Dustborn Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Dustborn is a unique little game. It’s a narrative heavy road trip with audio-based superpowers, combat with a throwable baseball bat that can be recalled Mjollnir-style, and some light ghostbusting. It’s an eclectic mix of ideas that might seem difficult to balance.

The highlight here is definitely the story and the characters. Set in the pseudo-dystopian hellscape known as America – an alternate history one, I mean, that’s now called the American Republic. You play as a woman called Pax who is tasked with delivering a package to Nova Scotia and has a small team to help her out. Pax and two of this team are Anomals – individuals with superpowers stemming from a mysterious cataclysmic event – and are planning to use this trip to Nova Scotia to escape their lives to a country more accepting of them. So in order to smuggle themselves and the mysterious package across the country, they start a band and go on tour. It’s the perfect cover…. band.

The characters and their dialogue is phenomenal throughout, and there’s absolutely tonnes of it. Most of the time, the game plays like a Telltale adventure or, more fittingly as it’s published by Quantic Dream, Detroit: Become Human, just without the silly quicktime events for opening doors and stuff. You’ll be having a lot of conversations, walking around an location for some light puzzling or adventuring, sending one of your crew in to pick a lock or just knock a door down, and so on. I absolutely love this part of the game, I found myself quickly becoming attached to the characters thanks in no small part by the excellent voice acting, which is handy when you can’t skip a single line of dialogue.

What’s also superb is the attention to detail, sometimes to a fault. Dustborn keeps tracks of an awful lot of things you say or do and often brings it up later. At one point, Sai was having a bit of an episode in a bathroom and I was trying to convince her to come out so we could continue. Having exhausted all of my non-magic options, I