I gave this game a solid shot, gritted through its glaring flaws, and tried to appreciate what was there. A very compelling dialogue system, a genuinely interesting take on an alternate history North America, and an ever-growing cast of misfits that really grew on me. However, this was all let down by the final two chapters, in which it becomes quite clear the devs had no time to truly create the vision they had in mind. They basically cram what seems to be another 6+ hours of content into an hourlong chapter that rushes to tie up loose ends and bring the story to a close. It does this with very little grace or regard for pacing. It introduces two new characters in the last two chapters that get zero development at all. Like they made zero effort to at least hide the fact that there's 3 or 4 cut chapters at the end of the game. And while I do really love the middle of the game, the real meat of it, to be let down so hard in the final act was truly heartbreaking.

I picked up Dustborn during one of the 2024 holiday sales, I love The Longest Journey and respect Ragnar Tørnquist as a creator. I started it and was bombarded by a bunch of buzzwords, got to a song where they're like "We're the Dustborn/We're the new porn" and I was like what is this trash and put it on the backlog.

Fast forward only a few weeks later and my government is trying to scrub out trans people and seriously discussing occupying the Gaza Strip. I was talking to a close friend about the 1984ness of it all and they replied "1984 had some good ideas I think all of the advancements of the 20th century are bad". I needed a break from "conservative" American politics badly and Dustborn sounded like it would be a warm and welcoming echo chamber, regardless of whether I agree with it.

But it's not warm or welcoming. Dustborn is bumbling and confused. Parts of the game feel like it's really trying to say something important, but it's less a call to action or a plea to understand and more like a long Twitter rant that collapses under its own frivolity.

Certain ideas are thrown into your face but the writers didn't know what to do with them? One of the weirdest is the party's reaction to the character Girl. There's a minute long discussion about how presumptuous it is to call the character Girl because we don't know what this eight year old's gender identity is. They resign to calling her Girl even though they could just as easily name her Kid or Hope or something that would actually mean something instead of wasting my time with stupid gibberish that they don't even follow up on.

This is basically the entirety of Dustborn, one big self-effacing discussion with no real purpose. The game is a long collection of conversations between various "diverse" people with serviceable 3D beat-'em-up sections and a couple simple puzzles. Like if you're going to make it this bombastic "left-leaning" game, why not follow through and make everyone strong and sure of themselves? They're all so insecure and weird about their own beliefs from start to finish.

I guess in some ways it's trying to be realistic with it's depiction of the different minorities and identities it's trying to portray? They have a very tangible goal of great importance, but they're constantly hiding things and losing focus and pissing each other off. Am I supposed to believe that endlessly disagreeing is human nature when all the American republicans seem to be in pretty good agreement that they think there should only be two genders? I was hoping Dustborn would create it's own liberal way of seeing, but it refuses. Maybe it's afraid to offend someone, but the fate of the future is in these character's hands and all they do is process emotions.

I identify as trans and I get a lot of flack locally because I'll wear dresses and skirts and everything but I don't close shave my face. Now I get the average idiot telling me I'm gay like it's an insult or people saying they hate me or whatever, but the thing that actually cuts deep now is that I get a larger amount of negative comments from, I guess "conventional" trans people who don't like that I'm not trying to pass hard enough? One of my best friends is openly gay for twenty years and he's received a lot of hate from people for not falling into stereotypical mannerisms like you would have seen on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy back then.

So is that the message here? We're all too busy talking and arguing over dumb crap to ever actually accomplish much at all? The game asserts words are power and have the ability to control or hurt or heal people, it spends nine chapters building up these colorful and likable characters and then abruptly rushes to a conclusion that feels so half baked. They're just still arguing about what options will change anything, whether its running around protesting or trying to manipulate the entire world into just aligning with these wacky mutant people.

My absolute least favorite part is that the average non-mutant population of the Republic is being infested with weird ghosts (the idea of echoes from our cultural past infesting people's minds is totally classic and appreciated by the way) that make them believe conspiracies, but then the main characters unravel a government conspiracy. So we're both trivializing conspiracies and making them very real. The devs really needed to pick one. It would have been fine if the "rightwing" conspiracies weren't the only thing the echoes were repeating, but no, "I'M AFRAID OF ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT" is presented constantly. It just gives this "my free speech is better than yours" vibe which is everywhere now.

So yeah, I went into Dustborn looking for a little bit of hope and instead it took a dump and left a stain on my brain that will probably wash away in a week. Maybe if the conclusion didn't feel so rushed after all the glacial campfire discussions there could have been a stronger narrative here. Whoever this game was made for represents a very, VERY small amount of probably very, VERY loud Twitter X whatever users that weren't going to spend $30 on this.

I'm going to make this review positive because I want more weird games like this to be made and nobody's going to read this anyway. Thank you for making a weird game, I didn't like it.

I have a feeling a lot of content was cut and that's why almost every scene ends in fade to black. Also there's a lot of jumping around between timelines. There was so much build up to Nova Scotia and we don't even get to see it. Who are those mysterious employers?

Game doesn't have manual save only autosafe and it's very sparse. Also half the time games saves before pre-battle cutscene. I don't want to listen to it 3 times in a row. When not in battle game saves every 15-20 minutes which makes achievement hunting near impossible. No opportunity to copy paste saves

Why no one asks people pronouns? Having character screen is cool but how do we know Eli uses he/him? It seems they made an assumption based on how he looks.

I liked the combat but all the shouts are pretty much the same. And most damage is dealt by taunts anyway. On Hard the most effective strategy is to taunt, run around until it recharges and taunt again. And every time the game stops to tutorial me on new shout in the most obnoxious way possible I am like: "Shut up, I am not using it anyway". 😭 Also by halfway point I've already unlocked all of them so there's no point in hunting echoes.