Dust: An Elysian Tale is an indie game made by an independent designer named Dean Dodrill (Humble Heart is the pen name) and was released in August 15th, 2012. By the way, the Korean on the side of the title translates to “dust”. The game is a 2-D, side-scrolling, exploratory, action-adventure (all of these together summerize metroidvania) with RPG mixed in. It is available on steam and Xbox Live for $14.99. I’m mostly reviewing the combat, level design, and RPG aspects of the game. I’m not really educated in art, music, voice-acting, etc. I don’t really like criticizing something that I’m not really familiar with, so all I can says is whether or not I like it. Keep in mind I played this on tough/hard mode.
My Rating: 6/10
(0,1 points = this game shouldn’t even exist)
(2,3 points = bad)
(4 points = not really worth it)
(5 points = average)
(6 points = could have been better)
(7,8 points = good)
(9 points = I highly recommend this game)
(10 points = One of the best games that I have ever played and you’d be a damn fool to miss it)
*Note: Criterion is at the bottom
Synopsis of the story: You play a main character Dust, who has amnesia, who is trying to discover himself and save the world. He has two companions: Ahrah, who is a magical talking sword, and a nimbat named Fidget. You are trying to save a race of “people” called Moonbloods, who are anthropomorphic reptiles, from an army of Warmbloods, who are furries.
Tl;Dr/Summary: Combat wasn’t that great because you can use the same combo for the whole game. You dealt a lot of damage and you never took damage. Bosses sucked because you never had to read into the telegraphing and you could use the same combo. The RPG is pretty good. Leveling up is reasonable and your stat upgrades have good impact and are apparent. The items/crafting was pretty fun and easy too. The shops would store and restock all the materials you found throughout the game to help keep up with the recipes you find. I also enjoy the minimal backtracking. Generic platforming, so nothing too special about it. Lots of wasted potential though.
Combat: The combat is based around hacking and slashing, which is my personal favorite combat system. However, it suffers from first order optimal strategy, which basically means that you can use a few simple strategies or tactics and complete most or all of the game with them. I happened to find one overpowered attack combo very early. (SPOILER WARNING) Once you learn Dust Storm and Fidget’s first spell, all you have to do is use the spell and then use the aerial dust storm attack, while moving left and right. If you find yourself in the red or low on magic, just get back on the ground, make a few combos with your regular attack to replenish the magic and “cooldown”. Rinse then repeat (SPOILER END). Using this combo makes you invulnerable to attacks and you do a lot of area of effect damage, which can clear screens easy. There is a bit of variety with the monsters in the game, but learning their attack patterns and strategizing against them is pointless. I’m also aware that there are other high-damage, complex combos in the game, but what’s the point? Why bother when you never take damage and kill everything so efficiently with the other combo? However, there are only 2 monsters in this game where this combo becomes ineffective. There’s one called blombs and they do nothing but stop your forward momentum. After a while, you can get tanky enough to ignore them, but sitting there and waiting for them to eat your Fidget spell to die is just annoying and wastes your time. This is really not a big deal but it still bothered me a lot. The other monster is the trolk (no this is not a typo). You can’t do any real damage to it unless you parry its attacks, which at some point isn’t challenging either, because they telegraph their attacks like its their job. So, other than those two monsters, you can use the overpowered combo to kill everything else. Sadly, this includes bosses. Seriously you can use the same combat strategy for bosses and they don’t take a lot of damage either, so boss battles end within a few minutes. Boss battles in this game suck. This was seriously underwhelming and the game lost much of its flare.
The RPG: Leveling up in this game is actually fairly easy, which is one of the few things I liked in this game. No one likes spending an excruciating amount of time grinding to improve their characters. You get experience points by killing monsters and getting high hit chains, which can be easily done with the previously mentioned combo in the combat section. You can get the maximum level (60) by the end of the game without spending too much time. However, getting the maximum level is nowhere near necessary to beat it with ease. The effects of the upgrades are very apparent and it feels pretty good knowing the time and effort you put into improving yourself has a real impact in the game.
Items: Items, including healing items, are super expensive. If you end up running low on health, I recommend you just go to a previous area of the game, and farm up healing items there. You can also buy resurrection crystals if you are still having trouble. You can only find equipment in chests. The rest you have to make yourself by getting blueprints and materials that are dropped by enemies. This is also really easy to do. You can sell your materials in a shop, and they will stock any of the materials that you have sold after a few minutes throughout the game. So, you don’t have to run around the entire game getting specific drops for equipment later. This was probably my favorite part because it helped to keep you moving forward. I always found backtracking stupid and frustrating. I already completed the goddamn area. I don’t want to run back there so I can farm a bunch of shit for a dumbass item. Backtracking for special blueprints, chests, and items I can tolerate. Backtracking to farm, not so much.
*IMPORTANT NOTE: Buy the keys in the shop if you can. If you are trying to complete the game and get all the chests and friends, you have to buy the keys.
Level Design: The platforming and level design in this game is pretty standard. The movement of the game was pretty smooth and quick, other than the moments where you had to stop for the blombs and the trolks. There’s dashing, sliding, double jumping, high jumping (only when there’s wind blowing upward), and wall climbing/jumping (only with vines though). What was really cool was ascending to ridiculous heights and speeds using the aerial dust storm. It was very smooth and you can transition into other modes of movement with it. They could have had some interesting platforming puzzles with it. But they didn’t. It was mostly used to find some secrets, chests, and keys here and there. A wasted opportunity if you ask me.
Music, story, art, etc. (SPOILERS): None of this really impressed me, but this doesn’t mean that I thought it was bad. With games like Journey, Bastion, etc, this doesn’t even come close to holding a candle to them. The voice for Ahrah was pretty good. Whenever Dust talked, he sounds like he just got out of bed and sighing. Fidget’s voice is tolerable, but it was probably because she had the best and funniest lines. She has moments when she breaks the fourth wall, but not to the point where it was obnoxious. During one of the quests, you have to collect sheep, and she makes a comment about how Dust just shoved the whole thing in his inventory. I do enjoy the use of colors in the art, but like I said, its nothing too special. The same is true for the music. The story is pretty boring. There is no real progression. You find out what’s happening in the world pretty early in the game and just details about it later. Just a bunch of racists killing people. When it comes to your identity, the only thing they tell you is that you have a relationship to the racist leading the army. No other clues are given to your identity up until the end.
Other/Personal Points: I haven’t played that many metroidvania’s, and all-in-all it wasn’t a bad game. However there are better games out there, such as Muramasa. I played Dust for about 18 hours, but some of that time was trying to achieve full completion. So for me, it was worth the price. You can play this game with either a keyboard and mouse, or with a controller, but I recommend the controller. The controls were responsive, so there’s no issue there. Here’s the big question: Would I recommend this game? Honestly, it really depends on the person. If you’ve never played metroidvania and not too fond of difficult games, this would probably be a decent one to pick up. For you completionists out there, this game isn’t that hard to complete either.
Criterion: For each section, there was a possible maximum of two points. A section will get 0 points if I feel that the mechanic or aspect was used poorly. 1 point will be given if the mechanic was used properly, but nothing special or new came out it. 2 points will be given if I feel that the mechanic made the game fun and interesting. The personal area is where the game can gain extra points if it made a good impression on me. You can choose to ignore this section if you want and just subtract one or two points the base max since some of it is subjective. However, there are some points in there that might affect your decision to play the game, such as price efficiency, controls, etc.
(Combat: 1/2)
(RPG and Items: 2/2)
(Level design: 1/2)
(Music, story, art, etc.: 1/2)
(Other/Personal Points: 1/2)
-thebakmiester
INDIE-vidual Gamers 