There are so many reflective surfaces in Sunset, you can’t forget that you are a physical presence in its opulent 1970s apartment, a woman of color in a wealthy man’s space.
The core concept of Sunset is that you play as Angela Burnes, a young American in the fictional nation of Anchuria who comes to this apartment around sunset to do some housekeeping tasks. The apartment is only yours during that liminal time when the sky shifts rapidly from orange to purple and a shadowy gloom increasingly fills the space. You leave promptly once the sun sets and you and the apartment’s resident, Gabriel Ortega, don’t meet. When the time is up, you have to get out. It’s a beautiful place but it’s not your place anymore.
This structure suggests that Ortega doesn’t want to see the labor that goes into keeping his life neat and comfortable, and it could have been used by Sunset as a point from which to engage in a real exploration of class issues and privilege. But while Sunset sometimes brushes up against such issues, it does so in a toothless, feel-good way that, at least in my playthrough, ultimately romanticized the imbalance between Gabriel and Angela rather than critiquing it.
After a certain point, it started to seem arbitrary that the two characters don’t meet. The only real reason for it seemed to be that the game wanted to tell a story about two people who haven’t met. And while I found the narrative justification for this lacking, I went along with it, because I wanted to see how the game would explore a connection between two characters who don’t meet face-to-face or speak on the phone but only communicate in notes left in the apartment.
Even though you’re all alone in the apartment of Gabriel Ortega, there’s a powerful, and in some ways troubling, feeling of intimacy that runs through Sunset. It’s the kind of intimacy that exists not between two people but between one person and the absence of another person. The kind of intimacy that can’t hold up to the harsh light of day; a perfect, conceptual intimacy that would invariably be shattered by the other person’s presence. In the shattering, it would perhaps be replaced by something more real, something simultaneously better and less perfect, but it would inevitably be a different intimacy altogether.
As a player, I wanted to explore this intimacy of absence and see how far the game let me take it, even while, as Angela, I felt like I was letting myself get carried away, and that things weren’t entirely appropriate. On one level, you and Gabriel become partners, working together to do what you can to undermine Anchuria’s oppressive regime.
But at the same time, even as you’re passing information from Ortega on to your brother’s rebel network or…whatever, exactly, it is you do to help undermine the regime (all these actions take place offscreen and are summed up by Angela in voiceover), Ortega is still giving you tasks to do as an employee, as a housekeeper. Sunset doesn’t look closely at the complexities, the power imbalances, and the potential improprieties of a dynamic like this. And I’m frustrated by that. Angela is a socially conscious woman with a history of activism and political awareness. I wish that in her diary entries and voiceovers, she’d thought about this stuff more. And while I very much appreciated all of her diary entries about body image and socially constructed notions of beauty, and about duality and wholeness…
…and about the true value and power of art and specifically the meaning that the African art in Ortega’s apartment has for her as a Black woman, there were also times when her diary entries seemed too much like the stuff of head-in-the-clouds political fantasy for a game that wanted to raise real political concerns. She describes pre-coup Anchuria as a kind of social utopia free of racism and sexism.
And I thought, you don’t need to sell pre-coup Anchuria as an enlightened society that has left racism and sexism behind to convince me that the current regime is bad.
But as much as I wanted the game to more closely examine the power differential between Angela and Gabriel, in the interests of meeting Sunset on its own terms I was also trying to roleplay as Angela, and I guess that I have to admit that if I were letting myself get swept off my feet by the idea of someone I’d never even met (which was a choice I was making for Angela as the player by generally responding to the notes Gabriel left around his apartment with the warmer and sometimes more romantic response option), I might not examine those things very closely either. Not thinking about them made it easier to believe that what I was feeling for Gabriel was a real, reciprocated connection, not just a fantasy.
As I spent more time in the apartment and the signs of my presence in it became more apparent, I started to wonder, Is this connection mostly in my head? Does Gabriel feel it, too? And if he does, then his connection is with the absence of me in the same way that my connection is with the absence of him, our presence in each other’s lives no more substantial than that of a ghost.
I would ask myself if the things I’m doing here in the apartment, the decorative touches, the bits of personality, make him feel more connected to me the way they make me feel more connected to him. Does he even notice? Sometimes the art book on his coffee table is open to a specific page and Angela reads meaning into it but is he really doing it to communicate with her or does she just enjoy imagining that he’s doing so? That’s the thing about a connection you feel to the absence of someone–it can be whatever you want it to be, because it doesn’t have to accommodate reality.
There’s a wall calendar in the apartment that you can set to the current date. I always enjoyed doing this for some reason.
Then there was a period of time when Gabriel was away, not staying in his apartment, and I updated the calendar, and then I felt like a sinking feeling. This action that had previously been meaningful to me in some small way was no longer meaningful because he wasn’t around. What was the point?
On one visit, I let a sultry song fill the air as a fire crackled in the fireplace. I was alone but it felt romantic, because I felt like the apartment was a reflection not just of Gabriel but of Gabriel and of me. Something we had made together.
Sometimes we can be with another person and feel completely alone. Sometimes we can be alone but feel deeply connected to another person. You hold on to whatever you can, even if it’s not real, and when you’re on your own in the purple shadows of sunset, just knowing that a certain person is out there can make a difference.