Dustborn is a unique little game. It’s a narrative heavy road trip with audio-based superpowers, combat with a throwable baseball bat that can be recalled Mjollnir-style, and some light ghostbusting. It’s an eclectic mix of ideas that might seem difficult to balance.
The highlight here is definitely the story and the characters. Set in the pseudo-dystopian hellscape known as America – an alternate history one, I mean, that’s now called the American Republic. You play as a woman called Pax who is tasked with delivering a package to Nova Scotia and has a small team to help her out. Pax and two of this team are Anomals – individuals with superpowers stemming from a mysterious cataclysmic event – and are planning to use this trip to Nova Scotia to escape their lives to a country more accepting of them. So in order to smuggle themselves and the mysterious package across the country, they start a band and go on tour. It’s the perfect cover…. band.
The characters and their dialogue is phenomenal throughout, and there’s absolutely tonnes of it. Most of the time, the game plays like a Telltale adventure or, more fittingly as it’s published by Quantic Dream, Detroit: Become Human, just without the silly quicktime events for opening doors and stuff. You’ll be having a lot of conversations, walking around an location for some light puzzling or adventuring, sending one of your crew in to pick a lock or just knock a door down, and so on. I absolutely love this part of the game, I found myself quickly becoming attached to the characters thanks in no small part by the excellent voice acting, which is handy when you can’t skip a single line of dialogue.
What’s also superb is the attention to detail, sometimes to a fault. Dustborn keeps tracks of an awful lot of things you say or do and often brings it up later. At one point, Sai was having a bit of an episode in a bathroom and I was trying to convince her to come out so we could continue. Having exhausted all of my non-magic options, I tried to give her some beef jerky I’d picked up earlier – something that would definitely have worked in a LucasArts point & click – and boy, was she offended. Later I offered it to her again when she was a little more calm, and she actually commented “is this what you tried to give to me earlier? I’m not a dog, Pax!” which really made me laugh.
There’s a lot of little elements like this that make everyone feel more convincing as characters. One quirk that doesn’t, though, is when you can check in with everyone at the end of the day, butting into the conversations they were having between themselves. Those chats then pause and resume after you’re done with an “as I was saying” type line. After a while, I found it ruined my immersion to hear that after a serious conversation.
Dustborn isn’t exactly subtle with its themes or intentions. From “Anomals” sounding almost exactly like “a-normals” to the “ghosts” which are actually echoes of misinformation that turn people into hateful and paranoid people, it’s all very much on the nose and outside of the accurate statement “misinformation makes people bad,” it doesn’t really say any more than that. Even the people that’s aimed at would agree, but just argue they’re not the ones who are misinformed. Some of these ideas don’t play out to satisfying conclusions, the game establishing a few interesting topics and then leaving them behind as you move onto the next one. It would have been great to tie them back together more cohesively.
While the characters and story are the main focus of the game, there’s a few other genres thrown in alongside. The occasional combat sequences play like a ropey arena brawler. It’s a bit too imprecise and chaotic feeling, but it’s also too easy and gets repetitive despite having some fun abilities, like Pax’s voice turning enemies on each other or convincing them they’re on fire. You can skip some of these encounters… but a one-off instance where I was able to sneak past a gang of bikers broke down when one of the other crew members failed to follow me to the bus, forcing me to fight anyway. Another one-off flashback took the form of turn-based RPG combat, which is rough but deep enough to be satisfying for its brief appearance.
Then there’s the music. You’re in a band, so you need to “write” some songs that you can perform whilst on tour. There’s a rhythm mini-game for both writing and playing the songs, not too dissimilar to Guitar Hero, but while some of these original songs are catchy in places, I wouldn’t expect them to end up in your daily playlist. The rhythm game itself is also just serviceable, button prompts flying in from all sides of the screen in a way that can make the timing more difficult to judge than it should be.
Variety is nice, but all these elements undercut the game’s focus and pacing. You can have a road trip across America smuggling a mysterious package that deals with weighty topics like discrimination and misinformation, but when the main story is combined with long conversations on other topics, it can feel disjointed. Add to that the funny subversions and absurdities between the serious stuff, and there’s a bit of tonal whiplash. It builds toward an ending that leaves a few too many threads without a satisfying resolution.
The presentation on the whole looks good, with pleasing character designs and models and a good art direction, but with environments that often feel a bit sparse and bare.
Now this all sounds like doom and gloom, but it really isn’t. I really enjoyed Dustborn. Mechanically, it doesn’t quite hit the targets perfectly, but I’m a sucker for a character driven story and the characters here are remarkably well realised, which is more than enough to keep me going through some mediocre gameplay and unrealised potential. The world might be a touch heavy handed in how it’s set up, but I think that we can collectively agree that the time for subtlety has passed when people are unironically cheering on Homelander whilst watching The Boys.