Dusk is a dark, pixelated, nightmarish boomer shooter – and it left a strong impact when it first shipped on PC back in 2018. In fact, it’s one of my top ten games of that year, and it’s still brilliant even today. On the surface, the game looks like it stepped right out of 1997, doing a remarkable job of capturing the Quake aesthetic, but beneath the hood, you may be surprised to learn that this is actually a Unity engine project. That’s no problem for a modern PC, but what about Nintendo Switch? Dusk is coming soon to the console hybrid and I’m happy to report that the Switch conversion is excellent.
Now, in theory that shouldn’t be too difficult, right? After all, Dusk is a retro-stylised shooter, built to approximate the look and feel of a mid-90s, software-rasterised polygonal first-person action game. Dusk does a commendable job of mimicking this very specific Quake-like look. Its hand-painted textures, designed to seamlessly tile across large planes, lack any sort of bilinear interpolation. These textures proudly flaunt raw, pixelated texels, boldly eschewing mip-maps as they’re slathered across every map. The maps and the denizens populating them are made up of precious few polygons lending the game an abstract appearance – the silhouette of its jagged architecture and low colour assets strengthen the nightmarish aesthetic Dusk so beautifully delivers.
Getting that authentic feel isn’t easy, but Dusk succeeds where many others fail and the work done in delivering this experience to Switch owners is suitably impressive – in fact, I think it’s up there with the more expert Unity titles available on Switch. This wasn’t easy. According to the developer, Switch barely cracked 20 frames per second when initially ported, but barring a few drops to performance in the busiest areas, the final game is essentially locked to 60fps in both docked and mobile modes, which run at native 1080p and 720p respectively. It features no anti-aliasing (the correct choice for this aesthetic!) and offers additional visual customisation including different colour modes – which can be fine tuned by hand, if you desire.