Sunset: Shall I Project A World?

Day 9. It was 1972.
I washed the dishes. I sat on the couch and scribbled a reply to a note on the table left by my employer. I briefly wondered how my brother was doing and then, slowly, I stepped out onto the deck of Gabriel Ortega’s penthouse and watched a city burn as the sun sank beneath the skyscrapers.
Just another day in San Bavón.
Sunset, a first-person game from Tale of Tales, exists somewhere between the grand love story of Casablanca and the softly spoken pain of Raymond Carver’s characters. It is a game of startling beauty housing quiet but immense ambition. As Angela Burnes, a black American immigrant housekeeper working for a mysterious man in San Bavón, Anchuria, you will mop floors and arrange books alphabetically and unpack boxes.
This sounds dull, doesn’t it? Luckily, Tales makes these actions rewarding. The first thing you do in Sunset is unpack the penthouse for your boss, a rich, mopey slob named Gabriel Ortega. When people talk about the environmental storytelling in Gone Home, they often discuss how much of a big deal it was just to turn the lights on in every room, how that helped make the Greenbriar house feel like a familiar place. The unpacking in Sunset accomplishes this same goal, making us build the home we’ll be spending the next real-time few hours occupying while letting us know how Angela feels about the whole situation.
The opening narration, and the thoughts that are presented to the player as text from time to time, reveal Angela to be a woman filled with resentment about her position and a fire in her heart for rebellion. She tells us about her and her brother fleeing America to Anchuria in search of a new, better life filled with opportunities not available to them at home, only to find a different kind of misery. Angela, an activist, is often annoyed with Ortega’s place of privilege as a wealthy man with political power who doesn’t really do anything except fill his apartment with works of art, statutes and paintings that suggest a sort of dull playboy who wants to impress people with an illusory intellect and taste. Of course, like everything else in the game, the narrative context of that artwork collection eventually shifts.