Review: Dust: An Elysian Tail

Dust: An Elysian Tail is an action-adventure platformer with heavy Metroidvania elements, though I would be reluctant to call it a straight Metroidvania game, for the Xbox Live Arcade. It was developed by Humble Hearts, who is just one guy, Dean Dodrill.

Our hero, Dust, waking up with no memory.

In the world of Falana, an amnesiac man is found by the magical talking sword Ahrah and its keeper, Fidget. Ahrah claims the man’s name is Dust and that he is Ahrah’s owner. Accompanied by Fidget and wielding Ahrah, Dust sets out discover his identity and how it relates to the danger threatening Falana.

Dust is several levels long, accessed by an overworld map. Individual levels are broken up into several areas that each take a minute to a couple of minutes to go through. Dust starts at one end of the level and fights his way to the other end, where he will often but not always encounter a boss. Defeating the boss rewards Dust with a new ability that allows him to reach previously inaccessible areas, like the ability to slide under narrow crevasses or climb walls.

The whole game takes about ten hours to complete.

Dust has a regular set of combo attacks and a special attack. Combos are easy to implement but are more effective than simply button mashing. It is still a type of button mashing, but it is slightly more complicated. There are three special attacks to collect that attack enemies all at once. These attacks are not powerful or effective, though one of them is useful for stunning many enemies at once.

To use a special attack, you first use Dust Storm, then Fidget activates her attack.

Attacking enemies gets experience points for Dust, if you get enough points you level up. When you level up, you can make your offense, defense, or special attacks stronger or increase your health.

Enemies drop money, food and craft items. Money is used to buy equipment that make Dust stronger and able to withstand more damage, craft items, and health items. You can also make new equipment with craft items, usually equipment that is stronger than the equipment you can buy.

Almost all the money, equipment, and craft items are useless. You will collect more equipment, items, and money than you will ever need. You can sell all the excess equipment and items for more money, but there is nothing useful to spend it on. You can just ignore everything, but why give us all this stuff to begin with?

If you keep up with your equipment upgrades, almost all monsters are sword fodder. You are normally swarmed with lots of enemies, but they are all slow and have one basic attack, and only exist to dispense experience points. As cool as Dust’s fighting animations are, I resent that I have to fight through the same simple enemies repeatedly, which I have to do to level up in case an enemy gets a lucky punch in. It feels a lot more like work than fun, easy work but work still work.

The game looks beautiful. Dodrill designed it to look like a cartoon you control, and he succeed spectacularly. All the animations are detailed and the backgrounds are amazing to look at.

There are hidden treasure chests in levels that can only be found if you go back with new abilities. The areas where they are hidden are marked on the overhead map, but they do not tell you where in the area they are or how to reach them. Like the loot dropped by enemies the treasure chests are largely useless and only exist for people who need to complete everything.

Levels are way too linear, which makes hunting treasure chest hunting more tedious. Most of the levels only have two entrances at either end, and you have to go through the entire level to reach the treasure chests, which are always in the middle or at the far end of some long path. That is why I am reluctant to call it a Metroidvania game, because those have a lot more exploration and doubling back, there are shortcuts and other things that make the different sections less linear in actual Metroidvanias.

The story and characters are cliché fantasy. You got the amnesiac stoic hero, the overacting talking sword, and the annoying, cowardly, little animal sidekick. The voice acting is terrible; Dust sounds like he has a cold and barely emotes, and Fidget is shrill.

I would have liked more variety in where the game takes place too.

The story amounts to little more than Dust wandering around solving problems until he catches up to the evil army that is causing all the problems in Falana. There is a backstory about how the evil army is trying to exterminate the Moonblood race, which is why they are going around being evil, but their characterization does not go beyond that. Not even a motivation beyond generic racism. Unsurprisingly, Dust has an important connection to them.

Dust: An Elysian Tail has some good points, and looks gorgeous, but there is so much wasted potential. It makes sense, since it was made entirely by one person, that is an amazing to be sure, but I do not think that makes it worth fifteen dollars.