shot of your hunting rifle while the military foes are best picked off with the assault rifle. Hearing the audio cues from your foes and swapping to the appropriate weapon before entering a room is something I'll never get enough of and it's nice that DUSK doesn't make any weapon too powerful. Even the requisite rocket launcher (the Riveter) is better saved for faster foes than being blasted at will.

There is, of course, a double barrel shotgun that tears enemies apart. It sounds fantastic, has great animation and can really turn the tides of battle when you’re surrounded by enemies. Whipping that bad boy out and going to town on a crowd is always satisfying. If that isn’t to your liking, you could always stick to the double shotgun setup DUSK has. Nothing is more gratifying than twirling shotguns in each hand and watching gibs fly across the screen.

About the only aspect of the game, I’m not too big on are the boss battles. They aren't bad and don't disrupt the flow of levels. In fact, you can actually skip almost all of them by flicking some switches and dodging attacks while waiting for doors to open. That choice is very much welcomed because the fights are just super basic. The arsenal in DUSK might be a blast to play with, but a big, hulking bullet sponge of an enemy doesn't make for the most taxing of encounters.

Thankfully, the final boss is much better and ends the game on a high note. It involves a little more than just unloading your guns and I appreciate that change of pace. It is very reminiscent of Quake, but I won't spoil anything else. You’ll be pleased when you take him down and see the end credits.

If you couldn't tell from the screenshots, DUSK employs an old-school blocky graphical style. This looks like the type of games that were being made during the dawn of 3D acceleration and it is charming as hell. Enemies are chunky and move with fewer frames of animation than modern titles, but it all works to complement the specific theming DUSK has going on. This is very much a game in the manner of the past.

This final build of DUSK brings in more music, more ambient sound effects, and just a general polish to each level of the game. It feels like a more complete product than back in January, even if the basic level design remains untouched. Paths through levels are telegraphed a little better with enemies popping up where you need to go and specific lighting drawing your eye to the path forward. Secrets are a little easier to spot thanks to some new textures for breakable walls.

I was surprised at how much easier it was for me to get through levels in episode one and two than before. That could be because I’ve played them about six times now, but the few moments where I did forget how to move forward were only met with about two minutes to exploration. I was able to decipher what I needed to do and get on my way in a very snappy fashion. It prevents the game from ever feeling boring, which even the best of old-school games can devolve into.

DUSK is all action, no filler and I couldn't be happier. The game may be taking us back to the past, but it doesn't ignore the lessons learned about what works in level design. Instead of reusing assets and bloating out the runtime, DUSK is a brisk, four-hour campaign that never hits the same beat twice. It really is just fantastic.

This is even before delving into the multiplayer component, DUSKWorld. In what is perhaps the only disappointing thing about the final release, DUSKWorld is still very limited. Containing only deathmatch and a handful of levels, this mode is mostly a novelty. It is an entertaining as hell novelty, but there isn’t much else you'll get out of it if you're looking for a brand new multiplayer fix.

I can't harp too much on that point as DUSK is priced accordingly and does its campaign brilliantly. It simply would be nice to have some more options when it comes to playing with friends. At least features like cooperative play and mod support are in the works for the future. That could really elevate DUSK into "Greatest of All Time" status because the basic feel is sublime.

That really explains DUSK well. This is shooter perfection and something fans of the classics need to experience. Maybe it doesn't redefine what is possible with video games, but it beats out basically every other shooter I've ever played. I know I'll be replaying this for years to come and I look forward to seeing what fans are capable of with mod tools.

It feels great to have the golden age of shooters back.

[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]

Dusk reviewed by Peter Glagowski

9.5

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[Big Wrangle]

Australian guy says game good, must buy.

 

[Curratum]

Just played, what, 7 levels of the new episode. Go out and buy this game now! You must, because I command it!

Biggest head trip I've had in years in a FPS. Often genuinely creepy too.

 

[skacky]

The second and third episodes are leagues better than the first, so if you were put off by it you should try again.

 

[udm]

The second and third episodes are leagues better than the first, so if you were put off by it you should try again.

skacky you're one of the few true connoisseurs of good games, so I'll take your word for it and give it a shot (and no, I'm not being ironic)

 

[ADL]

Been waiting for a proper Quake followup for the past 20 years. Just bought it today, in the middle of episode 2 right now and I'm having loads of fun.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Australian guy says game good, must buy.

Australian guy also says Fallout 76 is average teetering on good, so I guess that does mean Dusk is at least a little better than Fallout 76.

 

[Wunderbar]

Australian guy says game good, must buy.

Australian guy also says Fallout 76 is average teetering on good

Australian guy just likes to go against the public opinion sometimes. He was one of the few reviewers who disliked Wolfenstein the new colossus, for example.

 

[Jenkem]

He's Australian.. shitposting is in his blood.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Australian guy says game good, must buy.

Australian guy also says Fallout 76 is average teetering on good

Australian guy just likes to go against the public opinion sometimes. He was one of the few reviewers who disliked Wolfenstein the new colossus, for example.

I am pretty sure nuWolfenstein was universally disliked among oldskul fps community, just like fallout 3/4 is disliked among oldskul crpg community. You might've confused the noise from nugamers for a universal consensus on nuWolfenstein.

 

[Wunderbar]

Australian guy says game good, must buy.

Australian guy also says Fallout 76 is average teetering on good

Australian guy just likes to go against the public opinion sometimes. He was one of the few reviewers who disliked Wolfenstein the new colossus, for example.

I am pretty sure nuWolfenstein was universally disliked among oldskul fps community, just like fallout 3/4 is disliked among oldskul crpg community. You might've confused the noise from nugamers for a universal consensus on nuWolfenstein.

dunno, i never bothered to check universal consensus because the game was meh.

 

[Boleskine]

Gggmanlives should post on the Codex. Judging by his twitter profile picture he'd fit right in.

Spoiler

 

[Beastro]

Wow they included some of our very own GD members in the game as an enemy type:

It's not ever day a game brings to mind Tribes RPG.