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Angela Burnes, a protagonist you only see caught in the reflections of the surfaces that she dutifully polishes, is a kind of inverse Cinderella. Each day, as housekeeper to a wealthy businessman, Gabriel Ortega, she must carry out a number of chores. She hangs his pictures, waters his plants, cleans his ashtrays, polishes his silver and scrubs the floors of his ludicrously sumptuous penthouse apartment, which overlooks the higgledy skyline of the fictional Latin American capital San Bavón, all winking skyscrapers and nodding cranes. The clock is ticking. You have one hour to guide Burnes through her to-do list. At sundown, you are banished from the property, regardless of whether or not the day's work is done.Many video games replicate the rhythms and routines of human labour. In Sunset there is no metaphor: your time in the game is spent padding around the penthouse (the design of which was directly taken from concept sketches of the ideal bachelor pad in a 1970 issue of Playboy magazine), clicking on points of interaction to perform your duties as a cleaner. You may choose to put a record on the player, or to listen to the radio, or to admire your employer's latest fine art purchase. But Sunset, at its most rudimentary level, is a housework simulator. And even viewed through this most basic lens, it's effective. "There's a kind of peace, wiping away the grime," says Burnes of her work, early in the game. Indeed, the routine grows comforting. Sunset offers you achievable goals and, in a curious way, as you set the date on Ortega's chic calendar for the umpteenth time, you take honest pride in your toil. It becomes soothingly ritualistic.
This is not, however, a pure labour sim. Like Papers, Please, a game in which you play as an immigration inspector for a fictional European country, the work merely provides context and framework for a more ambitious storyline. Outside the apartment the country of Anchuria is troubled. You learn of this via Burne's daily commentary, spoken over the daily chores (and voiced by the actress Tina Marie Murray) and via the sights and sounds of revolution - the screaming jets, the pitter-patter of gunfire, the bulging black smoke of city fires, the raining ash - which can be encountered on the apartment's balcony. Every time you arrive for the next day's work there is change and movement. Some of this change can be seen at a purely domestic level: a new piano here, an Arco lamp there, an occasional re-decoration (the opulence seems to breed at least till, later in the game, it declines), and a window broken by a stray bullet. But change is also communicated by the clues Ortega (with whom you interact only through the occasional flirty note left on a sideboard) leaves around his home. He is, you soon learn, involved.
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