Red Thread Games brings us Dustborn, a narrative adventure that bets on a graphic novel visual style with saturated colors and cel-shading. The game puts us in the shoes of Pax, a fugitive with special powers, as she crosses a dystopian America. The art direction, inspired by European comics, is its main visual draw, supported by tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to define its vibrant palette and stylized characters on the Unity engine. 🎨
Unity as a canvas for an interactive comic aesthetic 🖌️
The Unity engine manages an interesting visual challenge here: maintaining cel-shading consistency in motion without sacrificing performance. The developers have used custom shaders to emulate the inking and halftones of a comic, while flat textures and bold outlines are achieved through post-processing. Although the finish resembles Borderlands, Dustborn opts for softer lighting and less saturated colors in outdoor scenes. The use of Photoshop for 2D assets and Illustrator for typography and vector graphics allows for artistic control that Unity integrates without major issues, though in scenes with many characters, the framerate can suffer on modest hardware.
The road trip where your worst enemy is the dialogue menu 🚐
Dustborn sells you a road trip with punks, powers, and a van. It sounds great until you spend more time in dialogue trees than driving. The characters have charisma, but sometimes it seems like the writer was paid by the word. That said, if you always wanted to feel like you're managing an amateur theater group in the middle of the apocalypse, this is your game. The voice powers are cool, but most of the time you'll use them to convince a guard that they didn't see you steal a can of beans.