Dustborn has turned plenty of heads with impressive showings in recent months, and with its promise of a narrative-driven, musically infused action-adventure experience, it’s certainly captured the attention of quite a few people. Prior to the game’s launch earlier this month, we had the chance to send across several of our questions about it to its developers at Red Thread Games, learning more about its setting, choice-driven mechanics, narrative ambitions, and more. Below, you can read our interview with studio founder Ragnar Tørnquist.
NOTE: This interview was conducted prior to the game’s launch.
"For the longest time we’ve wanted to create a game that took the visual language of comic books and brought it to interactive, animated life. With Dustborn, I believe we’ve succeeded."
Dustborn has a visually very striking art style. How did you settle on this look for the game?
Here at Red Thread Games, we’re big comics fans. I’ve personally read comics my whole life, and still do — although there hasn’t been a lot of spare time these past few years.
For the longest time we’ve wanted to create a game that took the visual language of comic books and brought it to interactive, animated life. With Dustborn, I believe we’ve succeeded, largely because of art director Christoffer Grav’s background in illustration and graphic design. His art style and direction has been central to the game’s development.
Not only does Dustborn look like a comic book; we also tell the backstory of the characters through an in-game comic (which also exists in printed form for those who bought a physical copy), and at the end of every chapter you get an illustrated recap of the game’s events — great for reminding players what’s happened, especially if they stop playing for a little while. It’s like those “previously on” segments you see before a new TV episode.
Dustborn was made with the Unity engine, so we had to write our own shaders to accomplish the unique look… and we plan to continue this style with one of our upcoming (and unannounced) games.
The setting of the game sounds incredibly unique. What were your inspirations for the game’s story?
Oh, there are so many influences, it’s hard to name them all — but the story was heavily inspired by real-world events in the past decade. There’s a growing political and societal division between people, not just in North America and Western Europe, but across the globe. Part of this divide is due to social media and the spread of mis- and disinformation. We wanted to tell a story where this theme — the power of words, and how language can be weaponized — was central to both the narrative and the game mechanics.
We were also inspired by games like the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series — which has done such a great job mixing genres and play-styles, and balancing a serious story with lots of silliness in a unique and interesting way — and by Final Fantasy 15, and Life is Strange: True Colors.
On the comic book front, The X-Men is an obvious source of inspiration, along with Preacher and Transmetropolitan — and many others. We obviously dug deep into our collection to see how we could use that visual language in a video game.
But Dustborn was also informed by our love of road trips and the desire to tell a story about a journey across an alternate history North America, visiting different locations and biomes along the road, and spending time with a diverse group of characters inspired by our own personal experiences.
Will players be able to influence the story through their action? We know you can have branching relationships with the other characters, but does that influence the main narrative?
To some degree, yes; each major character in the game receives their own ending, informed by Pax’s words and actions, and some scenes play out differently based on how you decide to solve problems, and on the characters’ current emotional state. The game really isn’t about those major narrative branches — it’s much more about the little things, about how people feel and react, how they respond to your dialogue choices — but you can certainly influence the plot in a variety of ways, and there’s room for replay.
"There are so many influences, it’s hard to name them all — but the story was heavily inspired by real-world events in the past decade."
One of the things Dustborn promises is a lot of varying gameplay mechanics depending on the location and what’s going on in the story. How deep can players expect the different gameplay mechanics to be?
Honestly, Dustborn is more about variety, joy and delight than deep game mechanics. There’s combat, there’s a music rhythm action game, there’s something we call “Echo recording”… along with lots of mini-games. Our goal was to keep players on their toes, constantly, and to mix genres, vibes, tones and moods, and to make the game easy and accessible for narrative players to get through the story — not to make a hard-core game that’s particularly challenging.
That said, there’s depth if you go looking for it and invest the time. The combat system, for example, allows you to upgrade your magnetic flying bat (!) in three different ways, using discarded tech you collect during exploration. You also craft new “Shouts”, which are used in combat, and combined with your crew’s powers unlock new combos. And the music game has different completion levels, based on your performance — and these affect the dialogue in the game.
The central gameplay mechanic – using words to fight and solve all sorts of problems in the game – sounds incredibly intriguing. What can you tell us more about it? How did the idea for it as a gameplay mechanic first come about?
This is the central theme of the game: words have power, and we have to be careful about how we wield and weaponize them. This ties back to how social media has become such a powerful force in our lives, and how information — including mis- and disinformation — affect us all, culturally, politically, spiritually, emotionally. We wanted to make a game where that theme manifested as a game mechanic, and that’s how the idea of Vocals (or “Vox”) came about. Pax and her crew can use their Vox — powerful words — to manipulate people and fight enemies.
It sounds like music plays an important role in this game. Could you elaborate more on what players can expect?
Music does play a large role in Dustborn. Pax and her crew pose as a punk-rock band on their journey across America, and you have to both write new songs and perform them at venues along the road. Your performance affects the story in small ways; you don’t have to be good at it, but there’s room to practice and improve, and to expand your set list.
Our composer and audio director Simon Poole was a key person on the creative team, and the game’s score was written alongside the design and development of the rest of the game — we believe that sound and music are crucial to the player experience, and the audio and soundscape are also closely connected to the game’s meta-story, which is about the origins of language itself.
"This is the central theme of the game: words have power, and we have to be careful about how we wield and weaponize them."
Roughly how long will an average playthrough of the game be?
If you rush through the game, you can probably complete the story in 12-15 hours — maybe less, if you’re rude to everyone and cut them off! But if you take your time with every conversation, get to know each character, explore all locations fully, look for collectibles and enjoy the journey, you could easily spend 20 hours or more on this road trip.
Do you have any plans to bring the game to the Switch, or perhaps its upcoming successor?
Not to the original Switch, no, but we’re very interested in Nintendo’s next console, and if Dustborn performs well, I wouldn’t be surprised if we announce something in the first half of 2025!
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