Dust: An Elysian Tail

[Dracos]

Dust is a game that was on the side of my radar for a while.  An action-adventure sword swinging beat-em-up 2d type title with hand animated stuff?  I'm pretty down with that.  An indie fare that won a few awards and a contract with microsoft, undergoing a 4 year long march to get to release.  One man's dream of a disney styled adventure.  I played and consumed it in its entirety, it taking a few sittings of play to get through everything (probably about 5-10 hours if you just rush through though).  A tribute in a lot of ways to games the main developer played in his youth (such as castlevania or super metroid).  How'd it shape up overall though?

I think it's an okay, but weak game.  There's hints of something stronger, but overall it has a weakness in craft level that shows throughout.  It's been said that it's a one person game, and that annoys me for a few reasons.  One, I've seen one person dev projects, and this isn't one of them, even if 90 percent of the work was really done by one person.  Two, it's unfortunate as the limits of that one person's skill are really part of the reason that the game only goes so far.  A collection of craftsmen working together would've probably had a better end result, and its unfortunate that these heroic tales get whispered so often obscuring the oft better results coming out of small team efforts.  Three, I stopped counting at 50 people in the credits, so unless the credits were just lying about their contribution, a large number of sound, vocal, qa, and production talent helped him in getting his game from an indie demo that stood a bit in front of the pack into a more complete finished product.  I'll leave that behind here in the discussion of the game as a product, because the crafting of a product doesn't either award or diminish the end result, which is sadly a game that seems a shadow of something better.

Just for reference, this is the PC port of Dust.  I suspect a few bugs I saw may be unique to that version, but they're not a big deal anyway, but mentioning for context.

Mmm, I think the Combat deserves to be talked about first, because it is both what you do the majority of the time and really the game's best feature (visual animation being a close second).  The game offers a smooth beat-em-up setup which gives you a small handful of sword attack combinations to use, along with a 'Dust' damage spin effect that can be held for a bit, and a small number of magic spells.  The magic spells can be boosted by catching them in the Dust Attack, which in its airborne form is probably the safest and most damaging move that can be done (Spinning overhead, boosting magic spells will pretty much annihilate almost any enemy).  The enemies do come in small crowds of 5-20 enemies, generally rushing at you on the ground or in air, and poking for an attack.  As a good addition, most the enemies have, and will use, a dodge technique that brings them behind you, so they're not just rushing into your blade all the time.  There's a few varieties that do a bit to keep things interesting, but mostly they're not a lot of threat and it doesn't develop terribly much from the beginning, with a few of the giant enemies offering demands for new tactics, but otherwise everything falling easily against the battering of your sword.  Difficulty level doesn't seem to really affect AI at all, and I doubt there's much of one to affect anyway, instead generally just increasing the damage taken and defense of enemies.  So if you find it trivial at any level, every level is probably also trivial.  Still, the combat is good light fun and generally provides an entertaining environmental hazard to play with.

The game provides a few bosses, but none of them particularly stood out as involving any different interaction.  Even the last boss, which had a damage shield preventing simply sinking him with massive damage, still pretty much had few responses to just being smacked around with the sword.  A shame, but a decent first time effort from a company.

The animation is worth speaking to next.  The game delivers rather nicely animated 2d drawn characters that smoothly move through the game world.  It definitely stands out a bit and combined with the bright color scheme draws attention.  The art in general stands out pretty nicely in terms of quality, and I think is perhaps the second highest strength of the game.  It's a rare sight to see genuinely nice 2d drawn art style games, and this one hits it well.  The enemies, hero, and even a few NPCs move pretty nicely and fluidly throughout.  The backgrounds, while not say Vanillaware level of awesome, are serviceable and nicely drawn.  If it wasn't for another craft aspect, I'd say it was genuinely the star point of the game.  Unfortunately, consistency of what was drawn bothered me.  I wasn't sure what culture was going on in the world as the background sported everything from seventeen hundreds era medieval manners, to sixteen hundreds era japanese houses, to ridiculous sci-fi stuff, to enormous mouse statues.  It felt pretty without impact because of this.  Like the thought into the cultures of the world happened at a very superficial level and that the art was only speaking to that, rather than communicating what you were interacting with.  Because it was well drawn, it provided more opportunities for strange contradictions then you'd find in older less artsy games where at least the town's had some consistency in their architecture.

The game did sport some RPG aspects.  Your character gained levels, getting a chance to boost attack, defense, magic, and hp within a certain range of each other.  This ended up not mixing too well with the metroidvania-ish re-tread design on secrets, most likely due to a lack of exponetially scaling math.  Treading back quickly could move you into a power level that nearby enemies just weren't any threat at all.  There's quite a variety of equipment, and a neat blacksmithing system that lets you put together things based on blueprints to get new items early or cheaper.  Total props to the main developer for not limiting multipliers just to limit them.  Since the game was easy anyway, it was a nice touch seeing the silliness that could come out of stacking multiplies and just casually having everything spill treasure or disintegrate under supermagic.  Sure, you could easily beat it without, but if you aren't going to be challenging, be playful, and the game did a great job on that account.  There's lots of equipment, and its really quite possible to collect all of it (and 2 of every ring).  Especially given that every material you sell to the shopkeeper starts growing there afterwards, giving you a plentiful supply usually in the next 20-30 minutes.  Overall, I found the leap between areas to be fairly quick though.  Usually I'd end up going right to the best gear of the next area, but that could be because of playing with the drop rings.  I think the math was a little too silly, in as much as way too many things were large multipliers, but it definitely was amusing to play with.

There was also a significant retread setup, trying to mimic the setup of various metroidvanias with a lot of ability locked off elements.  Overall, I thought the craft here was awkward and more mimicking without understanding what made them fun.  Double jump as one of the abilities mixed in with spin-flying being a thing definitely made for some unclear 'you need power x to get this' moments.  I give credit for giving in game journal hints for the more obscure secrets, but basically, if you want everything, the most efficient you can hope for is getting right in the beginning of the last level before doing everything.  It's not just a matter of occasional retread, but really that it's almost a mistake to go back and use a new power right away, since odds are you'll be standing a mere screen away from something else that needs a different power.  Just the way this played out came off as fairly unsatisfying and a bit flow disrupting as a completionist player.  I think this is just partially caused by going after metroidvania crafting without thinking on how to make it work.  Having a bunch of go-back points in every level left it not feeling like many things got completed until very late in the game.  Having them often near the middle of the level, made it come off as more of a retread.  Since there wasn't any reason narratively or route-wise to go back through the areas, it stuck out as only something to be done for treasure/secret finding, rather feeling part of bigger objectives (Hunting down rare monsters or challenges, doing quests in the area, or collecting things for people too).

I'm going to group the next three together.  Sure, the background audio was pretty nice and it was neat seeing voice overs, something that made it stand out over other budget games....  but the overall production came across as pretty weak, and I'm not sure where the fault actually lies.  There's maybe a half dozen distinct nationalities thrown as characters in the game, complete with strong accents on all of them.  It ends up making everyone feel like they aren't part of the same small village they are supposed to be part of.  Instead of the rare case, almost everyone has a strange accent.  It goes further though in that the lines of dialogue they were working with and the overall story just wasn't very good.  It was serviceable, don't get me wrong, but generally the character's lines lacked punch and to some degree a touch of consistency (even if Fidget wasn't too bad on this).  This made having voice acted dialogue not able to carry the experience, which was all the more bad for an overall weak storyline.  For as much as the game is exploring the amnesic hero's origins, and his conflict, it really doesn't deliver any sense of conflict about it's main secret well at all.  There's both a lack of outside actors to help contextualize the environment much, and the villains seem to both be "In it for the Evils" and at the same time think they're being reasonable good people by being "In it for the Evils".  They don't even get a setting to show them outside of being just part of the evils either, which is disappointing to be sure.  Because of the weak overall narrative framework, the actual main conflicts of the game read as a very "Duh" event.  It's disappointing and more than anything else really what delivers this as something that looks better than it actually is.

So, that's Dust.  Not a bad thing to take a look at, but I wouldn't bother heavily with finishing it if you get tired of it, or with grabbing it at full price.  For someone's intro effort, it's amazing no matter the assistance he had with it, but as an end product to buy, it's really nothing special outside of the low hanging indie scene.  Cheers to the fellow for surviving the effort.