Dustborn review: The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That’s the opening to the Gospel of John. I’m not particularly religious despite my parents’ best efforts, but I thought of it often as I played Dustborn, the newest game from Red Thread Games, the developers behind Draugen, Dreamfall Chapters, and Svalgard. In Christian and Jewish myth, something Dustborn openly references, God literally speaks the universe into being: “Let there be light.” For as long as we have been able to tell stories, words have had power, so much so that it is impossible for many to conceive of a story, perhaps the most important story, the story of why we’re here, without language. Human beings are storytellers. We define reality through language. It is how we see ourselves, and the world. In the Old Testament, God destroys the Tower of Babel, fearful of what humanity, united by a single language, might accomplish. Maybe there’s a story there, too.

Dustborn takes place in a reality where words literally have power. Set in an alternate, divided America where the JFK assassination killed Jackie Kennedy instead, Dustborn’s world is a very different place from our own. 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 play as Pax, the leader of a group of Anomals — people whose words have the power to alter both perception and reality. Hated by the general populace and hunted everywhere, Pax and company have stolen encrypted data from the fanatical, technology-obsessed Puritans who control Pacifica. Their goal? Escape Pacifica, travel across the American Republic (and avoid Justice) posing as a touring punk rock band, and deliver the goods to Nova Scotia — and get out of the States for good. If they can make it, they’ll finally be free.

Like any Anomal, Pax’s words, known as Vox, have power. If she tells you to move, you’ll move, but she can also manipulate other people’s emotions, though only in a negative way. But it isn’t just Pax. Her crew — her found family — each comes with their own flavor of Vox. Sai, Pax’s best friend and a talented artist, can use her Vox to manipulate her density and weight, turning her skin to stone and giving her super strength and durability, though she does get tired of always being asked to open doors and move heavy things. Noam, Pax’s on-again, off-again lover, has a knack for calming people down, sensing other Anomals, and understanding how other people feel. Theo may not be Anomal, but he’s a talented software engineer with the connections to put all of this together and get the crew to Nova Scotia. 

That, of course, is just the crew you start with. Like any good RPG, you’ll pick up more folks as you go along, including Pax’s sister Ziggy, a talented mechanic who is super fast and can vibrate through solid objects. Your merry bunch of misfits is an eclectic group, but it’s also a truly diverse one. Pax is Black; Noam is non-binary; Sai is a big woman with vitiligo who also happens to be a practicing Muslium; Theo is Mexican; Ziggy’s got an artificial eye, and anxiety issues informed by various traumas and phobias. And that’s just the folks you meet early on. Many of the characters you meet in Dustborn are queer, and very few of them are white. It makes sense; throughout history, rebellions have been led by outcasts. Rebellions, and the stories about them, aren’t for everyone, despite what we like to tell ourselves: they’re about and led by ostracized and oppressed people who are desperate for something better, hoping to make a world where they have a place. Dustborn gets that, and the group of characters Red Thread has assembled here reflects it.

You don’t see casts like this often in games, and as someone who grew up all over the US, many of them reminded me of my friends. But I didn’t just connect with this group because they reminded me of people I knew. Dustborn has some of the most thoughtful, well-written characters I’ve run into in a video game, and they’ll change depending on how you interact with them. 

Almost every interaction you have with someone in Dustborn’s cast affects their Coda, which determines how they view themselves and how they act. Treat Theo more like a member of the team than your boss, for example, and he’ll be more likely to include Pax in leadership decisions — and feel more like a part of the crew, and open up to you as a result. Brush off Noam’s attempts to rekindle their relationship with Pax, and they’ll grow more introspective. Help Sai think before she acts, and she’ll be more likely to approach situations in a measured way and be critical of you when you don’t. Interacting with these characters, and watching them change as the story went on, was easily my favorite part of Dustborn.

There are inflection points in Dustborn’s story, of course: big moments that change large parts of how things play out, but most of what you do happens in little moments, around campfires or at diners or sitting next to one another on the tour bus, with each character slowly changing and growing over time. It’s a fantastic system, and something I wish more games would implement. I also appreciate the way Dustborn’s dialogue encourages you to listen. You won’t get every dialogue option at once; other characters will often keep talking if you remain silent, opening up new options and, sometimes, closing off old ones. You can almost always blow your crew off mid-conversation if you like or jump at the first thing that pops up, but like in real life, it’s almost always better to just sit and listen to what your friends are saying instead of just waiting for your turn to speak. When you do choose an option, you’ll know what you’re saying. Highlighting an option before selecting it will tell you what Pax thinks of a response, and how she wants to approach a conversation in a way that mimics the word/thought bubbles and captions you’d find in a comic book.

It’s a nice touch. You’ll 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 complements Dustborn’s comic book aesthetic.

Speaking of, Dustborn's cell-shaded art style is gorgeous; I love how bright and colorful everything is, and the world and characters are memorable and unique without being overdesigned. New mission objectives show up in the world as words pointing you in the right direction, and special attacks in combat look like they came straight off a splash page. Even the recaps showing you where you’ve been and the decisions you’ve made take the form of issues of a Dustborn comic you can read through. It’s very cool, and the plot goes in some very interesting directions.

What’s a little less cool is the combat. Don’t get me wrong: a lot of Dustborn’s gameplay is solid. I enjoyed the Guitar Hero-themed music sections where you can write songs, rehearse, and play shows as the band quite a bit, and I even liked the songs. I also liked exploring the environment, finding upgrades for her bat, and using Pax’s ME-EM (pronounced meme; think of an off-brand but charming Game Boy, and you’ll get the idea) to find Echoes — remnants of the mysterious Broadcast that gave Anomals their powers thirty years ago and infect people in the modern day with disinformation — and forge them into new Voxs she can use in combat.

The combat itself, however, is mixed. Dustborn plays like a fairly standard action game: you can attack, block, roll, and throw and recall Pax’s bat, Kratos-style. When her taunt meter fills up, Pax can single out and taunt an enemy and land a series of quick-time events to deal big 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. I didn’t even mind when I fumbled one because it was funny. 

You can also use Pax’s Vox powers to push enemies away, buff your crew, fool them into attacking their friends or themselves, or make them believe they’re on fire. 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. You can refill your Vox gauge by hitting enemies with your bat, but it takes a while to come back, so picking your spots can be crucial in big moments.

I enjoyed taunting enemies and using Pax’s Vox powers, but the problem with Dustborn’s combat is that there just isn’t much to it. Sure, you get more Vox powers over time and you can upgrade your bat to give you an extra hit in combos or grant you a parry, but there’s not a lot of depth here and, after a while, you don’t really receive any meaningful upgrades. It’s also a bit stiffer than I’d like. Dustborn’s combat isn’t bad, to be clear, and I enjoyed the boss fights; but after a while, it just starts to feel monotonous, and I wish there was more meat on this bone.

I also wish Dustborn’s ambient and combat dialogue didn’t interrupt itself quite so much. Dustborn’s cast is always talking, especially in combat, but taunting an enemy or using Pax’s Vox brings the banter to a halt so she can, you know, taunt enemies or say the right words. This means that the dialogue starts and stops a lot, generally with characters saying something like “So…” or “Where was I?” before picking back up at the start of the interrupted line. This also happens with ambient dialogue when you’re in the world, as characters will stop talking and greet you when you get too close, causing the ambient dialogue to pause and restart. This isn’t a big deal; Dustborn’s writing, especially its dialogue, is largely excellent and sounds the way people actually talk, aside from the odd clunker of a line. The performances are also excellent, and I sat through every piece of optional dialogue I found because I liked it so much. But it is an issue I wish wasn’t there.

Beginnings are easy. We tend to remember opening lines more than closing ones, unless they’re really bad, but it makes sense: endings are hard. I don’t love every aspect of Dustborn’s: I think the metaplot gets a little too involved for its own good, it drags on a bit too long, and a certain conversation, which foreshadows a subsequent plot point so heavily that it removes the narrative tension from the scene, would have a lot more impact if it happened a few hours earlier. 

But I do love that there is no final choice. Like the characters you’ve interacted with, Pax is, at that moment, everything you’ve shaped her to be. The choice she makes, at the end, happens because it makes sense for the person she’s become, not because we’re choosing a color or picking a door. What will stay with me, though, is the journey. Conversations shared around campfires, on park benches, at the back of the bus. Words shared among friends that go on to shape the people they become. Dustborn isn’t always subtle; it’s a game about how words have power, how people fall prey to disinformation and what that does to us, how what we say and do impacts other people, and the power we can find in being true to ourselves and being willing to fight for what we believe in. 

It is rare for a game to be about something, to work its themes into every fiber of its being, to ask us to think about the world around us and reflect on who we are, the world we live in, and the things we’ve done to make it what it is. Dustborn does that, and it's special because of it. It doesn’t always work, but what it gets wrong pales in comparison to what it does right. It is a reminder that what we say and do matters. That, to quote Hemingway, “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.” That a better world is possible, if only we have the courage to build it, if we can find the right words to speak it into existence. Let there be light.

Dustborn is available on August 20th, 2024 A code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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.