Duskpunk Review – Dead Souls

For better or worse, the games industry as a whole is driven by trends. Developer A makes a really cool game that captures the zeitgeist, Developers B through Z jump on the bandwagon and make a title which is their interpretation of Developer A’s game. It happens with big studios as much as it does with indies. Of course, every time a game “inspired” by a big hit comes out, it doesn’t feel quite as original and doesn’t seem to impact as much as that first attention grabbing title. We’re still getting knockoffs of Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper, and each one seems to be less impressive than the one that came before. I had hoped Duskpunk might offer up something new. Something to take the bad taste of Sovereign Syndicate out of my mouth, perhaps, and give me some genuinely good steampunk CRPG-style action. Alas…

Duskpunk puts you in the shoes of a recently “returned” soldier, late of the Empire of Sarum’s Army. Marked down as dead, and sent off to have your notional corpse processed into the mysterious fuel known as plasm, you wash up on a riverbank in the city of Dredgeport. What follows is an effort to try and navigate the various factions seeded throughout the city and avoid either getting murdered in a dark alley or get shipped back into the massive war the Empire is currently waging for inscrutable purposes. Random chance will either help you survive another day, or lead you a step further down the path to madness and death.

From a visual perspective, Duskpunk gives players a really nice UI and very well painted character portraits, but there’s not much more beyond that. In this, it could almost be mistaken for a Citizen Sleeper mod. The text is nice and legible, the various icons for items players can utilize become quickly recognizable with minimal consultation of the tooltips for them. The different gauges are easily understandable. Each of the major characters you come across has distinctive features which help them stick in your mind. Yet for all the good stuff, there’s a strange deficency. We don’t get a lot of different reaction images regarding the characters, forcing players to rely more on the text than anything. For bibliophiles, it’s not a big deal, but those suffering from aphantasia may have more of a problem. Players are treated to different vignettes here and there, but some of those vignettes seem to be lacking any sort of visual image to tie everything together, particularly when you’re involved in a conversation with random strangers.

Sound is a glaring trouble spot in Duskpunk. There’s no voice acting, which I can understand and even respect to some extent as a design choice and a logistical consideration. The consequence of that sort of decision, however, means that music and sound effects need to do more work. And here, they are clearly not up to the challenge. For the life of me, I cannot recall any music that was playing. No themes which stuck with me, no leitmotifs associated with the various characters, nothing that stood out. I vaguely recall there being brief musical stings at the start of each day, but even those don’t feel like they had much in the way of impact. As far as sound effects, they’re occasionally present, but suffer from the same problem as the music. They just don’t stand out.

In terms of gameplay, Duskpunk definitely hews closer to Citizen Sleeper mechanically than Disco Elysium. Dice rolls against different attributes lead to one of three outcomes: Success, Mixed Success, and Failure. Failures lead to Stress. Stress leads to “broken” dice faces which can shank future dice rolls. Successes and Mixed Successes advance “clocks” which ultimately lead to a completed task. Of course, there are other clocks which are advancing outside of your efforts. It may be efforts to recapture you for the war effort, or it may be the timeframe to break somebody out of prison. Go too long without successfully completing those tasks, and bad things happen. This, however, leads to something of a stumbling block in gameplay. Suppose you successfully complete a task. In some instances, the clocks still run and show you their progress rather that recognizing, “Welp, that scenario is no longer relevant.” It creates a bit of confusion at times. Unfortunately, one can sometimes get lost in the mechanics of basic survival and forget to devote time to one’s tasks, often leading to the failure of the task or the clock running out.

Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot happening. Navigating the map is easily done, and a lot of the vignettes you come across lend a little bit of flavor, but certain character backgrounds almost make it impossible to really open up the map, particularly if you happen to get a bad run of dice rolls (which can absolutely happen with computer generated dice). If you can theoretically hang on long enough, the map opens up on its own, but that’s a lot of time spent doing other things. Even on “Easy” mode, the gameplay just seems excessively punishing.

For all of that, the greatest sins in Duskpunk are reserved for its narrative elements. Much like Sovereign Syndicate, the steampunk elements do not feel properly incorporated, mentioned but never properly explored. Far too many of the characters feel like stock roles rather than actual people. Enter “Generic Burly Factory Worker,” enter “Knockoff Opium Dealer,” enter “Great Value Karl Marx,” none of them with a genuine personality. I’d say we’re given too little time to really know them as people because of the clocks, but it just doesn’t feel like there’s real meat to a lot of them. Attempts to touch on elements of mysticism, religion, and faith are teased but ultimately amount to nothing outside of the occasional vignette. Which is kind of a shame, since there might have been an interesting angle to explore with the dichotomy between what the state church says the gods want and what the gods themselves really want.

Throughout my playthroughs, I had this nagging sense of the story being too familiar, that I’d played or read something like it before. The same tropes so many other games have badly invoked, almost always in some tiresome attempt to say, “Capitalism is bad, m’kay.” Everything just seemed to be trite and I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t until finally reaching one of the endings, with a final quote from Leon Trotsky right before the credits rolled, that it finally clicked in my brain. Duskpunk is little more than a thinly disguised allegory for the October Revolution of 1917. At a time where the knock-on effects of that revolution are still affecting the world today with the war in Ukraine, the whole thing just seems absolutely tone deaf.

Duskpunk does not offer anything new or exciting. The nicely done visuals are completely undermined by the unimpressive soundscape and terrible narrative components. It stands as a testament to the fact that, once again, nobody really gets steampunk.

Axel reviewed Duskpunk on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.