Duskers

Explore. Adapt. Survive. This is a game where the first 10 hours consists of you opening a door, screaming like you're caught in a woodchipper as you get absolutely decimated by whatever was camping the door and then reset the run. If that doesn't make you wet, this game probably isn't for you. I am wet.

One of the scariest, most ferociously immersive games ever made. And don't believe a word about Duskers being repetitive or boring after a while. It's not. The sense of dread, of total isolation, and the slow gathering of evidence about 'what did happen to the rest of the universe' is at times almost unbearable. Short of Alien: Isolation and System Shock 2, I've never felt so strongly the sense of being a lone survivor put in an impossible situation. The command line interface seems rudimentary at first, but in reality, once you get the hang of it, it is very creative and satisfactory. Prepare for some jumpscares, but overall this is a game about constant dread, not monsters saying 'boooh' in space

Minimalistic greenish graphics shouldn't make your palms sweat as you manoever and order the icons representing your robots trough a space wreck via typed in commands and arrow keys. Yet you can't help but get startled as you misjuge a situation and panic as your little robot buddies get eaten by an anomaly or swarming thing. I really like how this game manages to ooze SF horror atmosphere as you battle your slowly decaying ship, food and energy reserves and whatever nasties or natural disaster awaits you as you trawl the universe for clues to what may happened to everyone else. And the programming interface can help you set up some really nice scenarios as you herd and blast nasties into space or slowly light up a wreck to get to a "treasure room" and are already planning your quick exit. The only negative for me is that the story elements are a bit light (but interesting).

There's still nothing really like to this game. I keep thinking about it a lot, even if I don't play it as much. Excited for the Duskers 2.

Fantastic idea and interesting mechanics indelibly marred by the roguelike formula. The common wisdom of the game is never to open a door you don't KNOW is safe but when it's the very start of the game and you didn't roll a drone with literally any sort of detection, just a trap that has to be manually activated, there's not much you can do but open some doors and hope for the best. The best will not happen. If this was, like, a 5-7 hour scripted game with bespoke levels and less complete RNG when it comes to drone upgrades I think this would genuinely be a crowning achievement in experimental horror gaming. As it is it's just an exercise in frustration. Buy it on sale, play for a couple hours to soak in the incredible vibes and atmosphere, and then leave when you've had your fill.

It's basically like when you go out mining at night in Minecraft without any torches.

This is a great game but I had to stop playing. It was jsut too stressful!

This game is very much about risk & resource management. The game loop is simple: Equip your drones with the right upgrades and pick a ship to board. In this ship, you have to find generators to control the doors. If you want to progress through the ship, you'll have to manage the threats. Different upgrades can give you information in different ways. By controlling the doors you can wait for creatures to move out of the rooms you need to be in, so you can get the resources that are in there. Once you've explored the entire ship (or have determined that the risk is too great) you can return all your drones (or whichever ones are left) to the starting room. After that, resource management kicks in. Upgrades have a probability of breaking. You can repair them, against a scrap cost. Or you may choose to let them break after the next few missions to replace them with another upgrade. Rinse and repeat. The good: [list] [*] The game is tense, especially in the beginning of a run where you don't have much to work with. [*] The game looks very good, the game looks pretty minimal, but I find that a charm, from the "Lidar dots" projected from the drones to the sharp and minimal lines of the ship view. [*] The game is very performant, this game will run on any old potato, running any OS. (I'd say, the older the computer the greater the ambiance) [*] The provided booklet is very nice. [*] As part of the story line, there are quests (Do this, with this or do this without that), these may require you to rethink your strategy. I wholeheartedly recommend following these. [/list] The bad: [list] [*] There is a rich story, however it is fully done through corrupted communications. Given that there are 6 storylines running in tandem, they can be difficult to keep track of. [*] Do you like waiting? Because sometimes that is all you can do! A certain enemy has a tendency to move back and fourth between two rooms, even if other options are available. This can be problematic when you don't have other options to your disposal to remove it and the ship is actively falling apart. [/list] Final thoughts: A tense and rewarding gameplay loop, with a phenomenal atmosphere.

While i am giving this game a Not Recommended i'd like to mention that the core gameplay loop genuinely is one of a kind and excellent except the game's a real lying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and all of you should be aware of what you're getting into. So: The main gameplay loop is docking with derelict stations and ships, exploring them to gain scrap, which is what you use to repair and buy upgrades for your drones and your ship, and collecting Propulsion Fuel to travel inside a star system, and Jump Fuel to jump between star systems. This is actually really good. The problem: There's LITERALLY nothing else here. The ""story"" if you can call it that is just a bunch of logs of the most lame and boring scifi bs i have ever read, telling you to salvage more ships of the military kind, or salvage derelict stations. Literally just telling you to play the game more, you dont actually have to do anything for it, it just jumps up before a salvage mission and goes away after with one button press. No actual logs to be found on the ships, merely docking progresses the story meaning its not something you ever interact with, it just happens in the background. That being said thats probably for the better considering how lame and filler it is. There's the joke that a game only needs story like a porno does and this game just took that idea and ran with it. Its so bare bones there isnt even skin on the bone. Its the first draft of a story's outline, not even a story itself. Moreover, as i said, this game has two hours of content and absolutely nothing else. No music(although to be fair it doesnt need one, but still), four enemy types, three of which play largely the same with very minor differences, and an absolutely brutal economy system that is so cruel that as soon as you start playing you're in an inescapable death spiral and you cant survive the death spiral, you can only extend it by a handful of more salvaging missions if you play well and get lucky. Not being able to tell how big a derelict is going to be is a major problem too because it makes the death spiral economy so much worse, because a derelict with four rooms and one scrap in it is a massive loss in repair costs, while the bigger wrecks are smaller losses atleast, letting you play for longer. There IS a ship class system in the game, going from D to A in terms of small to big, *except it doesnt do ♥♥♥♥* and i have seen D class ships with like 12 rooms when they are supposed to have 4-5 and A class ships that are supposed to have more than 20 or even 25 have only five. There's literally a system so you can tell if its worth it to visit it or not and it doesnt work! Also, the infestations number means how many TYPES of enemies there are, not how many enemies total. The difficulty options are largely useless too. So many options that dont matter. They literally dont do anything of value to change the parts of this game that suck ass. Even with more scrap and slower wear you're still in an inescapable death spiral so what does it matter, turning off permadeath doesnt matter because you still lose fuel from traveling and scrap from just playing the game and you need both to keep playing, simply being able to duck out of a derelict doesnt do ♥♥♥♥ when you cant go anywhere or dont have functional drones to play with, for which you need to do derelicts anyway, its just dumb. None of these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ do anything to address the game's problems! That last part is important because BOY this game is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RNG heavy its insane. From how much scrap a ship gives you, to if you're going to get enough fuel to keep going to new derelicts, to random events like a meteor destroying a third of the derelict you're on, to random pipe bursts, or the positions of enemies, or which rooms are unscannable by the motion scanner forcing you to face check the doors which almost always results in your drone getting disabled or destroyed, to if your upgrades that you desperately need to keep going will lose their chances of permanently breaking and turn into a useless broken lump worth one scrap, its just SO EXTREMELY RNG heavy, my god. Economy woes part 2 The death spiral exists because everything from your drone upgrades, to your ship upgrades, to even the slots on the ship that can host the upgrades, to the camera feeds of both your main ship and the drones, wear down with every single derelict you visit. The ship upgrades wear down as soon as you visit anything, without even boarding it, hell, they wear down from you just equipping or swapping them ffs! All of this means that literally everything and more has a scrap cost to repair, and its almost always around three to four times as much as you get for salvaging a single ship, meaning most upgrades cost around 9-12 scrap to repair while one salvaging mission gives around 1-4 scrap. Now multiply this with the 20 odd different things that WILL wear with everything you do, luckily drone upgrades only wear if you actually use them but still, all of them will wear and 20 things wearing at the same time costing 9-12 scrap each to repair, or if you're lucky, three scrap to buy at a trader, means that you literally cannot escape the death spiral. Oh and the traders? Yeah, they stock 3-5 upgrades, never replenish, no fixed upgrades that you might need so if you had a motion scanner that lost a 9% chance roll and the nearest trader doesnt have one? Have fun face checking doors! Seriously. Some of these upgrades you literally cannot do anything without and the game doesnt care. In short, buy it, play for two hours, get a feel for the main gameplay loop and refund this ♥♥♥♥ because i'm telling you, there's NOTHING more this game could offer you beyond the first two hours. It literally is that extremely shallow and its masking it with a permadeath gameplay system and an economy so brutally overtuned that its going to take you a good 12 hours of playtime to realise this is all there is and by then you will be way too far to refund this ♥♥♥♥. In addition the developer openly stated he tried to come up with ideas for a spiritual successor and couldnt and i'm genuinely baffled by that because there's potential for an extremely good game here, and there's so many more things to improve and iterate on this that i find it unbelievable that he cannot come up with anything. HOW THE HELL CAN YOU NOT IMPROVE ON THIS?! Anyway, I could go on but i've already wrote a novel...