DUSK

During the past decade, there was a renaissance of retro first-person shooters, which were coined by many as “boomer shooters”. Developed by David Szymanski as an homage to Redneck Rampage and Quake, DUSK was born and became one of the finest boomer shooters of this generation.

Beginning in the outskirts of the rural fictional town of Dusk, Pennsylvania, you’ll traverse through dark and desolate farmlands, Ukrainian and Chernobyl Zone inspired factories, and massive cathedrals, with a goal to blast cultists away with a fantastic arsenal of weapons at your disposal. You’ll also make your way through damp and rustic swamps and sewers, cause let’s be honest, a retro FPS can’t be a retro FPS without either a swamp or sewer level, so this one has both! The game has this very nice Lovecraftian feel to it, which is a nice breath of fresh air from all these modern military FPS games out there! Andrew Hulshult’s awesome music also helps with painting the atmosphere, and the tunes range from weird ambient sounds to face-melting heavy metal bangers, which make you feel like a god as you demolish your enemies with haste.

The Deck Experience:

DUSK was recently listed as Verified, and after playing it for myself on the Steam Deck, it feels like one of those perfect games to play on Deck. The publisher of DUSK, New Blood Interactive, put a ton of care into the game, which is apparent from the incredible Linux build that was created. 

While I am new to the Deck, and am garbage at DUSK with a controller, I managed to get the hang of it fairly quickly and it feels great to play! It definitely helped that the developer added a weapon wheel, which can be activated holding down RB, to effortlessly switch weapons when in combat. This definitely was a godsend!

DUSK Out of the Box:

DUSK supports the Deck’s native 1280 x 800 resolution out of the box, and it runs amazingly well. Locked at 40fps, in the most demanding level of the campaign I’ve played so far, E2M1, idle wattage is around 6 watts and heavy combat with a lot of particles and effects on screen draws around 6.5 - 7 watts on average, so you can expect to get around 5 ½ to 7 hours of battery life, depending on how heavy the scenes are. 

However, shifting the game up to a 60fps cap is more demanding on the Deck, with the power draw being slightly higher with the heavy combat reaching up to 9 watts, with an expected 4 - 5 hours of battery life, so if you value battery life over performance, I’d recommend locking the game to 40fps. Otherwise, the increase to 60 makes a big difference for not a ton of compromises, so I would stick to 60 in general.

The Deck itself ran surprisingly very cool at most times, with idle temperatures being around 35 - 40 degrees celsius and heavy combat reaching up to 55 - 60 degrees celsius. During testing, I noticed that the FPS cap didn’t seem to change this number at all, but your mileage may vary depending on what level you are playing on. However, from what I’ve played, I can say with confidence that my experience on the Deck is really solid.

DUSK at Max Settings:

DUSK’s graphics settings are fairly minimal with most to do with Field of View, which is very appreciated), and filtering that changes the look of the game with different colours. Out of the box, every setting was turned on, apart from Bilinear Filtering and Bloom which were turned off by default. After turning these on, I revisited the same level to see if there were any differences in performance, temperatures and power draw, and on the max settings, the power draw increased to around 9.6 watts when locked to 60fps, and around 8 watts when locked to 40fps. Thermal temperatures stayed the same, with temps running around 55 - 60 degrees celsius.

Conclusion:

DUSK has been one of my most fondest gaming experiences in the past few years, whether on my desktop Linux PC or on my Steam Deck. It’s a really cool game that is a ton of fun to play. On top of that, it has a kickass soundtrack that, paired with how easy it is to run, is easily one of my favorite FPS experiences so far! I think DUSK will go down in history as a classic a few years down the line when the next generation of aspiring game developers are looking at games for influence. DUSK is the perfect example of an FPS done right! It has made its way into my Top 5 favourite games of all time.

Plus, I have to give props to David Szymanski for developing such a high quality Linux build for DUSK. For fans of full native Linux ports and some damn good games, keep New Blood Interactive on your radar. The performance on the Steam Deck is near flawless and is truly a wonder to play. If you enjoy FPS games, I can guarantee DUSK will be an unforgettable experience. 

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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