I want to like this game. The concept and interface are both brilliant. The core gameplay is compelling and tense, but I cannot recommend this game because of how punitive it is.

In Duskers there is no such thing as a small risk: whenever you enter a potentially risky room you could find no hostiles, a hostile you can quickly close the door on and back out, or swarmers: hostiles that will destroy your drone within 3 seconds and then hover over the body making it unrecoverable.

To minimally build back from such a distaster requires a drone husk (you find these maybe every 5 ships), and 10 scrap (fully exploring your average ship nets you ~5 scrap), but all of your scrap goes to maintenance because your stuff is breaking at a rate roughly equal to how much scrap you get from fully exploring a ship.

This game isn't a battle of attrition, its a death lottery. No matter high how you are flying at any moment you are one dice roll away from losing your capacity either gain resources or to explore carefully, cosigning you to a slow withering dealth with no capacity for recovery.

Duskers has the most satisfying core gameplay loop of any game I've played this year (with the small exception of The Swindle). It's one-part survival horror, one-part puzzle, one-part luck, and 17,000 fiddly bits of tactical risk-balancing and nerve-wracking situations that develop organically and put your ingenuity to the test. It's sometimes unforgiving, and progress feels like it's eked out every step of the way, but that's part of what makes your occasional hard-won victory feel so meaningful.

... until your next misstep sucks three drones out of an airlock and you ragequit, but you keep coming back anyway because the next time you'll do better. It's that sort of game.

>Open A1
>Navigate 1 r2
>Navigate 2 r2
>Generator
>Drone 2 generating... see schematic view for powered rooms.
>Status
Name: Steam
Class: Gaming Client
Age: 12 (Stable)
>Scan
Items found in room:
Generator
Interface
Scrap (19.99)
>Navigate 3 r2
>Interface
Interface List:
Survey
Ship Scan
Defense
Store

///[JIL]: Recommended course of action:
[1] Use 19.99 scrap to purchase Duskers
[2] Praise Misfits Attic for creation of Duskers
>Purchase Duskers
Added to Steam Account
>Navigate 1 2 3 r1
>Exit

-i need to investigate the outbreak of a new self replicating form of artificial life
-find A-class space station
-mission: scan every room
-dis gon b gud
-i board the station with my three valiant drones
-i lay prehentive mines in a couple of locations, just in case
-very carefully and slowly search and scan all the 20~ rooms in the space station
-almost lose a drone to infestation, but i trap it in a room.
-nice, now I can relax. wow i've been in this space station for 20 minutes!
-so much scrap, 2 salvaged drones. oh sweeet Spacesus.
-BEBEBEBEP DOOR 35 IS BEING DAMAGED.
-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.jpg
-hacker mode activate
-go back to mothership, swap my Gather module with an Interface module
-backtrack and stealth past infestation
-interface with the ship and activate defense system.
-sweat running down my forehead.
-motion sensor goes green
-i did it
-time to go home and enjoy this sweet bounty
-ah wait! i'll go and pick up the mines I laid out before
-waste nothing
-dock on a different port on the other side of the space station
-open dock doors
-infestation runs inside my mothership at 1000MPH
-drones get wiped out and i can't do anything about it
-watch my hard work get destroyed in 2 milliseconds
-mfw it's all my fault


10/10 would scream in space again

This game is odd. There are horror games which feel entirely claustrophobic. There are horror games with a direct sense of panic. There are management games with no sense of thrill or adventure. And then there is this game.

Duskers, if you didn't figure out already, is a marriage of Horror and management game elements with a slight hint of extra typing. You're in space, you don't know what's happened and you piece the story together as you go from communications found logged on the ships you board. The story is surprisingly well written for such a gameplay focused experience, and does help to give you a sense of isolation in the rather large map you're spawned into.

The gameplay is the big part here, as there are many different individual pieces that make up the whole experience. Misreading the command log to see if the sensor in r5 became untriggered gives you this sense of sudden realisation mixed with terror. In comparison to another favourite horror game of mine, Alien Isolation, the panic in that game lies in making a break for an exit and crouch walking right into the Alien even after you checked the motion tracker. This is what is so very different about this game. You feel a horrible sense of responsibility (don't we all) over the poor drones you send into harms way, which makes it ever more unfortunate when you try to flush out a leaper and mistakenly leave the door to your generator drone open and simultaneously lose 3 drones because you locked two away behind a door you were sure you could open once the leaper was flushed out. Or when the door next to your only safe room starts being attacked and you have to rush to get all the drones back onto the ship. Surprisingly, the command typing takes nothing from the experience. As someone who takes a lot of time typing, the command system is surprisingly good as I find myself just pressing enter in a blind panic once I finish typing a door close command. There are also so many joys in this game, such as the feeling of commandeering a new ship with 3 upgrade slots or gathering the maximum amount of fuel from a station.

However, a few flaws lie in the gameplay, it's not just full of the outstanding elements of this great game. Once you've collected 10-20 scrap in a single mission, you will realise that it cannot repair the schematic view once you have repaired vital modules, leaving you with a chance of being blind. 20 scrap cannot give you the insurance of all of your drones' health back once you've fixed a couple of ship modules. Whilst this can be seen as a vital element, and I would agree, everything decays at an incredibly fast rate which can make module breaks feel a little bit cheap. This is avoidable somewhat by fiddling around with the options menu, which means it's only a minor flaw.

One other flaw I have with the game is that once you find a way to deal with the leapers, goo, drones and swarms, you tend to become unstoppable in your pillaging of ships for scrap. Another similar flaw is that the enemy types start to get a bit boring after you've been through a few galaxies. Both of these issues could be fixed with more enemy types. For example, an enemy that doesn't move or show up on sensors/motion, and only attacks drones that have their back to it but destroys any drone with less than 200 health points in one hit then becomes inactive for a set amount of time. That's just one example off the top of my head.

Overall, this game is brilliantly done. The atmosphere is surprisingly present despite the retro-digital aesthetic that I enjoy so much. The gameplay whilst a little dull after you've gotten everything is challenging and requires concentrated effort. The fear this game produces is unrivaled purely because it's a different kind of fear. I got this full price, no sale, and feel I got much more than my money's worth. Try it out.

I really enjoy the exploration, survival, and puzzle aspects. Can be very tense.

Before we delve into too many details, I have to say that 2D games have never appealed to me as much as this one has. When I first looked at some of the gameplay, it looked quite bland, as in drained of color and seemed very boring. But I decided to give this game a chance and It did not disappoint.

Duskers is a control-based game that gives you real-time control over all the events occurring on your screen. Although you may only be looking at a monitored-simulation, it truly gives a feel of one being present at the scene as this is happening.

To the objective of the game: As the pilot of a small ship, you are tasked with the job of exploring and unveiling the truth behind what has happened to the other humans aboard ships that are merely drifting in space. Boarding these ships, you may find subtle clues or messages (datalogs) that may shed light to the disappearances or what might have happened. Utilizing drones and a variaty of gadgets they come equipped with (all customizable), you pilot these units aboard frigates, freighters, and numerous other ships alike in order to accumulate necessary resources to keep your own ship from failing while at the same time, uncovering the mystery behind the disapperances of the crew members of these ships.

But here's the catch: You aren't alone.
There are... these... things that are on board those ghost ships with you. And as far as I know, all of them are entirely hostile. They will attack your drones on sight and destroy them. The trick behind figuring out how to navigate around them either stealthily or to eliminate them will be up to the player to discover.

Conceptually, stylistically, and even mechanically, Duskers seems like a unique and fascinating game. It's tense, original and compelling. And yet, the more I played, the more the lack of progression and excessive randomness wore away at me, until eventually I gave up frustrated.

Duskers is a sort of "last man in the universe" scenario. Everything - and apparently everyone - is dead and the player is tasked with figuring out just what the heck happened. This involves exploring various derelict space ships via a squad of remote-controlled drones. It's a sort of SpaceChem meets Aliens as the player controls the drones from an overview while identifying and (hopefully) avoiding dangers. Each drone has three slots that hold upgrade modules that serve as tools to facilitate safe(?) exploration of the ship. These range from the subtle and strategic Motion Scanner and Lure, to the more directly useful Stealth and Teleport modules.

While controlling the drones directly with the cursor keys is necessary, the player can also type in commands from an overhead view of the entire ship. The need to type in commands is a neat gimmick and really helps the immersion in the game, but it can also be awkward and aggravating, as a single typo could have devastating consequences. There's no mouse or gamepad input at all.

A big part of Duskers is its procedural generation. The derelict ships vary greatly in size and layout, yet all feel basically the same. Each ship is essentially just a bunch of boxes. There are no force fields, elevators or teleporters, no human corpses scattered about or locked away in stasis. It all feels very dry. I would have thought the setting would allow for some really unique and varied stuff in each ship, but there's only a handful of elements randomly scattered about.

There are different ship types: a "military" ship might have more defense turrets, and a "fuel" depot might have more fuel, but these differences are so subtle I eventually stopped paying attention to what type of ship I was visiting. Worse, the layout of the ships seems completely illogical at times. You might explore a tiny ship with an airlock in every room, or a massive ship with only one airlock. A power outlet might power the rooms right next to it, or those rooms might be powered by another outlet at the far side of the map. I understand this adds to the "puzzle" aspect of the game, as you try to navigate the ship without knowing its layout, but the nonsensical ship designs really hurt my overall immersion. The risk-vs-reward formula is so random, it's usually better to just explore a few rooms of each ship, then move on. Exploring a very large ship can be much more dangerous, but probably won't yield more resources than a smaller, safer excursion. I understand procedural generation is all the rage these days, but Duskers doesn't really benefit from it. I would have much rather had a large pool of well-designed levels with a clear sense of progression than the infinite number of mediocre levels Duskers seems to be offering up.

The lack of variety affects the enemy types as well. I found the first three types of enemies within a couple of hours of starting the game, and then after playing for a dozen or so more hours I found... one more. There's no clear "late game" or "early game" in Duskers. You might find the best module for your drones in the very first ship, or you might never find it at all. Even on the easiest setting, I would often encounter enemies with one-hit-kill attacks right at the start. Why not have a few, smaller, creepier enemies at the start when the player is just learning, then escalate things to include larger, ship-devouring "boss" enemies later on? Duskers always felt like it was building up to something great, but that "something great" never seemed to happen. Most of my time was spent gathering "scrap" (the game's currency), then using that scrap only to maintain the pool of upgrades and drones I already had. I was hoping I'd eventually unlock the means to craft new upgrades or new types of drones, but that never happened.

Duskers' story plays out through a variety of text logs that are randomly uncovered when visiting the derelict ships. While intriguing and well-written, I'm not really convinced they provide a satisfactory conclusion to the game's setup. I never did find all of them, but replaying the game over and over to find the ones I missed didn't seem worthwhile.

There's a part of me that loves Duskers for its unique style and mechanics, but also a part of me that hates it for being such a missed opportunity. It's a neat idea, but the lack of variety, progression and the nagging feeling that I had "seen it all" almost right from the start left me ultimately disappointed.

Duskers is the most unexpectedly absorbing action-strategy game I've played in a long time. Set aside a couple of hours to learn it, then play it in the dark with headphones. Trust me.

Most people hear that Duskers is a game that forces you to type in commands to play it. It's true, but not universally. You have direct movement control over your robot drones with the arrow keys, but to get them to do anything special you'll need to remember a bunch of commands. And you'll need to keep learning new ones as you explore the universe.

Anyway. There are two discrete stages to know about in Duskers - the preparation, and the execution. The preparation is all menu-based: you choose the next derelict spaceship on the map to raid (trying to use as little fuel as possible when making each jump), convert salvaged scrap metal into useful stuff, and kit out/repair your drones.

The execution is the meat of the game. Here you remote-control your drones through a derelict spaceship to salvage essential fuel, new drones, new upgrades and scrap metal. You have some control beyond the drones too - you can open and close any door on the ship, provided you have a drone with the right skill parked on a nearby generator. If you manage to find ship upgrades, you can also do things like teleport drones around or power bits of the ship without using a drone.

Gameplay video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0H9Hu-oN9U

You move the drones one at a time and type in commands to get them to use their skills, either alone or all at once. If you tell a drone to do something that takes a while to execute (such as gathering every pick-up in a room), you can leave the drone to it while you go and do something else. If you find yourself using the same complicated command over and over, you can programme it into a simple alias command.

So why bother automate the drones? Mainly because you don't have all the time in the world. The ship you're boarding will slowly degrade, forcing you to make the most of every second. There will be threats trapped in rooms that may eventually break out. You may even come up with clever strategies for dealing with those threats that require several drones to work together at once.

You start with precious little equipment - three droids with (fairly) random skills. To be able to deal with every room of some derelicts, you will need to find new skills to upgrade the droids. So if you're unlucky enough not to start with (say) the interface skill, you won't be able to remote-activate the derelict's weapon system to kill baddies. This randomness does mean some games will be less fair than others, especially near the start. But this is a roguelike, so tough.

There are so many emergent things that come out of the way this game is set up, I can't begin to scratch the surface. It really rewards improvisation using the tools you have earned. And it fully immerses you in the experience - from the eerie, quiet background sfx to the way the control system promotes the idea that you're sat on a ship in front of clapped-out, low-tech equipment remote-controlling drones by the seat of your pants in a dangerous universe.

Be patient with Duskers - it'll take a while to get into, but it's worth every gritty second.

I hate that I can't recommend this game. It's not really that the game is bad at all because it's good. It's quite good actually in making itself out to be a futuristic universe where everything's dead and gone(save the enemies). But perhaps it's too good at that. The game initially feels very forboding and downright terrifying since you've only got a limited number of drones and losing even one can mean game over, but the sense of fear you get fades to frustration as you have no way of knowing how the enemies in the game function unless you die to them over and over again while experimenting, or you google how they work. (looking at you slime)

I don't like how fighting enemies works on this game at all. There is a difference between having a threatening enemy that you cannot fight directly and an enemy that will kill you before you have more than a second to react to it being there. The horror of seeing a swarm jump on you is immediately met with frustration because you wonder what you could have done differently upon seeing the swarm and realize that there is literally nothing barring a shield or some other kind of defense that is equipped on the drone. And even then the shield wouldn't help.

Let me make an example here so that hopefully you can understand why I'm upset. Lets compare 'finding an enemy' to 'getting infested' in alien swarm. What happens in alien swarm is that you are essentially sentenced to death and there are only a few ways out of it. Number 1 is being healed until the infestation is gone and number 2 is using electric armor. Both methods expend resources making you weaker as a whole, but not outright killing you. In duskers the response to meeting an enemy is the equivilant of instantaneous death. Reaction in Duskers is waaaaaaay to reliant on planning putting you into the position of performing IMMENSE setup with very little reward.

In fact I think that is my primary complaint about the game is that I don't feel rewarded at all when I perform the duties expected of me. I am simply like 'alright, one guy down, now to spend another 10 to 15 minutes setting up for the next guy'. This is only made worse by the fact everything in the game breaks and it breaks at ridiculous speeds. I can use a motion sensor in one mission like 3 times and it will barely increment and then I use it once in another and the damn thing is ready to break. How the hell am I expected to progress in the game when I can barely maintain it without performing such tedious tasks tantamount to filing paperwork or examining spreadsheets. Any fun in this game is lost on the random generative manner of the game because it's almost like a puzzle game that is generated randomly and to make up for the random nature the baddies are so incredibly powerful that one ♥♥♥♥ up and yer dead.

This game would be a lot better as a non randomly generated experience where puzzles were carefully crafted to test your ability to think and be creative, not request that you spend several hours examining a ship for minimal quanities of scrap materials so you can examine more ships for more scrap materials and hopefully piece together some story that may or may not even be worth it. The mysterious nature of why everyone disappeared isn't really excited when it's presented in text that is literally people going about their day to day god damned business. The little bits and pieces are not worth the effort. The game is so bland when it gets right down to it. There's so few enemy types, ships just blend together after a while and the differences of drone parts and functionality is so minimal. Beyond the great aesthetic there is so little to the game. In the end, the game itself isn't bad at all, but the asking price is WAY WAY TOO MUCH. I do not feel like I got my moneys worth.

Also one last complaint, not being able to clear doorways is annoying. Also the game has some annoying bugs like scrap being dropped in between doorways and not being able to be picked up.


TL;DR: Game gets stale fast. Not worth 20 bucks. Wait for big sale.