- Charming world full of characters to meet
- Fun puzzles to solve
- Lots of areas to explore
Sunset Hills is a visually stunning point-and-click adventure game where you play as Nico, a war veteran who is looking to visit his friends from the war. Though you haven't seen them in a while, you are now looking to travel around the world and visit your friends.
Sunset Hills is divided into chapters, and each takes place in a different city where you're looking for a different friend. The first of which is Tobik, where you get off a train and miss your bus, seeing your first hurdle when it comes to actually getting to see your friends.
There are lots of different puzzles to solve and people to interact with, though I did have a little bit of trouble figuring out who and what I should be interacting with. Sometimes, there are bubbles that appear above the things or people you can interact with, but other times, that's just not the case. I also found it a bit clunky when using items from the inventory - though it's easy to combine them, sometimes I wished I could try using them and fail, as I did feel like it was time to do so.
Going around the town of Tobik, which feels like a very small seaside town, is filled with little quests and puzzles to help the various people who live there. Many of them are very curious about you and about your connection to the richest people in town, giving you bits of story to understand the person you are visiting.
The focus of Sunset Hills isn't these individuals, however - it's instead your journey. Some of the story itself felt a little off to me, with phrasings not making a huge amount of sense in English, but it was still fun to read and solve the various puzzles.
Once you have visited Doug, you are then skipping forward in time to the second chapter, without much of an ending, bringing you to a new town with a new friend to visit, more puzzles to solve, and more interesting characters to help. It's a cosy slow burner of a game, with very captivating art.
Sunset Hills review - "Beautiful, captivating world"
Sunset Hills is a cosy point-and-click adventure game that has a lot of charm to it. I do wish that the game itself were a bit clearer, but overall, it's a good adventure!
Jupiter Hadley
Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, and judges many jams and events. You can find her on Twitter as @Jupiter_Hadley