October is the perfect month for silly spooky Halloween games, so here’s a review by my friend Robbie Allen. It’s a downloadable PC title called Final Dusk, and in it you play as a vampire girl as she sets out to save her family from a witch who turned them all into stone! Check it out!

Halloween is slowly creeping upon us, and with All Hallows’ Eve comes vampires, and with vampires comes video games about vampires, and one such game is Final Dusk, and that’s how I’ll start this review.

Final Dusk takes place in an alternate world filled with demons and controlled by a royal family of vampires. However when the king of the vampires upsets a powerful witch, the witch casts a spell on the royal family that turns them into stone. You play as Mina, the daughter of the royal family who avoided the spell being cast on her because she was grounded for putting garlic in cook’s food. Yes, the game has a rather tongue in cheek sense of humor about the characters being monsters, this plus the expressive still frame cutscenes gives this game a bit of a Disgaea feel and charm that I do love.

As you can expect, despite being a brat, Mina still loves her family, and wishes to help return them to their original form. The only problem is, morning is coming and the touch of sunlight will turn Mina instantly to stone, this is where the main gameplay is focused. Each level consists of you controlling Mina’s bat familiar, Ren, as you help Mina get to the end of each level without being exposed by sunlight. You do this in a variety of clever gameplay mechanics that mostly revolve around moving furniture around the castle to block open windows, or by getting help from your batty brethren to block areas. There’s also cloves of garlic hidden around the level that you can collect for bonus points.

For all the clever gameplay and cute graphics, Final Dusk has one major issue: some of the controls are a bit counterintuitive or just plain awkward. The most annoying one is moving the screen around to see other parts of the level. In most games you’d hold left click with the mouse and then move around the screen to see what’s ahead or above you. That’s not the case here, instead you have to hold the right mouse button and move it around. This wouldn’t be so bad if the tutorial mentioned this, but it doesn’t, and it admittedly it took me a while to figure it out. It may sound like a simple issue, but it goes against a long standing history of game controls and isn’t something one would naturally try. This isn’t the only weird control setup, but it’s by far the most annoying one.

Overall Final Dusk is a fun, silly, and clever game perfect for the Halloween season. The gameplay can admittedly get a little repetitive and the controls have some flaws, but if you can get past those, I’m sure you’ll get bitten by this game’s charming atmosphere and creative gameplay elements.

Kid Factor:

Since this game takes such a silly and relaxed look at a lot of monster mythologies, I can’t see anything that kid’s would find scary or that their parents would find offensive. So if you have a kid who likes simple puzzle games like Angry Birds, they will most likely enjoy this game as well. Could make a Halloween game the whole family can enjoy. –Robbie Allen

Tags: Reader Reviews!