This certainly shouldn't have caused its studio's demise, but having played it twice I find it really frustrating. The central gameplay premise is promising: there's a revolution happening, but you're a housekeeper. You watch history unfold through the windows of your wealthy employer's magnificent vintage apartment. As you accomplish your mundane tasks, you hear your character's nuanced thoughts on the world around her. Maybe you decide not to accomplish those tasks after all and just sit around on your employer's plush furniture. Listen to his records. You know, role-playing.

The trouble is, the game insists on tying its protagonist in with the revolution story that's going on outside. Her brother is a revolutionary and she has the opportunity to use her connection to her employer to help him. This feels like a lack of commitment to me: a sop to notions of "player agency," when what really matters here is the protagonist's inner life and not her influence over the world around her.

Worse, the game invites us to make a series of binary choices that inform a romance subplot that makes absolutely no sense for the character. Again, a sop to the notion of "agency." I would have far preferred to be given choices for how to spend my time in this apartment that have no ultimate consequence for the story but that reflect the protagonist's interiority in some way.

Sunset is a complicated thing that I wish I liked better. It's well worth playing, because there's nothing like a noble failure.