Without a Dawn is a dark, psychological, and philosophical visual horror novel featuring a hauntingly beautiful pseudo-ASCII art developed by award-winning Finnish solo developer Jesse Makkonen (DISTRAINT -series, Afterdream, Heal).
Quality presentation can only take a visual novel so far when both its script and choices feel so false.
Without a Dawn is a powerful and moving, albeit short, experience. A distilled shot of emotion and anxiety wrapped into a surreal package. It made me feel deeply uncomfortable in all the ways art like this is meant to.
How to begin summarising an experience like Without a Dawn? For all its brutality, there’s a gentleness, even something delicate about how it presents its themes. Mental illness can be the harshest of things, but telling these stories can’t be as rough, as people wouldn’t be able to listen. Jesse Makkonen sticks the landing beautifully, though, with...
Without a Dawn feels down-to-earth, even small-scale compared to Jesse Makkonen's previous games, but at the same time it's a truly heavy experience. The visual novel takes you straight into darkness, both literally and figuratively.
Without a Dawn is an ideal experience for playing games at night with headphones, and overall it is a very strong one-liner - a melancholic “bedtime story” for adult souls.
