Leftfield games: Duskers

Duskers is an underexposed game from the indiescene that refreshingly refuses to be indie. It has no nightly attacks involving unbalanced monsters, no 'retro' elements that totally miss the point of why the retro was the way it was, it has no punching trees on the first day, it has no bleeding unfair difficulty excused with 'rogue-like' and it has no zombies or braindead military experiments in badly lit asylums.

Score one for the indie-dev avoiding almost every trope the indies have been relying on the last two years to throw a lazy cashgrab onto Steam, making Steam the laughingstock of game selling platforms. Score one for the totally new and unexpected game that is the result of it. It's no super meatboy and thanks Allah for small graces. What is Duskers then?

Duskers is a small idea poured into an elegant minimalistic approach towards audio-visual expectations pushing the gamer to rely solely on deduction and logical decisionmaking skills. The game itself is weighing in a little under a three hundred megabytes, which gives the illusion that the indiedev behind was going for the quick money, pricing the game at near to a dollar per 10 megabytes. That's pretty arrogant.

But the dev managed to pull gameplay over weight and pricing. Expensive as the game might be, light as the game might be, it ended up being compelling as heck. Nah, I'm dropping the political correctness. Duskers is compelling as fuck. You can quote me on that.

The universe in Duskers, once bustling with spacefaring traders and military manouvres is dead. Fallen victim to mysterious infestations, humanity was decimated, genocided, mass-murdered and made extinct. Not necessarily in that order. All those spacefarers and military vessels are floating about in the universe and it is all the gamer can do to visit those hulks, explore them and maybe get a handle on what happened. However, the gamer is not represented as themself, instead the gamer controls a squad of drones to search the hulks. The drones can either be controlled directly or through a down and dirty scripting language that's also beautiful in it's nihilism. Opening a door through the console is the same as closing it, no matter the state the door is in. To close and open a given door, type D01 (for instance), to close that given door opened earlier, also type D01. To collect stuff, simply write a command like '01 gather' and drone 01 will gather everything in the room it is currently in, provided it has the AI to do so.

And that's where Duskers hinges on, as the AI packages to progress in the game have to be scavenged from the husks. The packages divide into classes being exploratory, collectors, defensive and offensive. The drone squad is limited to four drones so the gamer is forced to balance his squad of drones out as each drone only has room for three AI packages and thus can't be a drone-of-all-trades. The huskes that the drones explore aren't safe as one would expect. The husks are floating in space for a very long time and are detoriating. Some have little hull integrity, their drivecores may be venting into the corridors and rooms or several types of infestations may be inhabiting them.

Duskers present the gamer with several problems that gamer will have to balance out, working with what they got. It's tempting to go for the big husks, though there's no guarantee that the big husk will pay off. The small ship may seem safe, but might kill off the drones. The constant balancing and rebalancing of risk taking versus rewards becomes ever more stressful the further the gamer progresses into the game, as it seem that the closer the gamer comes to finding out how the universe could have been bereft of all life, the more the universe fights to keep the gamer away from ever knowing the truth.

Duskers comes from the leftfield and deserves a playthrough if you're a serious follower of the indie-scene that's going indie from the indies. It's compelling and it will glue you to the keyboard in way that didn't glue you to keyboard in a long time. Especially if you're an older gamer and remember games like Cholo.