My first experience with a Tale of Tales game was back in 2005 with the release of The Endless Forest. The game is an MMO about being a deer in a magic forest, that’s pretty much it. Apparently you can still play it today. While I never really saw much beyond “be a deer” the game’s Wikipedia page lists quite a bit of detail and information about what’s actually happening in the game, a lot of which I missed during my playtime.
That seems to be a running theme with Tale of Tales releases, and I can only hope that in a few years I’ll read a similar article about Sunset, because after finishing the game twice my impressions aren’t great.
Sunset starts out with a premise that I think is excellent. The game puts you in the role of American citizen Angela Burnes, who finds herself trapped in an imaginary South American country in the midst of a revolution. Being that you can’t go home, you decide to find work as a housekeeper. It’s just your luck that the man whose house you wind up taking care of is one Gabriel Ortega, a man heavily involved in the current revolution. By cleaning Gabriel’s house you learn more about him and the revolution he participates in. You also have a chance to determine just how your relationship with Gabriel winds up, do you become lovers? Or are you his maid and that’s that?
You will spend one hour a week cleaning Ortega’s house, and as you do so you’ll wind up learning plenty about your boss both by seeing his living space and also by interacting with him through notes he’ll leave throughout the house. Each day when you arrive Ortega will have a post it note stuck in the elevator with directions on what you are to do for the day. Once you’ve completed his directions you’re free to leave but you can oftentimes stick around and reply to notes he’s left for you around the house or simply do other work to make his life more pleasant.
Most of the actions you’ll perform in the game can either be done “warmly” or “coldly”. Warm choices are represented by the color orange and are used when doing something nice or thoughtful for Mr. Ortega. For example unclogging a sink without using stinky and upsetting chemicals, or organizing his records in a fun pattern. Cold choices are represented by the color blue and they are used to represent indifference towards Mr. Ortega, these choices usually just involve doing the bare minimum of the job and nothing else. Whether you choose warm or cold actions throughout the game will determine just how your relationship with Ortega develops with warm options slowly turning you into a love interest and cold options keeping your relationship mostly business.
For my first playthrough I chose to keep things professional with Mr. Ortega. I did the bare minimum that was required of me every day and then left as quickly as I could. The story progressed like normal, and while Ortega would still leave me friendly notes I would always reply curtly. On my second playthrough I decided to do the exact opposite and instead do every nice thing I could for Mr. Ortega. I fluffed his pillows, polished his silver with my own breath, made him a colorful day of the dead decoration, if there was an orange option to click, I clicked it.
Here the “warm” action is to hang the poster on the wall, while the cold action is to put it on a shelf.
Ortega reacts to your service and your flirtation in the notes left throughout the house, but any other changes are minuscule at best and mostly revolve around what types of reading material he’ll deliberately leave around the house for you to see. The story plays out the exact same way regardless of your decisions, the only difference is whether or not Ortega will be taking you to bed by the end of it. I decided to do a third playthrough where I would deliberately never set foot in the apartment, I would simply enter, turn around, and leave without even performing any of my duties. Not only did Mr. Ortega not notice that I wasn’t doing anything he asked, he continued to shower me with the exact same minor praise that he did when I was bending over backwards to care for him. Our love was consummated again, with the first steps I ever took into his apartment heading directly into his bed.
The game’s story is all kept in Angela’s diary that’s accessible to you through the main menu. You’ll also notice that if you let Angela sit for an extended time she’ll write additional thoughts in the diary that help flesh out the story a little more. If you find yourself particularly interested in her plight, you’ll definitely want to fill the diary up as much as possible.
Ultimately the game took me just under two hours for my indifferent run through, and just a little over two hours for my full blast romance one. The difference between the two is so indecipherable I would be very hesitant to say I got 4 hours of play out of this $20 title, much less the 22 hours that the game touts in its marketing material.
Here I made a scary decoration for Mr. Ortega on the day of the dead. I’m not sure whether he liked it or not.
For the most part Sunset acts like you’re not even there, Angela tells the same exact same stories in between sessions regardless of how things are actually going. She’ll mention taking documents to her brother, even if you skipped right past those documents on your previous trip. You can pretty much do whatever you want and the game will just carry on without you. If you’re looking for a title where you can have a large scale sweeping effect on the story, this isn’t it. Your relationship with Ortega has its nuances but all your hard work doesn’t add up to much more than an extra note or two for you to read.
Unfortunately the game has even bigger problems in the technical side of things. Above all else my biggest issues are primarily in pathing, Angela can be stopped dead in her tracks by something as minor as a pillow on the ground. It makes exploring the apartment a lot less fun when you’re constantly snagging on everything. It gets even worse as the game progresses and the apartment fills with more and more stuff to block your path. When you perform a cleaning task the game takes you to a brief screen to show time passing and then teleports you back into the map. There were multiple times were when I was returned to the map I would find myself trapped inside a piece of furniture or a potted plant, unable to proceed any further. In most of those cases I was able to get into the menu and leave the apartment, but I also wasn’t able to complete all my tasks for the day. It’s also worth noting the default walk speed is borderline unbearable, even on your first playthrough. I would suggest raising it to its highest setting in the options, but that’ll almost certainly put a dent in your 22 hour playtime.
Classic maid problem, you’re dusting a lamp, and next thing you know you’ve fallen through the earth.
I encountered full crashes several times in the game as well, and at one point I even fell through the floor while cleaning. These are all issues that may have been fixed between the time I got my review code and the game’s release, but it’s something to be wary of just in case.
Other annoyances include a number of typos scattered throughout the game and an issue where raising my screen resolution would cut my subtitles off so I could only read half of them.
Here you can see my subtitles cutting off while I stare at my own clone in the background. That’s not a spoiler, I really think the clone is a bug.
I really wanted to like Sunset, the concept is very intriguing to me but in the end the entire package just doesn’t come together in a way that I was able to enjoy. If you’re a fan of Tale of Tales it’s perfectly likely that you’ll find something to like here but even without the game’s incredibly obtuse and subtle storyline, the technical issues might be enough to push you over the edge. If you want to reward a developer for thinking outside the norm and trying something fresh and new I think there’s something to be recognized here but for the most part Sunset is a very brief experience at a very high asking price.
