Steam Cleaning Part 4: Dust: An Elysian Tail

The game's themes are dark, but the overall feeling of the opening isn't as emo as this cover art makes it look.

I've only played through what seems to be the first act of the game and a little more, but I don't see myself finishing it so I'm writing up the part that I've seen. I'm 3 hours in according to Steam, essentially where the quick look picks up.

I was interested in Dust: An Elysian Tail mostly because of the discussion that surrounded it when it came out. The characters are anthropomorphic animals. On playing the game, it isn't apparent to me why this is a big deal, but the game apparently got a lot of backlash for being about "furries." I had a friend in high school who used to draw a lot of furries, had an online persona that was a rabbit (he probably still does) and it was really weird how much he seemed to think the furry-world was at least as real as the real actual world, but if people are into that, who cares? This choice on the part of the game's creator doesn't detract from the game - the art is striking, and the story has started out with some interesting themes. So far, you could reskin the game and it really wouldn't have to be about furries. I don't know if that's entirely to the game's credit (why make that art choice if it doesn't inform the story and gameplay?) but it does mean that the game's creator wasn't making something so weird and niche that a non-furry-enthusiast player can't follow what's going on.

The game is a 2-D beat-'em-up with Metroidvania elements (you can see things you can't access until later, your powers get doled out to open up new areas) and a Castle Crashers-esque leveling up system, and some RPG elements like side quests you can get from townspeople, and light item crafting. The Metroidvania and quest elements are the crux of why I'm not coming back to finish Dust: I just don't want to spend the time walking back and forth across the maps any more. The combat is a lot of fun, but my character has become plenty powerful to just wade across each screen in the map, and so I just walk from one end to the other, mashing the attack button without really paying attention. This is even worse in towns, where you might have to spend an interminable time wandering from one side of the town to the other in order to find a shop or turn in a quest. This really slows the pace of the game, and despite the cute dialog and beautiful art of the towns and surrounding wilderness, I just find myself without the patience to sit through these section. I feel like it might be an indication that parenting and my phone have destroyed my attention span to the point that I can't spend 40 seconds idle, and that soon I'm going to need Adderall to focus long enough to tie my own shoes. I also feel like it's a shame that this has put me off the game, because it has a lot going for it.

The visuals are amazingly colorful, emotionally provocative, and unique.

It's hard to exaggerate how impressive the game is in terms of creativity and the visual presentation. The animation is incredibly fluid and beautiful, with an anime-like feel (although with more frames of animation than most anime I've seen, everything is smooth). There are little touches that really give the characters life, like the way the eponymous main character strikes incredibly cool swordsman poses during the combat animations, the way downed enemies peel themselves up off the ground, and the way that your flying foxy companion's hands shake when it is scared. Not only is the animation beautiful and detailed, but it avoids the problem the I thought Skullgirls had - so much animation flying past so quickly that I couldn't really register what any of it actually looked like. The images themselves are also striking. It evokes feelings of nostalgia or regret, even though I have nothing related to this game to regret or feel nostalgiac about. The art is full of color but avoids being garish, and the game makers have very artfully managed to put a screen full of enemies and the Player Character onscreen at once in front of detailed backgrounds without making it hard to track the action; I never felt like I was losing track of the characters. You can see in the screenshot above how the bright "action" area stands out from the dimmer background and foreground, and the lighting helps to highlight the player character. It's subtle enough to look natural, but works very effectively when you're wiping out hordes of "monsters."

The game hints pretty heavily even this early on that all these things you're killing are actually just innocently trying to get by, and your character is a part of the army of the General that is setting about a genocidal mission to kill all of the non-cute furry critters, and in resisting him or helping him or whatever you're going to kill your old girlfriend or wife or sister or whatever that female character is that you meet early on.

This really doesn't represent how many enemies you face at a given time.

And hordes is no exaggeration. You leave a pile of flashing-before-they-disappear corpses in your wake as you trudge from one side of the game to the other. For me, the combat ended up being rather tedious. Maybe I just haven't gotten far enough into the game to really get challenged, but playing on the default difficulty, I find myself more annoyed at enemy encounters than excited or even frustrated. Since enemies repopulate after you leave an area and return to it, I found myself, even early in the game, slogging through areas for the second or third time, mashing the attack button in a state of near-catatonia. Every once in awhile, the combat would ramp up or get more complicated and I'd really enjoy myself. The boss encounters I experienced were all fun, if not particularly challenging, and gave me a chance to try some more advanced combat techniques like parrying. Dodging became more important as well at times, particularly when there were environmental obstacles or really large crowds of monsters. Popping up enemies with the combos and flying around the screen chopping them in half with your sword starts out being extremely fun, but when it's in service of just getting to another place, it just wasn't enough to hold my attention, no matter how curious I was about the story.

The writing in the game is very good. The characters engage in anime-style banter, mixed at times with anime-style philosophizing and moralizing. The funny parts are definitely funny, and the heavy parts of the game feel like they aren't just an attempt to be shocking (looking at you, Homefront), but actually are an attempt by the game makers to deal with a serious topic. That might seem like an incongruous goal for a brightly colored brawler, but the fact that the game seems to comment on the massive amounts of violence the player character is perpetrating as you play earns it some room to be taken seriously. Like a good war movie, the game presents the juxtaposition that life presents to all of us: moments of hilarity often arrive adjacent to tragedy, the absurd and the grievous come without regard for one another. This doesn't result in a tonal mismatch when it's well done, it feels realistic, and in the case of Dust, those shifts in tone fit in well with the overall experience. I have to admit: I'm curious to see what happens to the game, but I just can't be bothered to walk across it to find out.

I wouldn't want this essay to push people away from playing the game - I think most people will find it to be a worthy experience, just as I did. Certainly, it is well-crafted and interesting. Particularly for people with more time (or patience), I think this game would be worth playing. Despite that assessment, I'm putting it down for now, but I won't be uninstalling it just yet in case I decide to give it another chance.