Duskers

Fantastic idea and interesting mechanics indelibly marred by the roguelike formula. The common wisdom of the game is never to open a door you don't KNOW is safe but when it's the very start of the game and you didn't roll a drone with literally any sort of detection, just a trap that has to be manually activated, there's not much you can do but open some doors and hope for the best. The best will not happen. If this was, like, a 5-7 hour scripted game with bespoke levels and less complete RNG when it comes to drone upgrades I think this would genuinely be a crowning achievement in experimental horror gaming. As it is it's just an exercise in frustration. Buy it on sale, play for a couple hours to soak in the incredible vibes and atmosphere, and then leave when you've had your fill.

One of the scariest, most ferociously immersive games ever made. And don't believe a word about Duskers being repetitive or boring after a while. It's not. The sense of dread, of total isolation, and the slow gathering of evidence about 'what did happen to the rest of the universe' is at times almost unbearable. Short of Alien: Isolation and System Shock 2, I've never felt so strongly the sense of being a lone survivor put in an impossible situation. The command line interface seems rudimentary at first, but in reality, once you get the hang of it, it is very creative and satisfactory. Prepare for some jumpscares, but overall this is a game about constant dread, not monsters saying 'boooh' in space

While i am giving this game a Not Recommended i'd like to mention that the core gameplay loop genuinely is one of a kind and excellent except the game's a real lying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and all of you should be aware of what you're getting into. So: The main gameplay loop is docking with derelict stations and ships, exploring them to gain scrap, which is what you use to repair and buy upgrades for your drones and your ship, and collecting Propulsion Fuel to travel inside a star system, and Jump Fuel to jump between star systems. This is actually really good. The problem: There's LITERALLY nothing else here. The ""story"" if you can call it that is just a bunch of logs of the most lame and boring scifi bs i have ever read, telling you to salvage more ships of the military kind, or salvage derelict stations. Literally just telling you to play the game more, you dont actually have to do anything for it, it just jumps up before a salvage mission and goes away after with one button press. No actual logs to be found on the ships, merely docking progresses the story meaning its not something you ever interact with, it just happens in the background. That being said thats probably for the better considering how lame and filler it is. There's the joke that a game only needs story like a porno does and this game just took that idea and ran with it. Its so bare bones there isnt even skin on the bone. Its the first draft of a story's outline, not even a story itself. Moreover, as i said, this game has two hours of content and absolutely nothing else. No music(although to be fair it doesnt need one, but still), four enemy types, three of which play largely the same with very minor differences, and an absolutely brutal economy system that is so cruel that as soon as you start playing you're in an inescapable death spiral and you cant survive the death spiral, you can only extend it by a handful of more salvaging missions if you play well and get lucky. Not being able to tell how big a derelict is going to be is a major problem too because it makes the death spiral economy so much worse, because a derelict with four rooms and one scrap in it is a massive loss in repair costs, while the bigger wrecks are smaller losses atleast, letting you play for longer. There IS a ship class system in the game, going from D to A in terms of small to big, *except it doesnt do ♥♥♥♥* and i have seen D class ships with like 12 rooms when they are supposed to have 4-5 and A class ships that are supposed to have more than 20 or even 25 have only five. There's literally a system so you can tell if its worth it to visit it or not and it doesnt work! Also, the infestations number means how many TYPES of enemies there are, not how many enemies total. The difficulty options are largely useless too. So many options that dont matter. They literally dont do anything of value to change the parts of this game that suck ass. Even with more scrap and slower wear you're still in an inescapable death spiral so what does it matter, turning off permadeath doesnt matter because you still lose fuel from traveling and scrap from just playing the game and you need both to keep playing, simply being able to duck out of a derelict doesnt do ♥♥♥♥ when you cant go anywhere or dont have functional drones to play with, for which you need to do derelicts anyway, its just dumb. None of these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ do anything to address the game's problems! That last part is important because BOY this game is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RNG heavy its insane. From how much scrap a ship gives you, to if you're going to get enough fuel to keep going to new derelicts, to random events like a meteor destroying a third of the derelict you're on, to random pipe bursts, or the positions of enemies, or which rooms are unscannable by the motion scanner forcing you to face check the doors which almost always results in your drone getting disabled or destroyed, to if your upgrades that you desperately need to keep going will lose their chances of permanently breaking and turn into a useless broken lump worth one scrap, its just SO EXTREMELY RNG heavy, my god. Economy woes part 2 The death spiral exists because everything from your drone upgrades, to your ship upgrades, to even the slots on the ship that can host the upgrades, to the camera feeds of both your main ship and the drones, wear down with every single derelict you visit. The ship upgrades wear down as soon as you visit anything, without even boarding it, hell, they wear down from you just equipping or swapping them ffs! All of this means that literally everything and more has a scrap cost to repair, and its almost always around three to four times as much as you get for salvaging a single ship, meaning most upgrades cost around 9-12 scrap to repair while one salvaging mission gives around 1-4 scrap. Now multiply this with the 20 odd different things that WILL wear with everything you do, luckily drone upgrades only wear if you actually use them but still, all of them will wear and 20 things wearing at the same time costing 9-12 scrap each to repair, or if you're lucky, three scrap to buy at a trader, means that you literally cannot escape the death spiral. Oh and the traders? Yeah, they stock 3-5 upgrades, never replenish, no fixed upgrades that you might need so if you had a motion scanner that lost a 9% chance roll and the nearest trader doesnt have one? Have fun face checking doors! Seriously. Some of these upgrades you literally cannot do anything without and the game doesnt care. In short, buy it, play for two hours, get a feel for the main gameplay loop and refund this ♥♥♥♥ because i'm telling you, there's NOTHING more this game could offer you beyond the first two hours. It literally is that extremely shallow and its masking it with a permadeath gameplay system and an economy so brutally overtuned that its going to take you a good 12 hours of playtime to realise this is all there is and by then you will be way too far to refund this ♥♥♥♥. In addition the developer openly stated he tried to come up with ideas for a spiritual successor and couldnt and i'm genuinely baffled by that because there's potential for an extremely good game here, and there's so many more things to improve and iterate on this that i find it unbelievable that he cannot come up with anything. HOW THE HELL CAN YOU NOT IMPROVE ON THIS?! Anyway, I could go on but i've already wrote a novel...

This is a great game but I had to stop playing. It was jsut too stressful!

A very interesting game here. I've played my fair share of extraction games, but this game, Duskers, is a whole different league. The only thing it's missing is a coop mode in my opinion, but it's still great as is. I did NOT intend to sit down and play for 3 whole hours, but here I am. My spaghetti is cold and crusty and I am immensely sad to have lost my first game because of some kind of Bullet Bill creature that bum rushed me before I could react. This game is not for the feint of heart. It requires quick wits and slick hands on the keyboard. The tide of the "battle" can turn at ANY moment. You may think it's safe to explore because you ejected the last baddie out the airlock, but just as you let your guard down, a pipe breaks and begins radiating the ship. Now your escape is cut off and you need to make a split second decision to either take your chances running through the radiation, or seal yourself off and try to find another airlock to rendezvous with your ship. The way the game works is you type out commands for the drones to execute, so one misspelled word means your buddies just sit there and die while you struggle to spell the word mavi... nabi... NAVIGATE!! You can manually control the drones as well, but real pros like me (not) can string commands together and watch the bots do everything for you. The environment is just as much of an enemy as the creatures, so sometimes it's best to take the wheel to avoid any unnecessary mistakes like drones colliding and getting stuck, which f*cked me a few times. Overall, like I said it was a very interesting experience. I will be coming back to it, and I see the sequel is on the way as well, and that looks really good too. It reminds me a lot of FTL, except with a much more grim and desolate atmosphere.

A unique and brilliant sci-fi indie gem that I still come back to occasionally and always enjoy.

i love it so much. the only game that will just kill you and you say "i guess i messed up, ill do better next time!"

As you play and try to collate the last remaining files of humans presence in this dead galaxy, you come to terms with it all. That you're just the last Librarian. Someone to leave a monument to prove that we once lived. That we are to be remembered if we can be.

//best space game ive played!!! ##################### looking forward to duskers 2 (the dog stays in my ship)

If you love cosmic dread, roguelites and are fine using command line interfaces go for it. It got released 10 years ago at the time of writing but the game still feels unique and excellent in its niche. Pros: - The survival aspect. Your material progressively breaks, you lose fuel each time you jump and you always need to set your priorities with the little resources you gather. Will you repair your ship sensors or your drone shield ? - The narration format. Going from ship to ship and progressively crossing the information you find to find out what happened can be very satisfying. - Immersion. The game is incredibly immersive compared to (or maybe because of ?) its graphics. You see what your drones see, and if their camera or your ship sensors start failing you don't see anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Having all your stuff (drones, upgrades, even your ship) deteriorate with time and being forced to either deal with half working equipment and finding new one (ship included) that will then also deteriorate gives a real sense of epic. You're not always trying to find something better: sometimes your ship is simply starting to fall apart and you are desperately trying to find another ship that might be worse than your current ship overall but which at least doesn't have its damn camera glitching every few minutes due to progressive wear. - The game general reactivity / optimizations. It has been a while since the last time I played a game in which there are no laggs or loading times at all. - The command line interface. I personally enjoy it a lot, as creates a lot of tension in a real-time game. Staying focused on not doing typos while your drone is suddenly being attacked and seconds away from death is an excellent way to increase your heart rate. If you don't like CLIs in games that's not the game for you though, as it represents a good 90% of the gameplay. Cons: - It is becoming a bit repetitive after a while. I am a few galaxies and 150+ days in with my current game. I haven't unlocked all the lore and have no idea of the game end-goal yet (if there is one) but ships and stations exploration is starting to feel similar once you have safe-ish ways to explore ships and gather more resources / fuel per jump than you spend. I have the feeling that difficulty might progressively increase at time passes by though: the more days have passed in the game, the more unstable the ships you explore become ? To be confirmed. - The command-line interface has room for improvements. The commands history is very small and the information you want to re-check is often deleted by the time you try to access it, which can be a problem when you want to double-check which room is about to be hit by an asteroid. Likewise, commands do not have a timestamp and there is no way in-game to know how much time has passed since that alert telling you that "an asteroid has 78% chances to hit room 5 in 4m38s". On another note, you cannot express precedence when chaining commands ("do A, then do B, then do C") which would have been a neat feature. Basic does the trick though, and having a somewhat basic interface adds to the thrill when you need to take minute decisions while typing as fast as you can without making typos. Overall this is a niche game that you will either hate for its weird user interface and its punitive gameplay (losing 10h+ of upgrades upon loss because you ran out of fuel) or completely fall in love with (did you really need that many upgrades on your ship anyway ?)