I’ll break the surprise: DUSK is the most refreshing FPS game I’ve played. It does so much with a little tool set. DUSK creates an immersive world, narrative, and setting without investing much other than visual story-telling and the odd few voice lines or context of enemies you fight. You find yourself in the basement of cultist dwellers and have to fight your way out, only to fight your way much deeper into the madness.

I was not especially enjoying episode 1. It’s a solid game, but the setting went from farm, to farm lands, to other rural areas. The game isn’t boring in these areas: You get to experience the weapons, which I’ll cover in a bit more depth later, the world and the baseline for the cult that you’re up against, and the game feel, and the game feels good. Doom/Quake style mach speed running, quick peeking around corners, and full control of your characters. You can dodge any shot because each one is a projectile, not hitscan, even if a few of the spread shots from the scarecrow or early bosses are a bit more difficult to dodge. It’s a great basis for a game, but it wasn’t that mind-blowing experience that internet forums and online talk had made the game out to be. I wasn’t sated yet.

Enter Episode 2. Specifically E2M2. There’s a point in which you have to dive deep down into the ruins of this level. “DON’T TRUST YOUR EYES” was written in blood on the wall. Without spoiling what is maybe my favourite encounter and what really brought me into the game, you encounter the Wendigo enemy down here. There was a big shift from high octane action to mastercraft horror and genuine fear. More than anything, it really shows that DUSK has more surprises than just the standard FPS affair. Lighting was utilized to make it a scarier experience, and despite being a one man army, you feel stripped of your resources and thrown to the… wendigos. It’s a real game changer.

But that doesn’t happen once. From that point on, each level really felt like something entirely different in some way or another. The first time my flashlight broke I felt absolutely crippled. Other very reality warping things happen as you go further through the cult’s bases. It’s all presented in a this old 3d polygon style but somehow it still took my breath away in a way not unlike Titanfall 2’s surprises. The difference is that each of these surprises still flesh out the narrative of the cultists and what the Intruder (that’s you) really is. Visual and tactile storytelling is really something else.

Finally, it’s important to note how well the weapons strike a balance with one another. No weapon outclasses another. I still went back to my regular shotgun sometimes instead of the Super Shotgun, weapons that share the same ammo-type. The only catch-all weapon is the Assault Rifle, and even then, it doesn’t really excel at any one thing, just good at being consistent damage. There were pros and cons to every other weapon, and even the forgotten melee weapon you start with gets a change in the third act to become useful again.

Dusk is really incredible. Everyone said that it’s a great game if you’re a fan of classic FPS, and that stands up. It might be the best classic FPS. However, I want to extend that further: I think DUSK is worth playing if you’re a fan of any FPS. Maybe it’s even worth trying if you want to give the FPS genre a try for the first time. Give it a shot.

I had The Spectrum Retreat enter my radar after seeing a YouTube video on it. The concept was interesting: You are in a hotel and things aren't right. You're connected with someone who is going to help you escape. To what extent is this Hotel containing you, and what purpose is yours to find out. To escape, you have to enter test chambers and give yourself further access through the hotel and toward the roof where you can finally escape. The plot unfolds to help you discover who you are, why you're there, and what this strange hotel really is.

I called the core puzzle conceit test chambers for a reason: You conquer it one floor at a time, and you can't keep anything from previous chambers into the next. Each are self contained puzzles revolving around colours and cubes. By capturing colours in your phone from the codes, it allows you to go through that colour gate. You can trade the colour for another with the illuminated cubes. Test chambers usually revolve around setting up the level to get through a series of gates, looking through windows and getting to the elevator to the next test chamber.

As you progress and reach each progressive floor, new mechanics or ideas come alive, including teleportation or gravity flipping. They're an incredibly welcome addition that really change your approach. The puzzles are work man puzzles: Where in Portal you can stand and look around, The Spectrum Retreat pushes the player to experiment and play. However, it relies on limiting player knowledge into expand puzzles and lengthen them: It's only after you are through an obstacle that you find out that you are needing to rearrange things slightly differently to allow for one last swap to allow you to get to the end. Doubling back is inevitable and happens often and only happens once you have new information. Through time, I was able to avoid the situation more and more (especially when you can accidentally lock yourself out of a solution and have to reset the room) but it was still an ongoing issue.

And that's really the issue with The Spectrum Retreat: The developers neither give themselves enough credit but neither do they give the player. In the moments outside of the hotel, there are little puzzles that you need to do to advance the story and find the passcode for the next floor's chambers. However, the voice in your phone is always giving hints immediately. They're spelling things out. They're also not spelling things out to a player who has all the hints of what is happening within the plot, having the big confirming reveals much later after they've provided the information. The padding in the rooms shows the lack of confidence that The Spectrum Retreat had by trying to lengthen the game just a bit more. It works in latter puzzles when you realize, but the last puzzle in the game is incredibly long and I had the misfortune to have to reset it because I didn't have the knowledge that it required me to have. It fooled me, rather than outwitted me.

The plot has similar feelings of shallowness. Plot points are lacking specifics and those are what bring what is special out of nothing. Same tired tropes crop up from other mediums and problems shown feel like from a previous decade. The only specificity we really get are names. A lot of mysteries still feel left uncovered, so by the end, I did not have an opinion on what the potential outcomes should be.

The game is far from being labeled as a "bad" game. It's very crisp in its presentation and the puzzles are satisfying if you get past a bit of the inherent tedium with them. In fact, if you do like games like Portal, I would recommend it, but there's a list of games I'd recommend before it that offer the same experience. The best implementation that The Spectrum Retreat brings that I have not experienced in a similar game is the Manager's Notebook at the end of the game, where you can compare your stats and improve your times in each of the five floors' chambers. It still seems to lack the infrastructure to skip the story parts in between, or to skip to particular floors' chambers.

The Spectrum Retreat exists because of Portal, but it doesn't do much to exist despite of it.