The almost parodying melodramatic characters and odd combination of genres that make up Dustborn lead to an eye-rolling first impression, but as my crew of mutant outsiders traveled across America, beating people with a souped-up baseball bat and talking about our feelings, I realized there was a lot more to it than I initially thought. Dustborn takes gigantic ideas and does it with robots in bunny hats, heartbroken biker queens, and sci-fi squids. This combination of comics, Telltale-inspired adventure stories, and rhythm games is a smorgasbord of style, story, and action, and it works better than it has any right to.
You play as Pax, a disinterested con artist who transports a secret shipment to Canada with a gang of other super-powered smugglers posing as a punk band. The action takes place in an intriguing alternate version of America where JFK was never assassinated, Marilyn Monroe is called Lady Justice, and a flood of concentrated information has given some people powers. Not laser eyes or flight—think gaslighting, voice-based mind control, illusion magic, and more. Dustborn is all about making choices through dialogue and actions that guide your character toward a certain end of this journey. Will you cuddle up with your ex? Will you tell the rest of the crew your plan? Will you eavesdrop on their phone conversations? (I mean the latter, of course.)
When you’re not chatting with your allies through cutesy conversations that sound like they should have a mental health hashtag on TikTok, there’s also a bit of action. Your punk songs at concerts will play out as timed rhythm games, you’ll catch floating entities called Echos by dragging them into place with a modified handheld device, and you’ll even fight various humans and robots by swinging a boomerang and using your command powers to push, freeze, or disorient enemies. I can never resist a bit of button-mashing musical action, and while the combat is uncomplicated, it looks fucking awesome. I wish there were more sections like this to balance out all the chatter, but there’s a good chance I’m just impatient and emotionally stunted.
Either way, the pacing is Dustborn’s biggest flaw. The campaign has a leisurely start with enough exposition to strangle a donkey, having seemingly endless enraged conversations before you get a chance to do anything fun with these characters. It’s especially simple to get annoyed when everything you do seems to involve people being enraged at you. Over time, you learn more about each member of the team and how to have conversations, and all of that chitchat has an emotional tone, but at first Pax and the people he deals with just seem a little pathetic. Turns out, nothing brings people together like hitting robots with a baseball bat in combat combos or rocking out as a band, and that’s what won me over, too.
The action sequences themselves aren’t the deepest, so for Dustborn to be a worthwhile investment, you have to buy into the whole package. If you’re in it just for one mechanic, say the music, you’ll probably run out of patience waiting for the next opportunity to let loose. Likewise, there’s no way to speed through all the emotional stuff—even if you don’t care about being a frigid bitch to your buddies and decide to cut them off whenever possible, you’ll still have to reevaluate those decisions in order to get to the next chapter. I stuck with it because every time I was ready to give up, some part of the story would gently pull me back in, and I’m a sucker for robots and relationship drama.
Whether it’s the story, the diversity of the characters, or the way the conflicts are presented in the conversations, Dustborn clearly made a conscious effort to be as inclusive as possible. At first, it felt performative, and I say that as someone who is neither straight nor completely sane, but that philosophy ultimately becomes the driving force behind what makes both these characters and the decisions about them so much more intricate and captivating. That positive message doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay, because the gameplay is about being different and finding your place in society. The X-Men did it in the ’80s, and now Dustborn does it with the issues and visual language of 2024.
When the story picks up the pace and shows the confidence to have more levity in its sometimes overly earnest dialogue or give you larger chunks of autonomy, I was fully engaged. Exploring a sinister, robot-filled research lab with my spoiled little sister; getting a perfect streak at a small-town punk show; taking a robot hat shopping in an abandoned mall; using increasingly strange combinations of powers in combat; all of this combined with dialogue to give emotional consequence to my choices, good or bad. I won’t be back to repeat, but I’ll always fondly remember that time I took a road trip with a group of weirdos and set a gas station on fire.
