[Review] Duskers

[R e i]

 

After nine months in the womb of early access, Duskers has finally been born. Out it comes, snarling and writhing like the science fiction nightmare it is, covered in slime and engine oil. Congratulations, game developers! It’s beautiful. No, really, it is. And here’s Brendan to tell you why. Have you seen Alien? Who am I kidding, of course you’ve seen Alien. If you haven’t seen Alien, it’s probably because you are an Alien, and you live millions of light-years away, and you’re made of moss and haven’t developed eyes yet, or cinema. No, you’ve seen Alien because it’s essential. Well, I’m here to tell you that, as much as Alien is essential to any lover of sci-fi movies, Duskers is just as essential to any lover of sci-fi games. We’ve been looking for the Citizen Kane of videogames all these years, when really we should have been looking for the Ellen Ripley of videogames. Anyway, don’t worry, we’ve found her.Apart from the eerie whistle coming from the vents and the buzzing and beeping of the drones, it had been quiet for some time. I’d gathered scrap metal and fuel from the abandoned rooms and was all ready to head back until we heard an abrasive thud. Ethan, my gathering drone, headed to one of the rooms we’d yet to discover and heard the banging get louder and more constant, but found nothing out of the ordinary. A message popped up saying something was trying to break through one of the doors to the east of the supposed derelict ship. Suddenly, the mood changed and my heart was in my mouth; Abby, another of my drones was close to the room where the noise was coming from. I tried to pull her away, but something attacked her with great speed, instantly destroying her video link and functionality. The creature made its way through the ship and I couldn’t see it on the map, meaning I had to get the remaining two drones back on my ship as fast as possible. As I tried to recover Tommy (my third and final drone), the alien took it out. Ethan was a few rooms away from the airlock when the alien attacked him as well. Within a minute, all of my drones had been destroyed and my playthrough was over. Duskers is full of moments like this. One minute you can be scavenging and scanning a ship with extreme patience and precision, and the next you’ll frantically be trying to escape the threat of an unknown entity in a claustrophobic and frenzied panic. In Duskers, life has ceased to be and you must piece together what caused the end of existence. In each procedurally generated galaxy, you must travel to tons of abandoned spaceships searching for scrap metal and lost technology, along with fuel and information. Some ships will offer bite-sized narrative text from their commanders or inhabitants about what’s happened to them, providing just enough to keep you interested on what’s going on.Something is chewing through a door on the derelict space station Volgograd. I’ve been exploring the station room-by-room, for long minutes, with my fleet of drones, and so far it’s been a safe and worthwhile excursion. Now, though, I feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome. I quickly command my scouting drone to return to my docked dropship, but just as it speeds past the door that is being chewed through, I hear a loud beeping. My console informs me that my second drone, which is powering a generator, is being damaged by another something that has crept through an open air vent and spread across the room.

 

 

There are no flashy visuals here, and there doesn’t need to be. You’re essentially playing the game through a 1980s PC: green text and a poorly powered monitor make the game feel more authentic – like the tech in the Alien films. In fact, the game manages to create the same kind of tension akin to those films and it works all the more better for it. When you’re sending your drones around the ships, the lighting is weak, and many of the areas are dark so when you bump into something unexpectedly, you panic and the instant fear hits every inch of your body. You control your drones solely with the keyboard through a command box and the arrow buttons (think command prompt and DOS). This also adds to the retro feel, making the mouse redundant and requiring quick fingers and a calm nerve for when things go bad (which they will, a lot). You can skip between the drones by pressing their assigned number and move them with the arrow keys. Each drone will have different abilities which you can assign to them back in your ship (more on this later). To execute an ability, you simply type it in; for example: when one of your drones has the generator ability and finds one without power, type in ‘generator’ and it gives power to a specific area of the ship. If you need to scan some of the rooms, type ‘motion’ and it will scan a couple of the rooms you’re close to. There are plenty of abilities in Duskers and each one will play a role in how successful you are on a mission, but sometimes the most vital abilities are absent when a new galaxy is generated for you. There are other commands you can input which help moving around quite a bit. By pressing ‘navigate 1 2 r1’, you can send drones 1 and 2 back to your ship (r1 = room 1). If you use a semicolon between commands, you’re able to link multiple commands together; ‘a1; remote; navigate 2 d12; navigate 3 r 3 interface; navigate 1 r11 gather’ will mean absolutely nothing to you now, but this chain of command will remotely power the ship whilst one of your droids hacks into its network and another picks up some fuel and scraps.I quickly drive my second drone away from the new biological alien threat, which disconnects the power supply, which means I can no longer remotely open and close doors in the station. My scouting drone is now trapped in the room it’s in, the one with the door that is about to give way to that something. My third drone, at least, can manually pry open doors, but before I can dispatch it to save my first drone, I’m informed an asteroid shower is imminent. This leisurely and lucrative mission has, in the blink of an eye, become a panicky race against time. This is the best part of Duskers, a survival strategy roguelike in which you pilot drones through procedurally generated derelict spaceships. It’s perfectly fun and satisfying when things are going your way, but when the shit hits the airlock, when your careful plans fall apart and you’re forced to think quickly, when a successful mission becomes a harrowing, scrambling nightmare, Duskers really shines.You begin with only a few days of fuel for your spaceship, three drones, and the news that an undefined catastrophe has resulted in a post-apocalyptic universe in which you may be the only human survivor. You dock with other ships and send in your drones to explore, scavenging for spare fuel, scrap metal, bits of information from corrupted ship’s logs, and even other drones you can repair and add to your fleet (or turn into scrap). You steer your drones one at a time using the arrow keys, and there’s also a console to enter commands into: ‘navigate 1 3 r4’, for instance, will auto-pilot drones 1 and 3 into room 4. Drones have slots for three modules, which give them different abilities. The gather module will allow a drone to harvest scrap and fuel, the generator module can supply power to doors, and so on. There are droppable lures and traps, motion sensors and scanning beacons, shields and mounted turrets, and a tow module for dragging disabled drones or upgrades back to your dropship. You can swap modules between drones before a mission, or even during one provided the drones are adjacent to one another.

 

 

Naturally, you’re not alone. Enemies lurk unseen aboard the ships you visit. They might be automated ship defenses, a slowly creeping biological infestation, swarms of tiny robots, or a horrifyingly fast-moving alien entity that will pounce on and disable your drones in a split second. Sometimes, they’ll be all of the above: you never really know what you’re up against until you’re in the same room with it, at which point it’s often too late. Ship airlocks and doors can be opened and closed using simple console commands, provided they are powered by a generator. It’s a series of tense and spooky strategic challenges: keeping walls and closed doors between your drones and the enemies you’ve detected, herding or luring the dangerous entities around the ship, even trapping them in a room with an airlock and then opening it to suck them into space (along with whatever else is in the room).Duskers is a retro-futuristic science-fiction nightmare for anyone that fears being alone--and as best as you can tell, in this world, you are alone. You control your drones by typing into a command-line interface, watching from afar through sensors and cameras as they do your bidding. Duskers couples this control method with an art style that cohesively reinforces the game’s atmosphere, making the player and their physical keyboard an active part of the experience. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and presents itself entirely in-fiction. The primary interface is a 1:1 representation of a computer terminal on board your ship, which you directly mani[CENSORED]te with the physical keyboard on your desk. You never see a digital representation of your hands flying across a keyboard. There are zero layers of abstraction. When you sit down to play Duskers, you are the protagonist. This creates a huge amount of tension. Despite the fact that your drones are the ones facing danger directly, you know that if they're destroyed you won't be far behind. By depriving you the comfort of an avatar to control, each playthrough becomes a harrowing personal experience. Knowledge is power. Over the length of multiple playthroughs you’ll gain knowledge of the cataclysm that has seemingly stripped the universe of all human life bar your own. This knowledge comes in the form of small chunks of information taken from ship logs as you dock with them. Your own player knowledge increases in a similarly piecemeal fashion as you learn how drone and ship upgrades interact, increasing the power you wield over your surroundings.Duskers is a game of methodical exploration. In order to survive, you carefully expand your knowledge of each derelict ship you encounter by scanning rooms, dropping sensors, and when all else fails, simply opening doors and hoping the next room is safe. You start each playthrough with three drones, and a random assortment of drone upgrades. For your first playthrough the tutorial ensures that you have the Motion upgrade, which allows a drone to detect threats in adjacent rooms. This provides a huge amount of situational awareness, making it a tempting must-have. But what if on your next playthrough you don't have the motion upgrade? Or what if it breaks and you can't afford to repair it? Suddenly you're forced to discover new methods for exploring, building on the rules and lessons you've learned previously. Experimenting with new strategies and combinations of upgrades is a huge amount of fun, and mastering them is immensely satisfying. It’s rare to find a ship that isn’t crawling with at least one type of infestation. The first is a swarm of creatures that will take advantage of your every mistake, quickly turning your drones into piles of scrap metal. There are a number of different infestation types, but it would be a disservice to describe them in a review. Learning what an infestation is, how it behaves, and how to dispatch it is a central part of the risk and reward of Duskers. Infestations are terrifying at first encounter, but much like learning to master your upgrades, learning how to handle each infestation type is thoroughly rewarding.