Dustpunk: An Empire Of Dice and Dusk

Many moments preceded my enjoyment of Dustpunk, but I knew I would need to write about the game when a factory of workers raised their hands to support an unborn child, and I finally broke. I paused the game and cried for a moment, just to hold myself in the moment of such profound grief. Which is, ultimately, the heart of the story. The crumbling city of Dredgeport is bent on churning people into profit and oil while the Emperor and his kin thrive in the Palace District.

The game is structured around a series of competing clocks (ala Blades In The Dark). Each clock has a number of segments that count up as you invest money or time to progress to a positive outcome, or clocks count-down toward a given outcome based on the number of in-game days. You play a soldier returned from the Empire’s bloody war, a husk of a person. A zealot preacher keeps you alive, but almost immediately the vibes are wrong and it’s clear this is a temporary reprieve. Each morning you wake with a limited number of actions per day and a limited number of actions per night, and almost all actions that progress time require a dice-roll. Your character is traumatised and weakened from the conflict, and so most mornings you wake not renewed and rested, but tortured and stressed. You can spend double the time on a task to prepare, increasing your odds of success, but not guaranteeing a better outcome. This is where Dustpunk swerves from contemporary siblings: stress is a punishing, distressing mechanic that shows no signs of abatement until very, very late in the game. When your stress ticks too high, you start to break dice until you finally break inside, and injure a skill. The only way to heal stress is to take solace, an addictive heroin allegory that grows weaker with each use.

The core tension is competing priorities, clocks ticking as time runs forward, but really who you align yourself to and why, and whose interests you advance. And which of those interests align with your own, and which are just the right thing to do. Placed in opposition to ensuring you have enough money for food, shelter, medicine and sanity.

Early on I fell in with a clutch of beggars, using my sneak to five-finger discount enough money for food. And then one night my stress peaked and my sneak skill broke. The problem with this, dear reader, is that I dump stated into sneak, and was suddenly faced with the alternative of working in an incredibly dangerous factory, where at least once a day I injured myself on the assembly line. Which meant I wasn’t making enough money to visit the doctor, and even when I did, with my stress high I often failed to be healed, losing more coin and growing more stressed. This spiralled toward a progression-hole which plagues the genre, until I clicked on a random event on the map. I drifted along the streets and paused beneath the curve of a church. Voices rose in song within, and for a moment I felt a glimmer of hope, and peace. And my stress decreased by a few ticks. Enough to recover a dice. I went back to the factory, sailed through three shifts without incident, and then with the wheel ticked up, I met the other factory workers, a delightful thruple being crushed by the factory conditions. And so, after a few more shifts, we start planning a unionisation effort, and things seem less bleak.

Meanwhile the no-nonsense bartender Zai who poured me drinks a few nights a week to fight off stress asks me to recover scrap for her latest build, a furnace to teach other mechanists the ropes. So, even as I plan to unionise, I sneak back into the factory after dark to swipe scrap components and tools. The game never punished me for this strange dual position, but I felt an itching guilt and compromise. Fuck the factory bosses, obviously, but if my theft came to light, would that undercut our union effort? And both are on a timeline so I’m doing little else, my wanted level increasing with each evening I toss in fitful nightmares, sleeping in the sewers with the other veterans.

I illustrate this spiral of compromise and conflicting priority to communicate the feeling of Dustpunk at its best. A series of best of bad choices, and irreconcilable goods crashing over the shores of war, and the violence of the plasm factory.

The games sharpest political writing arrives with Markov, a straight forward rearrangement of Marx. With a curious twist: Markov has been forcibly addicted to solace, a dreadful secret that could crumble his entire Collaborist movement. This turned out to be incredibly fitting for my character who refused to touch Solace, even once, on principle. After chastising Markov for risking our revolution, I set about printing pamphlets and performing speeches about politics. The Emperor’s war is just an excuse to solidify his power while producing an endless supply of bodies to churn into plasm. His rule is not divine but greedy and ugly, and so on.

Markov is a useful stand-in for Marx, and his ideology is reduced into simple beats that are arranged in unobtrusive ways. Markov never explains use-value and exchange-value, but we’re provided the broad outline of the philosophy. Though the practiced reader will understand the game’s structuring principals also communicate Marxism.

Perhaps the weakness of Dustpunk is a structural issue a lot of RPG’s run into, the “I want to play more but don’t quite fancy it” hump. This occurs in Disco Elysium, for example, when Kim leaves to take a body back to the morgue or the day before the bridge opens. The timing is often unique but similar for most players. I remember Josh Sawyer calling this the “about to bite down” moment of a meal. One must simply bull through and take that next large bite, and then everything falls into place.

For me this occurred the night before a strange, wealthy socialite summoned me to her club. She asked me to do a small job at first: gather some gossip. Then blackmail, and then very suddenly she’s asking me to murder one of my co-revolutionaries. The city is on the precipice, and The Ossuary sees only an opportunity for power.

The game hangs all of these ideas on an evolving revolution that goes from idea to reality so much faster than I was prepared for. I won’t spoil where this goes, or the late game “currency” twist which manages an impressive zag to undercut the typical RPG late-game economy curve. When I realised what this twist meant my panic over certain clocks reached fever pitch and I sacrificed my body and mind for the cause, pushing myself day after day, night after night, desperate to keep the machine of revolution turning. This never errs into full-blown main character syndrome: the writing keeps a close handle on the fact this takes an army, and diverse leaders with diverse interests and priorities doing huge amounts of work. The cascading pressure feels fitting, as does the necessary violence of revolution, and neither end up reproducing the aesthetics of what they critique.

I’m reminded here of the argument of moralism which we hear endlessly in our modern context. “It’s inevitable, keep up or get left behind” they tell you, compromising before a cheque has even been written. Meanwhile profiteers like Dresden sell their soul to the highest bidder and soldiers serve the Empire, knowing it is wrong. On this note, my resolution with Dresden involved a distant church, a preacher and the sweatiest five minutes of gameplay so far. I managed to finesse the situation but it was a close thing indeed. Proof that even after the dust settled, the game still had knives to twist.

I knew Dustpunk worked for me as a whole when, with my revolution resolved, each closing conversation with core characters left me in tears and punching the air in equal measure. The game is a radical argument for hope in the face of oppression, and understands that this is an adversarial position. Choices have a cost, and Dredgeport always collects. You must fight, comrade, together we can take back our city.