How many times in your school years did you wonder where you fit in? How many times did you wish you could rewind awkward social interactions and try a different outcome? These are the kinds of teenage angst that serve as some of the building blocks for Turnip Games’ Sunset High. But that’s just a taste of what it has to offer.
You see, Sunset High is a detective noir game that just so happens to be set in a high school. You are an outsider student who is investigating the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student, and you must navigate the cliques of high school life as you try to get to the bottom of it all.
However, there’s another wrinkle to this story. The player character is trapped in a time loop that complicates the investigation, but they have some control over this. They can rewind and fast-forward time within this loop, discovering new information that could lead to a resolution of all their problems.
I spoke with Turnip Games’ writer and coder David Wert about the game’s use of time-manipulation, cinematic influences, handling expansive player choice, and high school cliques.
Neil Bolt: Time manipulation and time loops are a massive part of Sunset High. Was this always going to be at the forefront, or did it evolve with experimentation and time?
David Wert: Sunset High was an idea, believe it or not, that had been ten years in the making. I always knew I wanted to make a game that is steeped in this Americana lore of the high school experience. I also knew I wanted the main theme of the game to be obsession. What was less clear to me was how I could marry these two things to find harmony in the primary mechanic and the theme I wanted to play with.
Fast-forward (ha, get it?) eight or so years, the idea of a time loop came to me in the bouts of a sleepless night. What better way to ask your player to be obsessive than to keep them doing the same thing again and again. There are, of course, cons to this. Players can easily get bored, not only with the limited space they interact with, more so being asked to see the same things again and again with hopes of change. I figured, if movies like The Breakfast Club could get away with primarily taking place in one room, why not a video game?
The more unique mechanics, rewinding and fast-forwarding, arose through experimentation. To reduce this friction in our playtests, we began ideating. I was already hopping between moments in class using our objective system when I was testing the game, so why not empower the player? It became clear, If we are in a time loop, let’s let the player be the master of how they manipulate the passage of time. Let’s let the player own the loop.
Only time will tell if we’ve reduced the friction enough for the player to enjoy the experience.
NB: You’ve given your story a modern noir flavour, and two things came to mind for me almost instantly: Under the Silver Lake and Rian Johnson’s Brick. Were they influences by any chance?
DW: That is incredibly keen! Brick was one of the biggest influences on the genesis of the idea. I think the noir genre fits so well within the halls of a high school due to the emotional gravitas that everything carries at that time. Rian Johnson did so well in achieving this. I especially love this self-serious lexicon that creates an almost absurd tone. I love the line, “Who do you lunch with?” It really encapsulates how serious everything is at the time, but at the end of the day, these are just kids. We love wearing our references on our sleeve, and players will see a Brick poster in the protagonist’s room in the first text in the night scene.
Under the Silver Lake came out after the idea had seeded itself into my mind so it may have less of a direct influence, but it is a movie I have found myself returning to again and again. I am heavily drawn to the tone of the movie – this listless malaise that hangs over the main character’s head. I think our main character also heavily leans into this aimlessness, a lack of meaning. We all hope we can become the main character of a grand triumphant arc, and in a sense, the disappearance of K_____ is the call to action for just that. Wherein before, the protagonist is the new kid who would wander the school like a ghost, now their life has meaning.
Leading up to the development of the game, my friend and I would do research by watching noirs, and we re-watched both Brick and Under the Silver Lake as part of that journey.
NB: With the rewind function, players can revisit other possibilities of their interactions and actions. With a teenage outlook in the game, do you think that feels quite fitting when navigating the ‘what ifs?’ and imagined scenarios of social interaction at that age?
DW: Absolutely. As humans, we are put into the throes of the metamorphosis of puberty and then locked away in a building with our peers and not much guidance, and told to figure it out. I think it is incredibly natural to look at this period of your life as rife with regrets. Add these pressures of social and academic ladders, and needing to balance the two, and who wouldn’t have any regrets? So there is a huge textural richness in terms of storytelling to live out the fantasy of “if I had just said that, I bet I would have been friends with the popular kid.”
This is why the rewind mechanic is so thematically rich. It gives players a way to live out those fantasies. Prevent embarrassment, curry favor, what have you. It’s a tool that lets players explore not only alternate outcomes but alternate versions of themselves.
Sunset High Gameplay Trailer
NB: The time manipulation seems quite generous, as you can go back and explore other possible outcomes. How have you managed to keep that from affecting the mechanic’s impact?
DW: I’d argue it serves its impact. I want the player to become doused within the mystery. If I have a player who is using the mechanic to its programmatic breaking points, the player has successfully become obsessed with solving the mystery. SPOILERS: This then lets us subvert these expectations in interesting ways at the tail end of the game 😉.
There’s been a lot of rich and generous talk about rewind in-game, which I immersed myself in when initially designing the mechanic. A lot of games that introduce rewind limit its impact by only allowing the player to rewind a couple of seconds into the past. Think Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time or Life is Strange. This was something Jonathan Blow wanted to blow out of the water when designing Braid. As homework, I went and listened to all the talks in Braid: Anniversary Edition, which had interesting discussions on why every game doesn’t have rewind. We already allow players to save scum, so would rewind not be a natural progression of that?
Anyways, to circle back, I think time manipulation is our main mechanic, and unfettering its restraints was very important to me.
NB: The murder mystery is the overarching objective, but is the timeline flexible in terms of when it can be solved, or does a certain amount of work need to be done to reach that goal?
DW: From a design standpoint, our main quest has five chapters. These chapters help us ensure our story keeps the intended pacing we hope to deliver. We attempted to have each chapter have multiple pathways to get to its end in order to reward player creativity and ensure previous decisions have weight. Ultimately, we do have a point of no return in our final chapter… Most RPGs will outright tell the player when this happens. We’ve decided not to in order to gain more weight with our narrative climax.
Alongside this, each character has a side quest which has nothing to do with the mystery and everything to do with themselves. The player can interface with these pretty much at any time during the game until the point of no return for a certain set of characters.
So, to answer your question, a player can do whatever they please within the constraints of the loop but to solve the murder mystery does require a certain amount of work.
NB: How do you handle so many possibilities in the narrative? It’s impressive that there’s such flexibility in terms of how much players can see with alternate choices, but it surely must be a challenge tying it all together?
DW: As touched above, I think ensuring there is an overarching mental model, which then translates into a programmatic one is incredibly important. I have always envisioned the mystery like climbing a mountain, each chapter a switchback needed to be hiked. Each chapter contains multiple paths to the next portion of the mountain, yet each trail will still get you there, otherwise we won’t be able to serve the plot. When you model it like this, it becomes natural in diagramming the pathways, shortcuts, and loose ends you may introduce in each section. With all the shortcuts the player is able to unlock, I am certain I have not played every permutation possible to be able to get to the ending.
That being said, I guess in game design, you always want to give the player the illusion that there are an infinite amount of choices, but it’s up to you as the designer to do the sleight of hand necessary to ensure the player feels there is an infinite combination of outcomes, when you are keenly aware there isn’t.
NB: Sunset High features traditional high school cliques. What one did you feel you were in at school?
DW: Ha! I moved around a lot as a kid, so I always felt like I never belonged to any one clique. By the time I joined the school, everyone had already settled into their friend groups which made it difficult to make friends. This outsider feeling is something the protagonist of the game wrestles with.
That said, the groups who would eventually thaw and I’d begin getting along with were always the “Nerds” and the “Slackers” so shouts-out them.
Sunset High is available on PC via Steam on July 23, 2025. You can download and play the demo now.
