Born of dust is sort of the humanitarian friend who you know means well but is completely at his wits’ end trying to accommodate the needs of so many people. Red Thread Games’ adventure/rhythm/beat-em-up hybrid has its strengths, and when it works as a socially conscious, modern take on a Telltale Games adventure, the lives of its merry band of super-powered misfits are genuinely compelling. When it tries to be a below average beat-em-up The game trades relationship building for some of the most sparse action combat I’ve seen since the Wii era, but I’m less than impressed.
Born of dust feels like it’s trying to explore too many things, making the end result feel like a rough draft of every possible idea the team had for the game. It’s filled to the brim with mechanics, characters, and themes that sometimes feel contrived and half-baked, like an idea someone wanted to throw in whether the game has the bandwidth to incorporate it thoughtfully or not. The cast of (mostly) superpowered nomads are as diverse in background and culture as you’d expect from a group growing up as they travel through a dystopian America, but as their tour bus fills up, it becomes clear that not every character gets the same room to grow as others.
It was about halfway Born of dust that made me realize that not all characters are the same. Pax, the heroine of our story, meets nearly a dozen people who accompany her and her friends on their cross-country road trip, and at the beginning, each of these characters has their own path that you can send them on depending on your choices. For example, Theo, the boss of this group of mutant smugglers moving across America, may consider Pax and her crew as his equals, his employees, or as surrogate children by the end of. Born of dust. The game constantly reminds you that some of his reactions will depend on how you’ve treated him throughout the game, and will ultimately culminate in a specific ending based on your relationship. It’s an interesting, if obvious, way to show you how the way you treat someone can affect their worldview.
However, this mechanic never materializes for the cast that appears in the second half of the game. Instead, these less malleable characters feel like narrative devices meant to get Pax and his friends out of a sticky situation or create drama that never quite materializes, and they ultimately feel like little more than an idea that wasn’t incubated long enough. This problem goes beyond the game’s characterization and results in a story that seems unable to make up its mind.
Born of dust starts off straightforward enough. Pax, her friend Sai, and her ex Noam are all working with a man named Theo as an undercover punk band, smuggling a data key through an alternate future version of America. In this world, it wasn’t President John F. Kennedy who was killed in his 1963 assassination attempt. Instead, it was his wife Jackie Kennedy who lost her life, and in response to that loss, the President founded Justice, a police force that drifted into fascism, particularly when targeting “anomalies,” superpowered individuals who can influence various elements with their voice. For example, Pax can create negative feelings with her voice, while Noam can calm a tense situation. The group must make it across the country undetected to finish the job and achieve a better life.
That alone is a solid foundation for this road trip, but every time Pax’s tour bus stopped, I knew I would meet another character, hear about another side of the nationwide conspiracy our heroes are battling, or learn something new about this crew. By the time I was halfway across America, Born of dust already felt like it was collapsing under the weight of its ambitions. It’s clear that the team wanted to touch on different cultures, conflicts, themes, relationships, and character archetypes, but every time it expanded its focus, I felt like it lost sight of the strong base it had already established. Eventually, I felt like the grounded stories were getting lost in the noise.
There are parts of Born of dust I don’t think I could describe it to you coherently because they came and went so quickly that I didn’t fully understand what the game was leading up to. Whole sections feel like detours to another story that hasn’t ended yet, with constant escalations and deescalations of stakes and huge lore drops that feel disjointed from moment to moment. Born of dust is at its best when it explores how a group of persecuted people navigate the cynical endgame of a fascist America while still trying to find hope and connection. So often, these ideas are derailed by ineloquent genre-blending that never pays off. Entire characters are swallowed up in the final moments as they are fed into the gaping maw of convoluted twists Born of dust takes, and I wonder why the game had to be bloated into this overloaded Katamari of different elements when it already did enough.
I struggle with the big picture because I really, Really enjoyed the smaller moments in Born of dust. Before it started adding characters for the sake of characters, wrapped me around its finger as I saw sisters come back together, oppressed people find hope in each other, and a group of oppressed people fight for their freedom in an unjust world. Those were the moments that kept me going when a new invention or a convoluted twist derailed what I was going to see here. But ultimately, those were the least intrusive parts of Born of dustbecause combat remains the worst thing the game adds to its already packed agenda. It’s annoyingly imprecise, its sleight of hand from Pax’s arsenal of vocal attacks doesn’t add enough interesting flair to give the game its own identity, and the only really good aspect is that you have the option to do less from the start.
The game’s rhythm sequences, where you play the titular punk band Dustborn, are a little better and challenging enough, but I never found myself looking forward to them because I honestly didn’t like the music. Maybe that was intentional, considering Dustborn is just a cover for a smuggling operation, but I won’t be listening to any of those songs on Spotify. Born of dust constantly takes on more than it can handle, even with quick gags like a full turn-based combat sequence that pays homage to RPG classics. It’s not even that these ideas are inherently unsound, it’s just that the execution never reaches the heights of the relationship story.
I feel like I’ve spent most of this review demonizing a game that I mostly enjoyed. Maybe that’s because I get frustrated with wasted potential smothered under a pile of excess, like someone who doesn’t want to tell the person holding the Olive Garden cheese grater when. Part of me feels like I need a game like this. Born of dust right now; one that believes that people coming together can change the world and that despite the shit going on around them, there is still something worth fighting for. I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve fallen back into the same cynicism I felt as a teenager. I’ve watched the world around me get worse and worse while those who supported me get beaten down just as hard. How long do we have to stand together and fight against systems that would rather let us lie down and die before something changes? How much fighting spirit is left in me to figure this out? Large parts of Born of dust has awakened my fear of the state of the world, and despite the unshakeable belief that Pax and her friends could make the world a better place, I find myself becoming more and more numb to this idea. Perhaps the world, similar to Born of dustis not easily defined as good or bad, but is simply full of good people trying to make the best of the situation they find themselves in. I want to believe in it as much as the game does, and maybe that belief is enough for me to overlook its overambition.
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