Dustborn is among the most unrepentantly liberal and left-leaning games out there. If you’ve spent 20 seconds glancing at YouTube comments or social media, you’ll probably already know this–hundreds of people disavowed it without even playing it. Such is 2024, and once again, it’s a shame–there’s a lot to like in this odd escapade.
On a fundamental level, Dustborn has refined and nearly perfected the classic Telltale Games episodic graphic adventure formula, admittedly ten years after it was at the height of its popularity. It takes time to build momentum, but once you get to grips with everything offered by this cross-country, near-post-apocalyptic tale, you’re in it for the long run.
However, even if you fall within its clear target audience, Dustborn’s jarring start, odd mechanics, and weird characters raise some strong early opinions, and it has a few missteps along the way. On a fundamental level, developer Red Thread Games has created something that’s an exercise in patience–not just to get into it, but to enjoy the experience as intended.
Road trippin’ with your three favorite allies
Dustborn kicks things off in medias res, as you, Pax–a 30-something con artist and mutant lite “Anomal” with the ability to weaponize language–nurse a gunshot wound after a semi-successful heist. You’ve secured an important USB drive in the 2030 nation-state of Pacifica–this universe’s California–and you must get it to Nova Scotia.
Things are different here; it’s implied the timeline diverges from ours at Deeley Plaza in 1963, when Jackie O, rather than JFK, was assassinated. Kennedy takes Marilyn Monroe as a second wife, and together they turn it into a semi-fascist state filled with law-enforcing robots, tearing the union apart along the way, giving rise to supercharged versions of modern-day sub-cultures and groups. Neat!
As Pax–one of four initial misfits–you can use your vocal talents to make people feel terrible about themselves (“it’s like negging but more brutal”). Noam, your former lover, gaslights people to make them feel better (a “verbal tranquilizer”). Sai, the artistic, self-critical, and overtly sweary team brute can make literally make herself as strong as a rock. Then there’s Theo, a normal dude with no powers, but a thoroughly nice chap and potential dad of the group. Together, you cross a divided former U.S. masquerading as a punk rock band, combining chat, rhythm-action music sections, and a few fights.
From the first moments of you riding along the highway, Dustborn is immaculately presented. Cameras are fluid but settle into cleverly curated fixed positions, allowing you to direct your evolving conversations through excellent, regularly adapting angles, like any classic single-camera sitcom setup. It’s just as well–Dustborn revels in chat, whether you want to or not.
Finding your voice
Early conversations feel basic at best–good and bad decision-making is too binary, meaning you’re either calm and collected, or a dick. However, stick with it: this is Dustborn’s slightly heavy-handed tutorial explanation of chat mechanics and your own abilities. You can time your conversations, choose safe answers, or run roughshod over your friends with your angry vox ability whenever you like–not that you will, because it’ll make you feel awful.
However, conversational dynamics unfurl at a dramatic pace as you work through the first two chapters, and begin to trust your judgment. Some conversations add or remove response options with time; elsewhere, things are best left unsaid, even as Dustborn appears to imply you should talk. Skipping dialogue isn’t an option, either, but it makes you appreciate that this is meant to be all about words rather than actions. Sure, some sections can drag, but you feel compelled to get the most out of every conversation you can, even if your approach ends up making things worse.
Your choices influence your compatriots to fall into one of three dominant traits, which you can keep track of–important if you want to know how best to approach them ahead of another big discussion. It’s not clear if or what you want these to be, but you get a feel for the traits you like as the chapters develop.
Interactions are surprisingly delicate and carefully arranged, backed with absolutely superb voice acting–Dominique Tipper and Safiyya Ingar as Pax and Sai, respectively, are standouts–but the cast is occasionally let down by dodgy dialogue. You might immediately want to take it out on the characters being unlikeable in different ways, but that’s kind of the point, as they have their imperfections, but it occasionally feels like Dustborn doesn’t fully trust your intelligence.
Slapped with a brick
If you’ve got underlying messages you want to convey, you must trust in subtlety–it goes a long way–and this is especially true for Dustborn. It rightly wears its heart on its sleeve, but still has a habit of mishandling strong allegories by spelling them out for you, to the point you can feel a little patronized. Given its obvious audience, it’s far from ideal.
Early in the game, after you recover the potentially world-changing, Tamagotchi-like “Me-em” that becomes one of a few core tools in the game, you begin to encounter Echoes. These disembodied, angry voices spew bile about conspiracy theories, “mutilation,” fears of atypical people, and more. Echoes invisibly hang in the landscape but can be heard by people, influencing their behavior or can even take over their minds to the point of inflicting mental illness. It’s a spectacular visual metaphor for social media, and this is communicated with the perfect level of nuance.
That is, until you explain this phenomenon to Sai, who almost shrugs at the notion and immediately says “ah, like social media!” Great, thanks, satisfaction ruined there. When you suck the Echoes into your Me-em–in a move like the Proton Pack from Ghostbusters–you’re reminded that “it’s like ghostbusting!” OK, we get it, you need to be certain we’ve made that connection. This happens more often than you’d hope, and each time, the happiness you glean from interpreting things independently is flushed out to the tune of The Price is Right’s losing horn.
Changing it up
For all the highs and lows of its conversation-heavy core experience, Dustborn nicely mixes things up with other elements that add a bit of spice, and again contribute to refining the episodic adventure format that needs more to carry itself through the 2020s.
Firstly, the rhythm-action sections, which involve your band pretending to be musicians, is a nice touch and nicely responsive–though the oddly-placed and angled crosshair and super move inputs make it initially hard to follow. It helps that the original soundtrack is solid, and the songs are consistently worked into the wider story, giving more exposition along the way.
At the end of the first chapter, combat is introduced, arming Pax with a baseball bat as she takes on a bunch of Horned Riders, introducing a whole Borderlands gang element to proceedings. It’s not perfect–my first two fighting segments glitched significantly–but these sections incorporate easy-to-understand dodge and attack mechanics with upgrades, voice abilities, team play, timing, and further storytelling after each bout. Don’t like it? After your first skirmish, you can choose if you want more or less combat for the rest of the game, which is a great touch.
There’s also a gamification of conversations through collected items. You regularly come across team-friendly trinkets when you’re exploring, but you can’t just make someone happy again by gifting it to them–it’s all about the right time and place. If you hit the sweet spot by handing something over at the right time with Sai, Theo, or Noam, you unlock new dialog and backstory. It makes you appreciate the craft behind the dialogue even more; you might feel condescension in certain parts of the storytelling, but you feel thoroughly rewarded when you get this right.
Wait and see
Dustborn gets better, and feels more rewarding, as you play it. Its dodgy opening chapters will return double what you put into it, with a nicely evolving story and character development–even if so much lore and exposition is left on the table. Maybe Dustborn 2 will help us understand this weird, warring vision of the U.S. in 2030 (unless real life does it first, *massive probable satire klaxon*).
If you have an open mind and you’re willing to give it time to grow, Dustborn is a fun trip, even if it occasionally feels like it’s trying to be a bit too edgy for its own good–especially for the type of people who will immediately click with its socio-political outlook. Of course I know them–they’re me.
It’s not trying to be The Walking Dead: A Telltale Series or Um Jammer Lammy or Devil May Cry or Oxenfree; Dustborn really is its own thing, and the fact Quantic Dream is giving indie developers like Red Thread Games this platform to be exactly what it wants to be is absolutely fantastic. Those who refuse to play it on principle don’t know what they’re missing. Dustborn might need patience and an open mind, but if you don’t have either, what’s the point in trying something new?
