Dustborn for Xbox Series Review

An atypical road trip in a dystopian North America loaded with melodramatic narrative

The team that brought us Dreamfall Chapters, Red threadhas developed Born from dusta Road Trip with interactive narration and a variety of playable mechanics. They have teamed up with the publishing label of Quantic Dreams SA publish an AA with a strong message about misinformation, discrimination, and characters with very special powers in a dystopian North America.

It’s 2030 and North America is much more changed than we think, with altered historical events and an “accident” that changed everything. For reasons we’ll discover, there are people with powers and of course, they’re persecuted because they’re dangerous to “normal people.”

PaxOur protagonist is one of them, with special abilities they call “speak“, which gives her the ability to make others do whatever she wants. During their journey to escape, Pax and his friends stole information about the tyrannical government that has turned part of North America into a dictatorship.

A Road Trip with a Political Message

Along the way, Pax will have the help of Saiher best friend with super strength, Noamable to calm and soften people’s nerves and Theohis “boss” in this spy mission. Apparently, it is a punk rock band that has permission to tour the country and reach “La Resistencia” to deliver important information.

Their fight is also against government disinformation, discrimination against “Anomalies”, as Pax constantly emphasizes that they should be called, and the goal of freedom. There is this political message at all times, but also a rather unfortunate desire to inscribe certain political agendas that flood so many works of cinema, series and video games.

The game strives at every step to emphasize this, and through so-called inclusive language, it tries to make it clear where it’s going. It gets quite annoying, since the feminine plural is used at all times even if it’s a man speaking. This further tarnishes a rather slow and tedious adventure, which, while it tells an interesting story (albeit nothing we haven’t seen before), becomes tedious and politically overwhelming in my experience.

Along the way, we will find more characters that will make the plot more interesting, in addition to adding companions to the team with different abilities. Our long (very long) conversations will give rise to “consequences” with the characters and their relationships, which will be reflected in each chapter in the form of a comic strip (which I really liked).

Additionally, we can get orders or side missions from NPCs, which leads us to broader content if you want to follow the stories of the secondary characters you meet.

Varied mechanics in a diverse world

Dustborn is an interactive narrative, something seen in titles like Life is Strange or Dreamfall Chapters itself, but it adds fairly simple hack and slash mechanics and other mini-games. As a punk band, we will have to play in small concerts simulating Rock Band or Guitar Hero, something that, without the somewhat simplistic soundtrack, would be more enjoyable.

There will be stops along the way, such as camping and supplies, where the group will talk about their business, daily life and where they can strengthen their relationships, offer gifts that we will find if we explore first and compose more songs. Eventually it becomes quite tedious and the temptation to fall asleep to continue the journey is quite powerful.

However, if you want to know more about the characters and their relationships/past, it is necessary, even if with this the pace is desperately slow. Here we can choose to fraternize more or less with our companions, to become intimate or to delve into their feelings, a life that can help the player to forge other narrative lines, although not obligatory.

There is also a component hack-and-slashwith sporadic fights with combos that can be improved, special powers and other abilities. The combat is superficial and boring when you have some, which despite the improvement and the addition of skills are poorly worked.

The fights against the big bosses also did not bring me anything more exciting, remaining something anecdotal instead of being part of the adventure. Although in the trailer they show the fights as something integrated, it seems more like a decaffeinated supplement that, although not bad, seems somewhat wasted.

And another main mechanic is trapping »echoes” in our ME-ME devicea modified handheld video game console capable of neutralizing entities that cause confusion and distress in people. Discord and distrust are the consequences of these echoes’ actions, and Pax has the ability to trap them in a game of tug-of-war similar to that of the Ghostbusters.

By obtaining these echoes, we will be able to acquire more superpowers once we have demodulated them, which, along with the acquisition of more combat skills, gives a little life to the exploration part of Dustborn. In addition to clothes and gifts, we will find robot parts for abilities and echoes for powers, so get lost exploring the small areas of the journey.

Audiovisually one of lime and another of sand

With its comic style, Dustborn’s visual appearance is eye-catching, with very well-designed and striking characters. The environments have less detail and some animations are close to the minimum required for an AA title, but it really does look pretty cool. However, I miss a bit more interaction with the scenarios, as it feels somewhat artificial.

Sure, it’s a modest title, with a low price, but what’s most annoying are the animations and object collisions and the combats. Even if it doesn’t focus on that, it clashes quite a bit with the good work of character modeling, which is much more worked by focusing on the narrative.

The game is dubbed in English, but subtitled in imperfect Spanish, focusing on the inclusive language and empowerment that are so fashionable today. Most of the dialogue features these words in capital letters, such as “TOGETHER” and “WE” when talking about a mixed group or when Theo, who is a man, speaks.

But perhaps the most annoying thing is the behavior of the majority of the characters, thirty-somethings fleeing justice, hardened to conflicts, but who protest to their companions for absolute absurdities. It takes you a long way from the adventure they are trying to tell, with crude jokes and dialogues more typical of fifteen-year-olds than adults. With Théo too, it is worse, because he knows nothing when he is a spy, a globetrotter used to facing all kinds of people and situations.

I also expected a better soundtrack, but it remains within the themes simple and without any charisma, which can be detrimental to the parts of the game where you have to play in a group.

Conclusions

Dustborn is a title focused on interactive narrative that focuses on the relationships between the protagonists and their environment, in addition to their reactions to our actions. It includes combat mechanics, Rock Band-style music and other mini-games, but it completely lacks depth in each of them, making it a playable refuge among so much narrative.

The game didn’t really strike me as bad, it’s good, but I may have gotten the wrong idea about a story-driven adventure game and it gets heavy-handed with the dialogues made for teenagers. The political message and the constant scolding are completely unnecessary and a bit of a drag, making its inspiration from Life is Strange seem futile.

Dustborn will be released on August 20 on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Game Pass, Playstation 4, Playstation 5 and PC for $29.99. Southern Games You can get its edition in physical format.