The illusion of choice works wonders in parenting and in video games. Allow your children to choose either carrots or peas, and they feel they have control of what they eat while still getting their vegetables. Give gamers the option to be good or evil, flirt with this character or that one, and take road A or B, and they feel their actions matter in the overall story. The game, meanwhile, follows it prearranged routes, sometimes changing rails to appease us. We’re all just playing with the disconnected second controller while our older sibling occasionally acknowledges us.
Choices That Matter: And the Sun Went Out (“Sun”) promises a texted-based adventure in which your decisions carve the story. It features 2,400 either-or choices across its branching pathways. If every choice truly mattered, this game’s scope would overshadow the likes of Breath of the Wild. Sun, let alone any video game of this generation, can’t possibly be this expansive. In actuality, so many of Sun’s choices have no effect, making the game an experiment in the illusion of choice and control. The result of such an experiment is a bloated story which stops every few minutes to ask if you prefer the color blue or shooting someone.
Note: Minor spoilers moving forward.
What is it?
As the title suggests, And the Sun Went Out follows an unnamed investigator as they learn why the sun is disappearing and how to guarantee it stays. In the course of doing so, our protagonist will encounter a cult foretelling the end of the world, secret societies which speak of otherworldly energy and human sacrifices, and a growing list of murdered scientists. These exploits will send you globetrotting as the investigator follows directives from the mysterious “Company.” Although the premise has some science fiction underpinnings, your escapades fall more in the action/adventure genres in which mysteries are solved through gunfights and car chases.
The investigator narrates all of the proceedings as text against a black background. They wear a smartwatch which houses an advanced AI, “Moti,” who operates officially as a personal assistant. It’s less HAL 9000 and more Pinocchio who has complete access to the internet, minus social media and porn. Apart from helping the main character discuss plot points, Moti fulfills other AI clichés like providing inconsequential probabilities for success, updating/powering down at inopportune times, misunderstanding figures of speech despite access to the internet, calling humans illogical, and asking basic questions about morality and existence. It also functions as a semi-reliable alarm clock.
The game, itself, plays like a long-winded choose-your-adventure story. You’ll periodically select one of two options to determine what the investigator does or says. This person can’t die prematurely, so your choices will never result in a “dead end.” Instead, your inputs influence which branch you follow in a given story arc. These branches split and converge over the course of Sun’s 15 arcs, culminating in one of several endings.
What’s good?
- With its varied vignettes, And the Sun Went Out likely has a few that will grip you. Two in particular stood out to me, one which follows our narrator into a secret underground facility and another which concerns a cult leader in Italy. The sun outages would make for a compelling mystery as well, if only the overall narrative didn’t devote 90% of its word count to unnecessary plot lines and characters.
What’s up to your preference?
- Similar to Animal Farm, all your choices matter, but some matter more than others. Your choice can:
- impact which branch you take in the next arc
- improve your romantic relationship with one of the two characters
- change what Moti says to you in the final arc
- add an extra paragraph or two before returning you to the script the other choice follows
- do nothing
You’ll make over 500 choices in a single play-through, and 80% of them exist to justify the choice gimmick. So many options relate to whether you act polite or like a dick. The romance options straddle, “We are platonic friends, my friend,” and “My loins burn for you due to our shared trauma.” Some may enjoy how often the game requests their input. I would have preferred 100 important choices over the 2,400 included in Sun.
- At around 600,000 words, Choices That Matter: And the Sun Went Out has a lot of words to read, not including the eight in the title. I played through the story twice, averaging around eight hours per reading, largely due to the massive number of words I had to read. My second go-around allowed me to experience firsthand what happened off-screen during my first reading, with two arcs being the same. Rather than fleshing out the story and world, the alternate pathways highlight the weak arcs in comparison to others. Both of my readings ended in the same way in different locations, hitting home that my choices changed the flavor of the ice cream but not the food itself. Unless high word counts titillate you, Sun’s verbosity makes for a convoluted and protracted adventure rather than a complex one.
What’s bad?
- The plot suffers from poor writing, uneven tone, and plot holes. While murderers rack up their kill count and society crumbles, our protagonist worries about who’s attracted to them, complains about airports, and actively ignores any communication from their boss. Losing the sun will lead to humanity’s complete annihilation, and the narrator seemingly copes with this by chronicling everything they eat in detail. This aimless meandering leads to a bombastic climax in which both named and unnamed characters converge in one country to fight an all-out war—replete with tanks, rocket launchers, B-tier character deaths, and one-liners—against an enemy which has no logical reason to battle our heroes. Worse still, the powers of friendship, love, and soul fix the sun situation, not the aforementioned skirmish which resulted in numerous casualties.
- Sun’s simplistic presentation may have worked for a mobile game, but the Switch port lacks basic staples found in other text-based adventures. You have only one save file and no way of tracking which choices or arcs you encountered in-game. You can backtrack to the beginning of a previous arc but can’t rewind to a choice or hop to any other arc. An autoread function is noticeably absent. The omission of these common features further disincentivizes any additional play-throughs.
- The choices that do matter can be difficult to distinguish, and you often have too little information to reach an informed decision. This problem mainly stems from how little we know of our protagonist. They wield a silver tongue at times, but once you rely on this skill, they trip over their words and into a worse situation. They alternate between James Bond and Austin Powers in terms of combat potential, and you don’t know which one you’ll get in a conflict. The only constant is their ability to shake off consecutive concussions like a bad hangover. By the end of the story, the investigator is thrust into a leadership role when almost anyone else would be more qualified, leaving you to command an operation with little more than gut instinct.
What’s the verdict?
Choices That Matter: And the Sun Went Out resembles Icarus in that they both die to their inflated ambition. Burdened by its obese word and choice count, the story fell to the waters before it could soar. A functional narrative does exist under all the feathers and wax. Those willing to search for it would do better with the mobile version of the story, which can be downloaded for free with ads. Otherwise, the only choice that matters is whether you avoid this sun-mangled mediocrity entirely.
Arbitrary Statistics:
- Score: 5
- Time Played: Over 15 hours
- Number of Players: 1
- Games Like It on Switch: Oxenfree, any Telltale series