Card to Kill: Final Dusk

I end up with a lot of card spewing games from Groupees that I would never normally play. As I write this, Steam enhanced reports of remaining card drops my account has $47 CDN sitting there. While some of that is bugged and some of that will be taken by Valve, you can get an idea of just how many Card games I end up with.

Mechanically Final Dusk is a puzzle game where the vampire girl runs along a set path, and then there are a variety of objects to interact with. The vampire girl has brain problems, likely from listening to the music on loop, and has to be guided, prodded and protected with all your bat energy otherwise she turns to stone and a pointless sad game over screen appears. I feel like this is a pretty normal puzzle game, sort of akin to a more interactive physics puzzle, but somehow it doesn't quite have the pleasing feeling a puzzle game does.

From the second level on, the game presents you the option of using your ... Bat-ness? ... to cover objects. This is about 3 minutes into the game, and I already hit a snag. The controls indicate you press 'Q' to use your bat powers to cover a light source, but the game doesn't explain how this actually vis-a-vis works.

It is always a good sign when the wordy, irritating blob of tutorial text doesn't actually cover how to properly use a skill. Also I noticed running it in windowed mode it had that moronic "windowed but locked" set up, where your cursor can't escape the window. That is optional, mind you, but I'm not really sure why it should ever be turned on. As far as I can tell after a good twenty minutes of limping through levels, you press 'Q' and then slide your mouse over the object you want to cover... Once I figured that out, I could get the mechanic to work most of the time, but not always. It never felt quite consistent.

If there's one thing you don't want out of a puzzle game, it is even the slightly margin of error introduced in the control scheme. Certainly it is ultimately user error, but I'm not even sure why it is possible to make such an error.

Art asset wise, Final Dusk has the weird smell of clip-art ... But other than that is actually quite crisp, clean looking and maybe a little weird if you don't like ... I dunno what we're supposed to call the princess here. They clearly portray her as a bratty teenager, so we'll say she's 16 and pretend? Ok? Anyway her sprites are good, the bat sprites are good, and cutscene art is pretty nice looking. I guess I can forgive it, since she's sexualized in sort of the "for teenage girls" ways, and I sort of imagine this game is aimed at teenage girls so maybe there you go?

Or you know, waifu hunters.

The music is awful. Like really, really awful. There was one track that just bored a hole in my skull until I turned it off, maybe there were other tracks later on but I didn't hear them because I feared permanent brain damage. I then put on the tracks for Sol Survivor, which are really good and make for excellent ambiance while doing puzzle games that don't otherwise have good sound tracks. Like this one.

nope.jpg

I got to a level early on where I realized you're supposed to, in the planning stages, winch furniture up an elevator. Like you move the dresser over to the elevator and then you - yes, I'm serious - crank it up "by hand" to the next floor. During the planning phase. I don't know what happened, I blacked out for a moment and when I came to the game was uninstalled from my computer. It is a mystery!

Anyway I like the basic ideas behind Final Dusk's gameplay, and the art is actually nice, but the control issue is just so freaking irritating that it makes the game frankly impossible to enjoy on any level. Between fighting with the controls and the tedium of slowly setting up the levels to run the track, and the game deriding you for "setting a checkpoint" when all it does is redo all the nauseating busywork because the controls flaked out on me, I just kinda fell asleep in my chair. I really don't want to repeat the two minutes dragging furniture around. If I wanted that type of gameplay, I'd stop putting off cleaning my basement.

I do feel like maybe I'm not the target audience. Maybe this game is for twelve year old girls, not me, and that's fine, but I still kinda actively hated my time with it.

I completely forgot to post this one back when I finished the game. I always feel bad posting negative reviews. Then I tried playing it again. God, the music, urgh.