SUNSET Pc Review

The first time I rounded a corner in Sunset I just about fell out of my chair, startled by my own reflection as I came nose-to-nose with a glass door and a low-res woman with dead eyes, barely blinking, peering at nothing. It was creepy, but I got over that. What I couldn’t get past was the feeling that I wasn’t the real Angela Burnes. Sunset’s protagonist comes in two forms: one is a character in the story, and the other is a reflection of the player and game designer, a distortion. The real Angela, I think, is the one who exists without me. When I took control, I felt like a fraud.

Angela is an young African American engineering graduate and activist who becomes stuck in a fictional South American city during a US-backed military coup. She makes ends meet working as a housekeeper for wealthy art collector and bureaucrat Gabriel Ortega, whom she never meets in person. Sunset explores their relationship, how they relate to each other and the unrest outside, and how that divides and connects them. Once a week, I assume Angela’s body and wander Ortega’s penthouse completing chores while he’s out—clicking on things that need doing—and poking through his belongings. I can also reply to his notes, and most things I do can be done ‘warmly’ or ‘coldly’. I can arrange his shoes playfully or neatly. I can help myself to a drink while cleaning up, or just put away the glasses. I can express my presence, leave kind and flirtatious replies to his notes, or be invisible to him.

Sunset isn’t really about investigating like in Gone Home, where everything has already happened and you’re piecing together the past from what’s left behind. It’s more like pausing an in-progress play and messing with the set dressings. I deduced some things from Gabriel’s possessions, but anything I missed was filled in by Angela’s voiceovers at the beginning of each day. The unnatural mouthfuls felt over-rehearsed, like she woke up and pre-planned her thoughts about “people organized by hierarchy, aimed at each other with purpose, instead of breathing and flowing through each other, like a city’s supposed to feel.”