As Dusk Falls’ couch co-op makes a middling thriller a lot more memorable

theverge.com:

As my wife and I played through As Dusk Falls, a tense new interactive thriller that recently launched on Xbox Game Pass, we would regularly turn to each other on the couch and say, “Coin flip.”

In As Dusk Falls, up to eight people playing together in local co-op can simultaneously vote on what the game’s characters should do next. Think Black Mirror: Bandersnatch mixed with Jackbox’s many-player multiplayer brand of trivia. Similar to Jackbox games, you don’t even need a controller — you can just use your phone (though you’ll have to download a companion app).

Much of As Dusk Falls’ story revolves around a hostage situation at a motel, and as you might expect, decisions can be pretty tough. In one instance, we had to pick between pointing a gun at someone as a threat or dropping it on the ground. Generally, the option with the most votes is the one the character will actually do, though some major decisions require a full consensus. If there’s a tie, the game will randomly select between the options.

Throughout our playthrough, we regularly relied on this “coin flip” to add some unpredictability. Will a character act calmly or lash out under pressure? I almost always picked the safe route, but sometimes my wife would make a more chaotic decision just to see what would happen. In other cases, some choices would be equally good — or bad — so we’d mutually decide to split the vote and let the character “decide.” These coin flips would stress me out, but they also helped the characters feel more like actual people making their own choices.

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 turned a gritty drama into a party