Dust

Dust is about a man in the Wild West who comes to town looking for his wife when he comes across trouble. It involves a lot of conversation and the use of a lot of tools.

This game was entered in the German IF Gran Prix earlier this year, where I personally found it the best game of the competition. I enjoyed the characters and the western setting.

I love foreign translations and foreign things in general (maybe I’m a xenophile?) so it’s always hard to know when playing a game in another language if it is the language that attracts me or the game itself.

In this case it’s a little bit of both. One reason I liked it in German was its simplicity, with descriptive but mostly non-figurative language and the use of menus in conversation and some actions. While in German it was brilliant for someone with a weak vocabulary in another language, in English I could have enjoyed some more complexity in writing, and perhaps a slightly expanded map.

But there’s a lot here that I loved in the original and now in the translation. I like how you collect various tools and apply them, giving the game a physical feel. I like the social dynamics, with the non-violent but still substantial threat of the sheriff holding onto your papers while you investigate, and the tavernkeeper urging you to grab a cookie. I also enjoyed the townsfolk popping in and out, from mean grandmas to ball-playing kids.

I helped test this game a little by reading through the English transcript looking for any errors (of which I found very few).

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I feel like the American West is an underserved sub-genre in IF. We get HIGH FANTASY and Puzzly Light Fantasy out the wazoo. We get a healthy dose of sci fi, mystery and horror. Much like modern cinema, the Old West seems novel whenever it shows up, purely as an exercise in numbers. Yeah, I’m aware this is the second this Comp, but compared to other genres, still rarified.

One aspect of the American West is its sparity. Humans imposing frail infrastructure on a hostile, dry environment where there is more nothing than something. I found the prose in Dust to reflect that vibe better than any I can think of. It is mostly spare, under-adjectived and dry. The IF convention of not listing every damn thing in the room (because, who has time for all that trivia?) here becomes a textual representation of the setting. I’m not mentioning a drawer full of paperclips and stapler refills because THIS IS A DESERT. I think the work captured a Wild West feel on the strength of its prose alone, and that is noteworthy.

This is a reasonably capable puzzle parser, its puzzles better integrated into the story and setting than a lot of them. The geography was tight, enough to keep solution space reasonably contained and tractable. Where it lost some luster for me was in its story, specifically its NPCs, and in its implementation.

Implementation first - there are a lot of missing verbs and nouns in this story, and quite a bit of either deceptive messaging, ignored alternate solutions, or mind reading puzzle solutions. I had to go to the walkthrough often, almost always because I knew what I WANTED to do, but could not figure out how to communicate that to the game. A prime example is the getting of lantern from a high place. This ‘puzzle’ that in real life would be solved in seconds took forever because: 1) feedback when I tried to climb or get chairs let me know this was fruitless so I never tried the actual (Spoiler - click to show)>push chair; and 2) it could not be reached, maneuvered or remotely manipulated despite having many long objects! Elsewhere, I used IF puzzle habits to uncover an object’s hiding place, but because I had not had the magical NPC conversation, the object was hidden from me. I could (and did) just take it though. The distract-the-guard puzzle I never had a hope of solving without walkthrough, my brain just wouldn’t have tumbled onto it.

Beyond the technical implementation, a wild west story like this, with such spartan motivations and moving parts, was always going to live and die on its NPCs. Unfortunately, the game treated them as puzzle elements, not characters. Yes, the barber was kind of a standout in weird background, but all of them had almost nothing to say except for whatever might be needed for the current puzzle. This rendered them transactional clue machines, not characters to interact with. Without a surge of interest from them, the plot itself was also just a little too mechanical to capture the imagination.

I respect its writing, and the vibe it captured, but it just needed a little more zhuzh, either technical in the puzzles, or dynamism in its plot and NPCs to push me beyond a mechanical playthrough.

Played: 10/5/24
Playtime: 1.5hr, finished with walkthrough help
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable puzzle block
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

We’ve been self-deprecatingly saying parser puzzlers with traditional mechanics are medium-dry-goods games for decades now, but never I think have I seen that conceit made so literal as it is in Dust: progressing through this Old West adventure requires grit and a swift hand at the revolver, sure, but mostly it just takes a lot of trips to the general store. Crowbars, rope, matches, you name it, they’ve got it, which allows you to progress through a linear sequence of logical, satisfying puzzles. Much like the game as a whole, it’s a little silly if you think about it too much, but as you’re playing it all makes sense.

The Western is not a genre whose subtleties I’m especially familiar with, but even with my cursory knowledge I can tell that Dust plays the hits. You’re a drifter who’s come into town on a personal errand of some urgency, before getting swept up in the ills facing the community and having to resolve them before you can move on, a victim of circumstance as much as your moral code (it is a ding against the game that the original errand doesn’t go as much as mentioned until you’ve saved the day, but I suppose that would just make the game feel less self-contained). Said town boasts a saloon, a sheriff’s office, a gallows and graveyard, and the aforementioned dry-goods story – everything an Old West community needs, and not a whit more. This also includes, of course, a ranch whose owners are up to no good, which is where the plot kicks in: some toughs under their sponsorship are doing something in the old mine, and they appear to be mixed up with the disappearance of an ingenue with a heart of gold, as well as her fiancée. Sure, the sheriff tells you you’re the main suspect and need to clear your name, but he immediately falls asleep and there’s nothing stopping you from just walking out of town: must be that you have a heart of gold too.

There are no surprises here in terms of either plot or character tropes – all is exactly as you’d think it’d be – so mostly all there is to talk about is the implementation. On the technical side, it’s all quite solidly put together, and as mentioned, the puzzles are a good fit for the setting and generally well clued, though I was getting a little sick of running back to Bill the Storekeeper every five minutes by the end (the puzzle requiring you to jump through a bunch of hoops to get some rope was perhaps a bridge too far in my book – come on, the only bit of rope that’s lying around in town is the leftovers from when they hanged some people?) They did hold my hand more than I wanted; in particular, many are resolved via dialogue, which is run via a menu-based system, so you don’t even need to ASK STOREKEEPER ABOUT MATCHES, just TALK TO him and select the single option available instead. And I was momentarily stymied when I couldn’t get other characters to acknowledge that I needed a lamp – turned out I needed to blunder around in the dark for a bit first, rather than just come up next to the darkened mine entrance and recognize that light would be helpful, which felt like overly-fussy authorial stage-managing.

If I’m searching for critiques, I’d also say that there are some occasional odd phrases, perhaps artifacts of the game’s translation from the German. The saloonkeeper is described thus, for example:

"She is in her late forties, a corpulent, attractive woman with laugh lines and calloused hands."

But with that said, the version with “plump” subbed in for “corpulent” is much less memorable, and strictly speaking there’s nothing actually wrong here. Actually if I’m honest I mostly enjoyed these occasional departures from standard English, as they’re at worst harmless, and at best reasonably amusing: in a game otherwise so dedicated to smoothly incarnating its genre, it’s fun to run across the occasional bit of friction. So too with the occasional challenge that sent me elsewhere than the general store – sure, structurally there’s nothing too different about borrowing a parrot from the German barber in order to take advantage of his expanded senses (the parrot, not the German) as compared to borrowing a crowbar from the nearsighted shopkeeper to pry up a rock, but it does lend some much-needed novelty.

The result is a success, I think, though a low-key one: if Westerns are your jam, you’re in for a solid take at the genre, and if not, well, at least Dust goes down easy and will probably offer you a chuckle or two along the way to boot. Admittedly, it’s hard for me to get too excited about this kind of thing after so many decades, but those with less experience in the dry goods industry might easily feel differently.