Recent reviews by jspsfx

A beat em up platformer set in a vibrant, detailed landscape populated by amateurishly drawn anthropomorphic characters.

The music and the gameworld illustrations are Dust's strongest elements. Both are soft and airy, but complete in their sound and aesthetic. In these elements the games childish nature is a benefit. The view is colored by imagination, the music dreamy.

Where the illustration felt inspired in the backdrops and visual effects, it fell short with character renderings. In this regard the game is rife with inconsistency. Where some character renderings seem polished, other renderings of the same character may seem like they were rushed. At their poorest the characters are drawn with little detail, in strange poses, out of proportion, and filled in with lazy coloring.

The aesthetic shortcomings can do harm to suspension of disbelief, which is already made vulnerable by cliche anime tropes and voice acting. The story is paced well, with a likeable protagonist, which helps to ease the parts which are harder to swallow. It's a mixed bag, where the delivery is sometimes charming and then overwhelmingly juvenile.

While exploring Dust's beautiful landscapes you will find the odd puzzle sections, treasures, and map areas which are inaccessible without certain abilities - a la metroidvania. The mechanics are fluid and responsive. The sound effects and animations provide useful feedback to usher you through battles with hordes of enemies that provide a comfortable challenge.

Dust: An Elysian Tail is enchanting in large visual sections of the game, and so sets itself to disappoint with other elements. The gameplay and story are objectively servicable, but potentially polarizing among different players.

I recommend you give it a try.

I learned how to play each world like one would learn to play a song without mistakes. It required my timing and concentration. It allowed ingenuity as I developed more efficient ways to overcome obstacles. I found myself relieved to finish a world, but also a little sad to be finished with the experience.

For my enjoyment it was all about the journey, not the destination.

Highly recommended!

Pros:

The dungeon puzzles reminded me of Zelda. Plus it's got a whole blend of other fun stuff. Climbing mechanics, running on walls, looting for weapons, upgrading, various skills/super powers, fighting is like some mix of batman & god of war. Immediately summon an undead horse to ride if you don't feel like running across the map (fast travel is possible too).

Exploration doesn't go unrewarded! I spent a lot of time visually combing over every area to see if there was a collectible to grab. There are more than a few different kinds plentifully scattered all over. If you get the feeling like the level design might be hiding something from you, chances are you're right, and if you investigate you will probably get rewarded for your effort.

The puzzles feel like that too. When you have this intuitive sense for how something should be solvable, using pieces/elements of what's contained in the room, well you're intuition is rewarded! You are encouraged to think creatively. It reminded me of when I used to play games and I would think to myself "Man, if this were real life, I'd just take object X and use it over there, but since it's a game I have to figure out what they want me to do". The opposite seemed true in darksiders 2.

There are some really epic boss fights! A couple are huge, like shadow of the colussus, others are challenging at a smaller scale.

The art style is wonderful! A consistent aesthetic throughout - and there are a few different worlds that are pretty huge with their own visual themes/moods. Cool character design. Decent voice acting.

Cons:

It seemed that by the time I had the build strategy for my character figured out, and I got the right weapons, I was pretty much unstoppable. I ripped through the last bosses with ease. I maximized my critical stats, so the crit chance and crit damage were as high as I could make them. And used the skill tree to complement this. It's hard to not take advantage of what the game gives you. But most of my time was spent solving problems/exploring so this didn't bother me too much.

Some of the animations were cheesy/repetitive. I had one reoccurring issue with the camera during elevator rides, but nothings happening then anyway.

A lot of people have issues with the games VSync and Anti-Aliasing. As far as I know the PC port was just bad in this regard. I installed NVidia Inspector and solved both of these issues with it. Before fixing VSync it felt unplayable to me at least. As far as the anti-aliasing - it looked kind of poor before using Inspector to override the AA settings. Highly recommend you do a little tinkering before you play through.

Crisp, detailed artwork. From the clouds rolling over the map, to the in-game items, everything is thoughtfully crafted and coherent. A single aesthetic for the entire game scales from little elements to full-fledged splash pages.

The music does well to pair with the artwork. There's no let down. As much mood is created visually, there is equally fine musical pieces that create the sensations of adventure and tension in all the right places.

There's a major "cool" factor with the audio in general. The gruff but smoothly delivered voice-over fits the writing styles comfortable brevity. I never felt tired of sitting through narration. It was quick, to the point, but stylized to keep the entertainment flowing. The tunes mix atmosphere and raw, bluesy-western sounding guitar. Like our hero was born "cool" right out of the womb.

How easy it would've been to fudge these artistic choices and end up with something cheesy. Bastion is coherent on all fronts visual and auditory.

As for the mechanics and gameplay? I think they play second fiddle. Passable by all means - nothing seemed to be lacking, unresponsive, imbalanced, etc. But this game, in my opinion, is primarily a sight and sound to behold by the senses.

Eat it up!