There are occasions when a someone sends me an email about their game and I make a super late game audible and switch to that game for the week. This is one of those cases. This week’s game was going to be Caravan Sandwitch but I was shot an email about a narrative game that focused on war and its impact on single individuals. This week we follow a fellow named Nico who is looking for his prestigious friend from the war. This week is Sunset Hills.

Sunset Hills is a narrative game from Cotton Game and published by Asmik Ace, Inc. The game is slated to release on August 20th for the PC and 2025 for the Nintendo Switch. I cannot find how much the game will retail for, but the Kickstarter page has an inkling at around $15-20.

You play as Nico, a veteran of what would be World War I, and follow his adventure in finding his comrades spread all throughout the world. Sometime after the war Nico has published his first book that he carriers with him in his fancy suitcase. Sunset Hills demo, essentially a prologue, takes place solely in the city of Tobik, where a good friend of Nico lives, who is integral to the town’s economy.

Sunset Hills informs the player early that the game is going to be dense in storytelling and character development.

Tobik is quite a large city and it has a lot of people to talk to and puzzles to solve. People have stories that they want to tell and you can choose for yourself if you want to listen to how they managed to live life after the war.

Sunset Hills tasks the player with the main objective of finding Nico’s friend, that’s it. What unfolds is something out of a comedy. You find yourself immediately without a ride into town, then you have to settle a disagreement with two people who got into a car accident, help the maintenance guy with switching fuses, baking bread and somehow you find yourself at a carnival throwing darts for prize tickets.

The pacing which Sunset Hills unfolds is nice and relaxing. It provides the player with lots to do and people to learn from creating a huge interconnected world in the demo alone.

Gameplay is pretty cut and dry. You are clicking where the player wants Nico to go, or using WASD. Interacting with NPC’s is as easy and they provide a lot of backstory and provide the player with puzzles to solve, which is the meat of Sunset Hills.

As you are learning about Tobik, you are given the generic fetch quest and soon enough you are embroiled in an incredibly long quest of who needs what that continues until the end of the prologue. The demo spans quite a long time and a lot of the gameplay can be boiled down to: A resident has a magnet, and you need to get it to get a wrench from a storm drain, the wrench then gives the maintenance guy the ability to open of the thing that allows the bakery to do their thing that gives the person the bread so that they can usher the line to progress the story.

I spent 186 minutes in the prologue and majority of it was connecting fetch quests together.

The other gameplay option are puzzles. There are a good amount of puzzles in Sunset Hills and they provide a meaningful challenge without border lining on complete and utter frustration. These puzzles usually are connected to the fetch quests, for example, the player is tasked with getting candles for a woman and the store owner forces you to construct a puzzle of the woman that you saw in the window.

The puzzles are a break from the laundry list of things that the player and Nico have to keep track of. They are often fun and remind me that I am in fact playing a video game as opposed to a drab point-and-click game.

The art design of Sunset Hills is where it is at. The hand drawn art style is top tier. First off, the autumn colors in the city of Tobik are absolutely beautiful. The “picture book” look gives the city its own unique identity and mix that with the fact that the inhabitants are various breeds of dogs, it then mixes into a really clean, colorful vibrant video game.

Sunset Hills‘ prologue was a blast to play though it was at the last possible moment. I usually like to play these kinds of games with my wife so, she can help me with some of the voices of the numerous people the game introduces to the player, remembering where to go when I get lost and help with the puzzles. The various side quests and objectives kept me engaged with the game. The people that you interact with are often funny and memorable and when they speak with you about issues in their lives, they seem relatable.

Though I don’t play many games like Sunset Hills, I am sure that I can step out of my comfort zone to enjoy this game. The art design alone is enough to recommend the game but the story, characters and gameplay options make the game go over the top.