Thoughts on Dustborn

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I simply wanted to play Dustborn not out of hatred or irony, but rather "is it that bad?" and for me, I found that the game had it's moments, couple of chapters in the game are interesting but bogged down due to it having a shaky foundation, TLDR; The game is slow and actively discourages replaying the game, the combat is tedious, rhythm game is nothing to write about, overall the game is just a fluffy nothing burger.

Ragnar Tørnquist is the lead director, known for playing a part in making adventure games that I've never played, The Longest Journey being the stand out game I've noticed, I'm not an Adventure game person. Only thing similar I've played is killer7 but I'd say thats an extreme art house blend of genres, but I mainly focus on platformers, action, FPS, and rarely RPG games, so this is kinda out of my wheel house but I can apply some of my knowledge to this game on what I don't enjoy.

I want to start out with game feel, Pax is very slow moving, I'm not really expecting, jumping, or parkour, but she has about 3 speeds, slow walking, walk, and a jog, it's nothing bad until you actually start getting into the bigger levels such as in issue #4 with mall Jesus where you have a massive level to explore but walking from point A to B is an extreme chore, inflating the playtime artificially.

There are no text boxes in this game to pass through once you're done reading the subtitles, just one long scene, so if you are one of the few that have beaten the game and want to replay it and see the different reactions, good luck with that 2nd playthrough, not only you have to listen through it again, you have no way to replay any of the levels in this game I know you might be asking; "who cares, this is a game nobody will care about." This is a very basic feature QOL feature some games should have just like DVD releases of movies and TV shows, specially a game like this, if could add anything to this game, I'd add the dialogue/text box system that most modern JRPG games use where it's voice acted but it automates to the next text box or you can speed read then skip to the next box, that is something Dustborn needs instead of just having one long unskippable scene.

Combat is bare bones action game even on Hard mode, it's meh, you can attack, taunt that leads into a bunt attack, block, dodge roll, and use Vox. Vox is your main tool, make enemies think they're on fire, give yourself a buff, push enemies, and turn enemies into ragdolls; it's funny to see my teammate or mooks lifeless body fly across the screen, which I think it would be cool if they leaned more into that, crank up the hitstun, add a leg sweeping/launcher moves instead of it being locked to a special attack, more emphasis on throwing your enemies into each other. Speaking of extra moves, throwing the bat useless until I invest in the skill tree, why is the final string in my combo locked behind a skill tree? Why isn't Ziggy upgrading your bat instead? I'm unsure if this is in the game since there are 3 types of personalities you can encourage out of each main cast character, but I'm not playing this game again to find out.

Now for characters and story, I suck at this also spoilers; but personally, the only character that was interesting was Theo, but they fumbled his crisis of faith character arc by just skimming over it, I also thought Theo was going to be a double agent but it's Sai, it feels like they switched Theo's story beats with Sai, since she made a flash drive with encrypted junk data, this obviously sounds like something Theo would do, since he's extremely knowledgeable about computers, based off the character intro.

The two main villains Justice and Purity feel like they just serve the plot whenever the author needs them, but what doesn't make sense is that Justice should have caught the group at the first check point due to Sai being a double agent, but nope, I guess Sai is just really good with her Vox to convince Justice or Justice is just extremely incompetent, Purity is the same except they have this kid named Axiom, that can disintegrate anyone but chooses to wait until the final moment to pull on the player's heart strings a bit only to get BTFO'd by Pax in a big ass pull.

I find it honorable that Ragnar Tørnquist wanted to "bring adventure gaming back into the mainstream" but that is not an easy undertaking in any genre, this did not pull me in even though I gave it a chance, it feels like I'm actively fighting your game on the simplest of ♥♥♥♥ such as being able to replay a chapter. The story, I'm not good at pulling it apart, all I can say is that it had an interesting premise, but boring execution by outright spoon feeding me every single detail about the lore and "possible ramification of this powerful language" in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ office room with a character that only exists just to spoon feed me this info.

Overall the game had some interesting moments bogged down by slow movement, boringly easy combat, and a story that only has me interested because it's soo damn boring, I keep thinking to myself "Wouldn't it be cool if there where time limits in certain sections?" "What if this story had any sense of tension?" Other than that I only wish for the best for Red Thread's future games.

I give bustborn like... ah half quarter of a Pizza Tower, and cold Spaghetti thats a bit freezer burnt

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I'm probably dumb but if anyone here has found a "chapter select screen" please tell me, I'm unsure if I'm just dumb or its actually not there