Dustborn

I went into Dustborn braced for culture-war chaos and came out the other side thinking about a game that is genuinely split down the middle - not politically, but structurally. Red Thread Games, the studio behind Dreamfall Chapters, clearly knows how to write people. The early stretch of this roughly 15-hour road trip across an alt-history American Republic is quietly gripping: superpowered outsiders disguised as a punk band, a bus driven by a robot, a cargo nobody will explain, and a web of relationships that shift based on how you speak to each person. That first half earns its slow burn. The world-building is the engine here. In this timeline Jackie Kennedy was killed in Dallas instead of JFK, which sent the country spiraling into a militarized police state run by a fascist president and his force called Justice. Pax, your protagonist, is an Anomal - someone whose voice carries literal power. Her ability to "trigger" enemies into a frenzy, "gaslight" them, or eventually "cancel" a target are combat mechanics that double as thematic texture. Noam can calm a situation down vocally while Sai can break down doors through sheer Anomal strength. The crew's powers complement each other nicely on paper, and dialogue choices that track each relationship through a visible plus-or-minus meter give you a genuine sense of authorship over how these people feel about each other. Chapter summaries rendered in comic-book panels, showing your choices against a global percentage of how other players decided, is a small touch that I found oddly moving. Where the seams split is in the back half. The combat is the most honest problem: a 3D brawler with a smash button, a dodge, a meter for vocal abilities, and a camera that fights you as hard as the enemies do. The game actually asks you early on whether you want more or less combat going forward, which is a sign of self-awareness that unfortunately does not translate into fixing the system itself. Even dialled down, the encounters feel sloppy, and the rhythm minigame sections - Guitar Hero-lite moments where the band has to prove its cover story - are serviceable without being satisfying. The story also starts folding in new characters past the point the game has bandwidth for them, and the final chapters feel written at a different pace from everything before, piling on metaphors until the earlier warmth is buried. Here is what I kept coming back to, though: the smaller scenes. Sisters reconnecting. A software-engineer named Theo whose entire arc shifts depending on whether you treated him like a boss, a peer, or a father figure. The art direction, built on custom shaders in Unity to achieve a vivid comic-book look, gives every stop on the road trip its own atmosphere. The soundtrack, punk-adjacent and pointed, fits the tone in a way you do not expect from an indie game with this kind of political ambition. Dustborn arrived wrapped in online noise that had little to do with the actual game, and that noise obscured something real: a flawed but earnest piece of work from a small Norwegian studio that cares deeply about character, even when it cannot stick the landing mechanically. If you have zero patience for brawler combat and want choices that meaningfully branch the story, this will frustrate you. If you are drawn to narrative adventures with a genuine emotional core - think Telltale at its best, extended over a longer road - the people on that bus are worth meeting. Kai, Scout Team