What if Zootopia was DARK? Like DAAAAAARK?
That’s the thematic feel of Back to the Dawn, a 2025 release that is making its way to Nintendo Switch. This deep, heavy narrative RPG deals with a prison break in which we play one of two characters who are wrongfully sent to the penintentiary and need to get out.
Or, maybe not.
The plot is completely malleable. In fact it’s kind of astounding how much things can change and adapt in the game on our choices. We can try the legal route to escape, by talking to our lawyer and trying to prove our innocence, but that’s stupidly difficult because the cards are stacked against us. Or, we can try to actually escape, working with the underbelly of the prison to make our way out. We can even just align ourselves with one of the gangs and work our way up. The game leans into unpredictability, and feels endlessly replayable because of it.
And yet the plot path is really only one aspect of the experience. The cast is incredible, with the game’s themes depicted through the use of different animals to represent a social class system. Every character we meet has a backstory. Some are evil people, some are just down on their luck, some are being abused. We may run into some folk who are decent, but even they have dark sides that we need to leverage or stay away from. We have to build and cultivate relationships with these people because we may need their help later.
The gameplay itself is built onto dice rolls with layers and layers of ways that things can change. To give an example, we select our initial character to start the game, then select a sort of class for that character, and then a sort of modifier for that as well; it can affect our relationships, our abilities, our charm and our physical attributes — all of it initially feels so overwhelming, almost like it’s inconsequential, but as we play these abilities and stats unfold in how they affect us.
The prison is a great backdrop for everything. We need money in the game to purchase food, items and to bribe people; the main way to get cash is through jobs, like laundry or cleaning. At first I thought it was going to be menial or repetitive tasks, but jobs are a way for us to earn that scrilla, make deals, and even find ways to escape, so once a new one pops up it’s valuable to see what we can get out of it.
The rub is that we only have 21 days to get out, to sort of make our move. As we get into those latter days we start to feel the stress and tension of our situation. The story unfolds slowly at first but I appreciate that it gradually speeds up, pushing us to make decisions faster, for better or for worse. It makes those early insignificant seeming decisions gradually feel like they’re carrying more and more weight until everything is suffocating us.
Whew!
The game’s nice visual aesthetic is almost done on purpose to make things seem less serious than they are. These are cute animals! They don’t actually want to shiv us! (They do, actually.) It’s all in on the HD2D trend, and it’s wild to see it here with such a sobering tone.
It’s rare to make actual good parallels between cinema and gaming, but Back to the Dawn does just that. It’s written like a procedural drama, with each day bringing something both interesting and introspective, making necessary of the the typically unnecessary. By the end of it I’ve found my favorite characters, I’ve second guessed my decisions, and I’ve decided that I’m ready to head back into the cell.
This review is based on a Switch 2 eShop code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher and SideQuesting. This video first appeared on The SideQuest for March 06, 2026.
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