Duskpunk

Great world building, interesting story, great gameplay, but written by progressive leftists, no thanks.

A solid Citizen Sleeper clone for class-conscious comrades

I LOVED this game. Tense, beautifully written, gorgeous art, compelling characters, excellent writing. Totally exceeded my expectations, a best-in-genre option for leftist games with on-the-nose content about authoritarianism.

I would very tentatively recommend this game. Pros: 1. It's a solid roleplaying experience with resource management and an interesting setting. The world is interesting and I enjoyed the classic "overthrow the evil empire" plotline. 2. It's clearly made by a passionate dev, and I always like supporting people who make narrative games with some gameplay depth, a real story, and at least somewhat sophisticated message they're trying to tell 3. I really liked the character of the priest and I enjoyed working with the War Dead (faction of deserters you can align yourself with) Cons: 1. The message the story was trying to tell was one I somewhat agree with, but the execution was hamfisted. Without spoiling too much, it has some extremely obvious parallels to a particular real world revolution. When I got to the end and there was a big quote from Leon Trotsky I couldn't help but laugh at it. 2. The character work was honestly shoddy. It ran the gamut from absurd "heroes of the working class" who could have been pulled straight from YA literature to the comically over-the-top evil Emperor his faceless minions. Essentially every characters' arc I guessed from the moment I first met them. The priest was the only one I felt had real nuance, felt somewhat like a real person, and changed meaningfully during the game's events. 3. It's too easy, particularly after you unlock all areas. By the end-game I had like 400 solidarity points (twice as much as I could possibly spend during the game's climax) and in the mid-game I was making like $100 a day which made the resource management irrelevant.

This is a nice little game. Definitely similar to Citizen Sleeper. Good balance of resources and time available to accomplish tasks. The writing is good and I really enjoyed the worker's revolution storyline.

If you like Citizen Sleeper you'll probably also like Duskpunk. The game has a very interesting setting and a captivating storyarch. The game takes you on a wild ride through the last days of a collapsing empire, hurt and traumatised and asks... "watcha gonna do about it" I'm very happy to have experienced the story and I think lots of people would benefit from going through that experience too.

Thoroughly enjoyed this game. I found the characters and writing to be solid, I liked the art style, and the themes and story of the game are important, on point, and powerful. I liked the main mechanics of the game, while i'm not a large fan of dice systems, I found it worked decently well here. Quests had a good amount of depth and it was nice to see the way things unraveled over time. I think there were some slow points of the game, where I was passing the in-game time. The start of the game hooked me very quick, as it became clear that doing more than surviving was going to take much effort. The end of the game was nicely paced compared to the scope of the game.