If you’re going to make a point to attribute yourself to important influences, you need to be exceedingly careful how you make the execution stick. If your game is Metroid meets Harry Potter, I’m expecting some magical level progression, good exploration and potentially at least one comment about trans rights that’s deeply upsetting. For Sunset High, they chose to list themselves as having two major influences: Disco Elysium and Donnie Darko. The former being one of the most lauded games of all times in terms of engagement and dialogue expansion, the latter being a cult favorite of the turn of the century crowd. Both are positively iconic in their own way, though attracting very different audiences. But there is a major difference that separates the source material from Sunset High: neither Disco nor Donnie were so damn boring,

Okay, I do like that texting in the middle of the night is now a trope within these kind of games.

The premise is potentially interesting. You play a high school student who clearly has affections for his classmate, with whom he is texting one faithful night. The next day, your crush is gone, seemingly transferred in the middle of the year, with no explanation and no real reason why or how. It feels like the student body and the faculty know something, but everyone is being tight lipped. Between those who wish to keep the secret at all costs and those willing to talk for a price, the information and secrets come with equal parts cunning, intimidation and bribery in order to find out the truth. There’s no way you’ll be able to understand everyone the very first time, so it’s a good thing that you appear to be stuck in a time loop. You’ll begin the day over and over again, starting from zero but retaining some knowledge.

The execution of Sunset High has ups and downs. You engage with your classmates in dialogue parlays that have different bits available depending on how much you’ve unlocked in your notebook during the current run and previous conversations. Many of the beats need to be done in a specific order to move things forward. For example, you’ll have to get one character to coyly suggest he knows something before you then can figure out how to lean on him in order to extract the information. Owing to the aforementioned Disco Elysium influence, this approach can come one of three ways, as your personas will allow you to speak in ways that are more intelligent, more flattering or more…confrontational. Choosing one approach may decrease the effectiveness of another persona during your current time loop, so choose carefully. You’ll need to hone your speech skills well to level up each persona.

Time to get through class in the best way: by being a hyperaggressive dick!

The good part is, once you begin locking in on a set approach, the game’s options will open up more easily. For example, you’ll progress more swiftly in the beginning if you invest your energy and time into being the more aggressive personality style. This enables you to specifically interact with one character who can fast track the discovery of information you might not otherwise pick up. However, as a result, you lock out conversational advantages with other NPCs, including some important details that you’d get from your lab partner for the day’s loop. This up and down approach might seem fairly obvious to anyone who’s played Disco Elysium: after all, the sheer number of ways you can approach the story is what made the indie darling such a force in the larger, more critical media.

Yet, Sunset High’s decision to make the paths so segmented, while also relying on their time loop approach, is what can make it frustrating. That is, time loops often give players a chance to get things right or to improve their approach with knowledge from the past: this applies to both roguelike games and more on-the-nose approaches like Deathloop. But the stat choices you make hamper the game and, honestly, I’m not sure if it’s an artificial approach to inflating the game’s time. If you want to try a different persona, you’ll potentially lose all points made in the last loop. By sticking to one trait, you set yourself up for either just brute forcing conversations until your persona’s choices can be utilized OR you can keep exploring dialogue decisions to see what you like best, taking much longer but ultimately giving you more of a feel for the world.

The deductive persona now working on talking about trees.

And there are aspects of the world that keep it interesting. Using high school as a backdrop makes the inner dialogue of the protagonist even more fitting, as that was a time of extreme emotions and, let’s be honest, main character syndrome. While I would have liked to have the monologing read aloud, being able to read it in large chunks at a time is perfectly serviceable. Not to mention the dramatic, waxing poetic nonsense that bubbles forth from our MC’s lips fit both the media they’re homaging as well as the general tone of everything. Hell, if it wasn’t a video game, I’d assume the girl you liked just went on vacation and forgot to tell you, and all of this conspiracy is just within his mind.

Not to mention the characters of Sunset High are visually on point. The pixelated art style gives great definition to the characters of jocks, nerds, preps and other Breakfast Club stereotypes that populate the world at large, and their conversation points are on brand as well. There are aspects of it, though, that sometimes take me out of the story altogether. For example, there’s this whole roundabout engagement where I’m trying to get information, and one person needs a favor and then another, etc. But one of the characters asks to borrow someone else’s vape pen, and, upon getting it, they…use it. In the classroom. Look, I know I’m a couple decades removed from schooling, but vaping in the classroom? There’s no goddamn way a teacher just says “alright, put away your contraband and pay attention.” Is smoking okay as long as it smells like cotton candy?

Then why even give me the fight button, huh? Don’t tease me like that, bro.

Additionally, from a technical standpoint, Sunset High doesn’t feel great as a keyboard or controller only experience. If the devs are hoping for a console port eventually, I suppose that works, but I’m playing it on PC right now. There’s this thing called a mouse: it’s been used since time immemorial for pointing and clicking: hell, a whole genre exists to support it. But I can’t do that here, and it makes me absolutely infuriated. The biggest things in the world would be being able to point and click over the various objects I can interact with to trigger more dialogue, which exists and can be both informative and fascinating. Instead, I have to try and navigate non-straight pathways with a controller, and awkwardly face the right direction to begin interaction. It’s a massive miss on a fundamental level to me, and it drops the playability significantly.

At the end of the day, though, the story is what lands the plane, and the tale of Sunset High is enough to capture the attention of players who are looking for this sort of thing. We now live in a world where games can shape a person’s entire personality for a bit. From Undertale to Omori, from A Space for the Unbound to Until Then, players are taking away something from games that speak to them. Sadly, for someone who has already lived through these moments and is on the other side (read: I’m old), the youthful petulance of it all doesn’t strike a chord. I watched the Gyllenhaals make hay out of a truly bizarre time travel movie, and it was wonderful. It had the right pace and energy to captivate me. I’m not that young man anymore, so attempts to emulate it fall on deaf ears. 

Do I have to?

Sunset High is a day late and a buck short. Having to repeat the same nonsense again and again to slowly unlock some new information doesn’t feel like I’m gradually learning more, it feels like I’m stuck in a Tik Tok that’s mashing up Twin Peaks with Sixteen Candles but trying to keep it modern. I didn’t care for the controls, the progression is bizarre, and the entire event was flat and empty. This might really appeal to some folk, but, as the “target” audience for their inspiration material, it wasn’t for me, and continued to not be for me. I already finished high school: good luck getting back into that mix if it’s really what you want.

Sunset High is available now on Steam.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Sunset High was provided by the publisher.