Dust

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.