The End of the Sun review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Magical Slavic adventure burns brightly with its lovely natural scenery, richly drawn characters and folklore-infused story

We take that big glowing orb in the sky for granted, but the sun sustains us with its light and heat. When that warmth is gone and the light is extinguished, so too will be life on our planet. But there are countless figurative, less cosmic ways someone’s world can end as well, and it’s these stories The End of the Sun wants to tell. Through first-person exploration and time travel across the seasons, players will uncover the mysteries and family secrets of a Slavic settlement in an eighteenth-century fantasy reality. In this alternate history story, the people still practice millennium-old rituals and beliefs, so you can expect all kinds of folklore, legends and mythological creatures taking shape before your eyes. It’s a world where fire and the sun are revered and one’s ancestors are constantly remembered, but the love between two people is always the greatest treasure. This is a beautiful game that takes you on a rich magical journey to discover what’s really important, and does it so well it’s sure to warm even the hardest of hearts.

You play as the Ashter, a Slavic sorcerer, in pursuit of a Rarog, a mythological firebird very much resembling the phoenix, only a lot more predatory than you probably imagine. There’s evidence that the Rarog has roosted in a small valley in Poland, so you must travel there to lure it out of hiding and catch it before it burns everything to the ground. In the meantime, you’ll witness the valley’s inhabitants living simple lives influenced by the all too real myths and legends surrounding them.

At first glance, the valley is a very peaceful place that’s a joy to freely explore. The development team certainly did their research, visiting several museums, scanning historical objects and even entire buildings to make everything as authentic as possible. And if I were a botanist, I’d probably recognize each plant and tree thanks to the high level of photorealistic graphics. At one point, as I was ascending a zigzagging mountain trail, looking down into the valley, I really felt like I was back on one of my summer hiking trips in Austria. The skies are alive with birds and butterflies, though I did miss seeing other animals on the ground or splashing in the river. But even without that, the scenery is absolutely gorgeous – more so because there are four entirely different variations of it, one unique to each season of the year, which all exhibit incredibly accurate detail.

Ambient sound helps bring this stunning world to life. You’re constantly surrounded by birdsong, buzzing insects, the blowing of the wind, rushing water, and crackling fires. To top it all off, The End of the Sun features a unique soundtrack of modern compositions of traditional Slavic music, written especially for this game. It doesn’t play the entire time, but kicks in at key points of the narrative and whenever you discover new regions on the map. The score is a mix of serene ballads, chants, instrumental pieces featuring primarily flutes, fiddles and bombastic drums when the story turns really dramatic, and even songs performed in the area’s native language, which are thankfully subtitled. (The normal spoken dialogue is subtitled as well but performed in English).

Viewing the lovely 3D environment in first-person perspective, I started out playing with the mouse and keyboard but quickly changed to a controller purely out of personal preference. I suffered a case of motion sickness after the first two hours, so I adjusted the settings to get rid of the head bobbing and motion blurring for a smoother experience. I think it was triggered because I was running everywhere in-game (which requires constantly holding down the run button), since the regular walking pace was way too slow to my liking.

And there is a lot of wandering involved, with plenty of backtracking to find an item in one location to use in another. I tried moving in a straight line from place to place, but eventually ended up having to take the long way around following regular paths, since you can’t climb or jump down elevations. There are many items and documents to inspect on your journey, with hotspots visually indicated by little bold x’s. Get close enough and a tap of the action button reveals information about them. You might be able to pick one up for a closer look, turning it around to view it from all sides, or maybe even take it with you.

It’s worth the effort to be thorough, as every completed task is rewarded with a cutscene of the valley inhabitants’ story, which is at the heart of the End of the Sun experience. During these cinematics, you can still move around and watch the interaction play out from any angle you desire. Finish a series of linked tasks, and you get not only a great feeling of accomplishment, but also new insight into the overarching storyline via drone-like aerial views.

Each character is masterfully voiced, and the Ashter himself plays the part of the narrator. Occasionally he will explain the current objective, but it doesn’t feel artificial. It’s as if he’s simply talking to himself, letting you know what needs to be done without explicitly guiding you through the gameplay mechanics or user interface. The first people you see are Mira and Nadarim, a young couple who could very much be in love if Nadarim wouldn’t screw up so often. The game starts with them performing some kind of ritual, only to be violently interrupted by the Rarog, assuring the Ashter he’s in the right place. Nadarim’s parents are Dalim and Dobromila, who have sorrows of their own. Then there’s Samodiva, a seductive water nymph who’s central to the main plotline, basically messing up the human relationships as you probably can imagine. There are a couple of surprising extras in some lighter scenes as well.

The End of the Sun

Genre:	Fantasy, Mystery
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Cultural, Magical, Time travel
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Photorealism
Gameplay:	Quest
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

I found the female characters far more interesting than the males. Nadarim is a bit of a douche, to be honest, and I often wondered what Mira was doing with him. His father Dalim comes across as either a naive brute or a nutjob, though it is obvious he loves his family and can show a gentler touch when he really wants to. But it’s clearly the women holding the valley together. Mira is a sweet girl with lots of love to give, but also very mature about it and never prone to rash action. Dobromila is the perfect example of a mother and wife, caring for her husband and son, and it soon becomes obvious these two are helpless without her. Unlike in most games, none of these characters are ever aware of your presence. Draw too close to them and they will vanish from your sight in a shower of golden sparks, though you can still hear them talk. You can only influence their paths through life indirectly by making changes to their timelines, which represents the main part of The End of the Sun’s magical gameplay.

The Ashter’s special powers revolve around fire. The land is scattered with hearths and bonfires, some extinguished and others still smoldering. Your main objective is to relight all of them. While you don’t have any fire of your own and thus can’t simply re-ignite any that have gone out, you CAN bring the smoldering ones to life again by completing a handful of connected quests. Each smoldering fire will spew forth two or three smoke trails. Following these leads you to “traces of time,” which are usually vague, glittering golden shapes of missing items from past events that you need to make whole. You will see a vision or memory of the valley’s inhabitants trying to accomplish something but failing because of those missing items. Since they can’t succeed on their own, the vision will go into a comically fast rewind, and then it’s up to you to search that earlier time for the required object, which can be simply lying nearby, or hidden away in another season.

For instance, in an early scenario during a summer solstice ritual, the women make flower wreaths, set them afloat on the river, and the men downstream have to catch them. Nadarim is too slow, however, so Mira’s wreath quickly drifts out of reach. When the vision rewinds, you can search downstream for the runaway wreath, then go back and place it strategically somewhere that prevents it from drifting away. After putting it into place, you can rewatch the vision, and this time it will play out the way it’s supposed to, with Nadarim simply picking up the wreath and returning it to his love.

Interacting with the bonfires always initiates a cool “passage of time” animation and a time-freezing sound effect as if you’re being submerged or caught in a vacuum. You will see shadows pass very quickly, clouds rush by overhead, and day suddenly turn to night to indicate that you have just journeyed to a different time. In effect, you, as the Ashter, are playing with timestreams. It’s not clear whether you are creating alternate timelines this way, changing the past, or if you are simply acting as Fate and arranging the right circumstances the way the situation was always supposed to be. What’s important is the influence of your actions on the lives of the valley people.

Once a bonfire is blazing again, you can meditate by it and thus enter another plane of existence. The Slavic equivalent of the Norse Yggdrasil Life Tree stands in the middle of this other dimension, connecting the four seasons, only here they’re allegorical as much as they are literal. You will need to switch between these seasons, each personified by the statue of a different god. An extinguished bonfire in one season will still be smoldering in another, and thus available for the Ashter to manipulate. Making changes in one season might open up previously blocked pathways in another, like enabling a mason to build a new stone bridge after the wooden one has collapsed in the spring so you can cross over to the other side in the summer. In effect, when traveling between the seasons, more actual time passes than you would think. Travel to autumn and Nadarim will sport love handles and a full beard. Travel to spring and he’s a young child again, trying very hard to earn the approval of his parents.

Succeed in igniting a fire and you are granted a feather of the Rarog. Collect all of them and you can summon the bird and lead The End of the Sun towards its conclusion. There’s only one possible ending, but your path leading there in one playthrough can be very different from another. The open world gives you the freedom to choose the order of bonfires to light. Some fires are definitely linked, because of a particular puzzle designed around them; some will only become available after others have been lit, but every season has several bonfires to choose from. In this way you compile the story of the valley, sometimes going back in time, sometimes going forward. The fun is in seeing all the pieces connect in the end, as if you’re reading a book with all its chapters scattered to the wind, just waiting to be found in whatever order.

There’s lots of lore to pick up on in your travels, some required to progress and others just for educational value. Often you’ll see strange objects lying around that you can’t use, but you can read about their historical everyday function in the Slavic community through pop-up descriptions. At one point you’ll wind up in the ruins of a fallen kingdom embedded in the face of a mountain, with skeletons everywhere and diary pages strewn around. You need to gather these papers not only to grasp what transpired there but also to find the code of symbols to unblock a mystic barrier protecting the grave of the old king.

Along the way you will encounter mythical creatures like will o’ the wisps, a domovoy (a sort of leprechaun or house elf) and drowners – zombie-like toddlers that fell victim to raging river waters who now return to shore to steal away even more innocent souls. These drowners CAN see and harm you, but since you can’t die in The End of the Sun, they will only make you faint and waken again somewhere nearby. The game autosaves each time you successfully light a fire and enter the seasonal plane. You also have one manual save slot, so you can record your progress and leave anytime you wish. There’s never a reason to reload a previously saved game mid-session, however, because you can’t really do anything wrong, nor are there any decisions you might have wanted to make differently in hindsight.

I was expecting a more complicated game when I first started playing, but I was happy to discover how accessible it was with its combination of exploration, fetch quests and solving puzzles. Following young Nadarim’s scavenger hunt and completing an alchemist’s recipe to release a captured wood spirit are just some of the fun and clever puzzles required to uncover the heartfelt stories of this small group of people simply trying to make the best of life.

What helps the most in making the game accessible is the in-game map you find right at the start. I can imagine this nine-hour game taking far longer if you had to rely on your own devices to keep track of everything. Opening up as an overlay with the tap of a button, this map of the region is blank at first, but as you explore it will be automatically updated with pathways and points of interest. There’s no quick travel option and it doesn’t show your current position, so you really have to use it like an old-school paper map to figure out where you are in relation to your surroundings.

Crucially, however, the map does show the locations of the bonfires and color codes them – white ones are extinguished, black ones are still smoldering – but only for the season you currently occupy. The map automatically adapts itself to each new season you visit, and all fires are numbered, indicating the season in which they can be manipulated. When you are trying to solve the puzzles involved with a particular bonfire, it will turn blue on the map, and when you have completed one, it turns red.

While most of your adventure is filled with mystery and drama, the developers didn’t shy away from adding a layer of humor as well. There’s a prank Nadarim and Dalim play on Dobromila, and a domovoy riddle elicits funny dialogue from the creature. In another scenario, Dalim is talking gibberish and acting very strangely as the result of a self-concocted mushroom potion to better commune with the gods. To understand him, the Ashter says, you need to drink from it yourself. What follows is a hilarious psychedelic trip through a version of this world with bright colors, giant mushrooms, talking bees and wooden statues, while Dalim grows and shrinks as if he were Alice in Wonderland.

Final Verdict

The End of the Sun deserves to be played at a leisurely pace to fully take in the amazing surroundings. The slow walking speed is remedied by the run button, but it’s a shame to hurry through this magnificent world. The scenic valley quickly feels like a real place, especially when you experience it through the various seasons and observe its inhabitants in different periods of their lives. Most of the gameplay might be a tad too easy for experienced adventurers, but each puzzle is unique and very much rooted in the legends, folklore and rituals of these Slavic people. The drama of human relationships and the mystery of the firebird Rarog and its regular apparitions are sure to ward off any boredom that might otherwise occur from of all the backtracking between locations. Dramatic events are leavened by humorous episodes in a narrative coated with a layer of love and romance while displaying a deep respect for traditions and one’s ancestral roots. Clearly nothing was done half-heartedly in the development of this game, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. It definitely sparked my own wanderlust, and is sure to kindle the interest of anyone who appreciates exploring other historical cultures. 

Johnny played The End of the Sun on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.   

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