Dustborn is a punk rock rebellion that I can get behind

Dustborn is a game for the freaks, the broken, the lost, the outcasts, the exiles, the ones who’ve never quite found a place. But if my time at PAX East was any indication, it resonated with people. The first day of the show, there weren’t many people checking out the game. You could just walk up to Dustborn and play it. By the last day, the line circled the booth. Games can draw a crowd for a dozen reasons on the show floor, but I like to think Dustborn grabbed people because, at some point in our lives, we all know what it feels like to be from the island of misfit toys.

Anyway, when I got another opportunity to return to Dustborn’s world for an extended, nearly two-hour demo, I jumped at the chance. If you’re not familiar with Dustborn, it’s the latest from Red Thread Games, the team behind Draugen, Dreamfall Chapters, and Svalgard. Set in an alternate, divided America, Dustborn follows a group of Anomals - people with special powers - as they traverse what remains of America to deliver a mysterious package to Nova Scotia - and get out of the States for good.

Dustborn’s America is very different from the one you might be familiar with. JFK survived his assassination attempt; California has seceded from the Union and transformed itself into a technocratic corporatocracy called Pacifica. What’s left of the American Republic is policed by Justice, an authoritarian military/police organization that keeps a tight grip on the populace. You don’t want them after you, and you definitely don’t want them to catch you.

That's where your crew comes in. You play as Pax, the leader of this merry group of misfits. As an Anomal, Pax’s words literally have power. If she uses her vocal powers aka Vox and tells someone to move, they’re going to move. As you can imagine, it’s not just Pax. The rest of your motley crew makes up her found family. There’s Sai, her best friend, an artist who can use her Vox to manipulate density and weight, so she essentially has super strength. That said, she’s not a fan of always being asked to move heavy things. Ziggy, Pax’s sister, is a great mechanic who deals with anxiety and hyperactivity. Naturally, she’s super fast and capable of vibrating through walls. Noam’s Pax’s on-again, off-again romantic partner with a knack for emotional manipulation and understanding how other people feel. Then there’s Theo, your resident Team Dad and tech guy.

It’s a diverse group, but it’s also a diverse group. Sai is a big woman and has vitiligo. Ziggy’s missing an eye and traumas are a big part of her character. Noam is non-binary. Several of them are queer, and almost none of them are white. It’s cool. You don’t see casts like this in games too often, but it’s made cooler because these are well-written, interesting characters that are fun to pal around with and feel like real people. Remember, they’re outcasts with superpowers, and they're on the run. As much as we like to pretend that stories (and real-life examples) of rebellion are for and about everyone, the reality is they’re almost always stories of people ostracized and oppressed, desperately searching for something better, for a place they fit. Dustborn understands that.

My demo started off with the gang aboard their tour bus - they’re posing as a rock band called The Dustborn as a cover when they travel - and it gives you a good idea of what Dustborn is. I spent time wandering the bus, talking to characters and working on a new song for the band. The latter is a Guitar Hero-like mini-game where you’ll match button prompts in time as they race along a track. The former takes the form of Pax’s thoughts - highlighting an option shows what she's thinking, and how she wants to approach a situation in a way that mimics the word/thought bubbles and captions you’d find in a comic book.

The system is cool, because you always know what Pax is thinking in a conversation, and you’ll never accidentally choose an option you think is saying one thing and actually says another (I'm looking at you, BioWare dialogue wheel), but it also compliments Dustborn’s comic book aesthetic. The whole game is beautifully cell-shaded, bright, and incredibly colorful. When you get a new mission objective, it appears in the world and literally shows you where to go. If you’re in combat, using a special attack resembles something you might see on a splash page. Recaps even take the form of comic issues, implied to have been drawn by Sai. It’s neat.

After I spent a little time on the bus hanging with my friends, we stopped for fuel, and wouldn’t you know it, the robot driving our bus malfunctioned and ran off with the thing. Ziggy wasn’t happy with Pax because of some stuff that happened before my demo started, so conversations with her were going nowhere. Sai was mostly trying to stay out of the sun (her vitiligo means she burns easily), and Theo and Pax were feuding over the robot because I’d mentioned it was acting weird earlier, and he’d ignored it. And Noam, well… Noam had been taking a nap on the bus, and was inadvertently kidnapped. We couldn’t stay at the service station, but there wasn't an obvious way to leave, either.

After some exploring, I found a locked garage with a broken-down truck. But I wasn't going to be able to fix it by myself. Choosing the right character for the job is crucial, but they may also say no depending on your relationship with them, or their own personal beliefs. When I asked Theo to open the door, he refused because he felt hacking it was too risky and might draw attention we didn't need. Sai, on the other hand, was happy to brute force it open for me.

Fixing the truck was a team effort, too. I had to find the parts as Pax, but Ziggy had to help me install them; we needed Sai to move it out of the garage; and Theo had to hack the service station pumps because we didn't have any money. Whoops.

We found the bus (and Noam) at what looked to be an abandoned trailer park sealed off by a weapons-grade fence. I could have had Sai open it, but I managed to find a piece of rebar and Pax pried it open herself. It was a minor thing, but I appreciated the subtlety there. Sai doesn't like being asked to push and open things because she deals with that all the time, and Pax knows that, which means I know that. No reason to upset her when I could do it myself. In a game about the relationships you have with other people, that felt right.

Once we were inside, I got my first real look at another choice - and one of Dustborn's most unique mechanics. The trailer park was weird, and I’m not just talking about the fence. All the trailers were empty facades, but before the team could figure out why, we were ambushed by a dude in a wife-beater with a trucker hat and a gun who was angry because he thought we’d destroyed his tomatoes and, therefore, his ability to live off the grid. He also started reiling against cities, and the people who live in them. I could have had Theo hack the gun or Sai just take it from the guy by force, but ultimately I distracted him and had Ziggy grab it before he could react.

At that point, it became obvious that the guy was infected with an Echo. Dustborn never really explained what Echoes are in my time with it, but they seem to be a remnant of the event that created Anomals, and they can drastically alter people’s personalities. I pulled it out of him with Pax’s ME-EM - imagine something that’s part-Game Boy, part Ghostbuster’s proton pack - and when it was over, he was left wondering why he’d been so angry about cities and tomatoes. Turns out his name was Mike, and he was actually an okay guy. Plus, getting enough Echoes allows Pax to learn new Vox skills, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for them.

I don’t want to spoil the rest of my time with Dustborn, because I think it’s worth playing it blind, but a little later, Pax and Ziggy find themselves in the remnants of a secret Justice facility full of abandoned, deactivated robots that looked just like the one we were trying to track down because, well… nobody else could drive the tour bus. The whole thing is incredibly creepy, and after a while, you’d swear that the robots are following you. Pax weathers it well, but it scares Ziggy, who is also deeply claustrophobic, so you occasionally have to wait for her to work up the courage to keep going and encourage her when she’s afraid.

This segment also let me get comfortable with Dustborn’s combat. It’s largely a standard action game: you can attack, block, roll, and throw and recall Pax’s bat, Kratos-style. It feels pretty good, but there’s a couple special techniques that make it stand out.

First are Pax’s Vox powers. You build up your gauge by hitting people with Pax’s bat, and once it’s full, you can spend it to do things like push enemies back or fool them into attacking their friends. Use the right Vox, and you can even land a follow-up attack by teaming up with one of your friends if you time it right.

Pax’s health recovers over time, and once it’s full, you can use Pax’s Vox to single out and taunt an enemy and land a series of quick-time events to deal massive damage. Mess it up, though, and Pax will fumble her words and end up saying something like “uh… you’re stupid!” and you’ll have to wait until you can try again. It’s a nice touch, and when I did mess up, I barely minded because of how funny it was. Dustborn’s combat isn’t going to light the world on fire, but it is engaging, and I enjoyed messing around with Pax’s Vox just as much as I did whacking people with her bat.

But I think what stood out to me most were the little moments with the other characters. At one point, Ziggy gets overwhelmed after a particularly rough sequence and has to sit down and take a breather. You don’t have to sit with her; you can keep going if you want. But I did, because it felt like what Pax would do, and I listened to her talk about how she felt. That may feel pretty standard in a game like this, but Dustborn spices conversations up by giving you more responses the longer you listen, because you have more to respond to. Pax and Ziggy’s relationship is in a rough place, and how you respond here will determine how both of them try to move forward. My choices in that conversation, and during the events that followed, went a long way toward mending that relationship, and the next time Ziggy referred to Pax in front of another character, she called Pax her sister, something she’d pointedly refused to do up until that point. Had I made different choices, or responded before she’d finished talking, I feel like that conversation - and that relationship - would have played out very differently.

My time ended with the whole crew relaxing around a campfire after we’d played a song in the Guitar Hero-esque rhythm game for a group of bikers that had attacked us earlier. Long story, but it all worked out. My relationships were in a very different place than I started. I’d smoothed things over with Theo and Ziggy, and reassured Sai that she’d always have a place in the group when she expressed anxiety about being replaced, but I’d also put some distance between Pax and Noam in a way that I didn’t intend, but felt natural for where both characters were. And I had a completely different relationship with our now-recovered robot and a new friend we’d made along the way.

What impressed me most was that these changes felt natural, the result of several conversations and choices I’d made that had built on each other and who these characters are at their core. It wasn’t always pretty, and it wasn’t always easy; relationships never are. But when Pax curled herself into a ball on the backseat of the bus and called it a day, it felt right. I was sad my time with Dustborn was over, at least for the moment. I enjoyed spending time in that world, with those characters, and I can’t remember the last time I played a game that felt both this unique and this confident. All I know is this: whatever happens next, I plan to be on that bus, composing songs, and spending time with Pax’s found family as they search for something better. Let’s hear it for the rebels.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.