Recently I’ve been playing “Dust: An Elysian Tale” on the 360. It’s a pretty amazing game; it’s something like 20 hours of gameplay, programmed and drawn by one man. It’s not without its flaws but most of them can be excused because, holy shit, one man working for three years? (Well, plus two guys for the music and sound, a writing partner who came in near the end, and a voice cast – but it’s still very much One Man’s Vision and largely his work.)
I wholeheartedly recommend it if you like the platformy explorationy thing. The combat remains fun for pretty much the whole game, no small feat given how generally simple it is. And the world is just beautiful – it’s all hand-painted, really sumptuous.
And now, spoilers.At the very end, the game pulls a giant narrative flaw out of its ass. It’s been telegraphing that you are a dead man since the title screen; it’s been revealed that you’re actually a magical combination of two dead guys. And of course Dust (your character) has some conflicts over this; the two dead guys he’s built from were on opposite sides of the war the plot involves.
It’d also revealed itself as more mature and nuanced than I was expecting. There’s one mandatory subquest where you have to try to get an item to save someone who’s on the brink of death. As you race back with it, there’s conversation between Dust and his two companions. Fidget, the innocent little bat-cat friend, is saying things like “We’ll make it, right? We did everything we were supposed to.” And Ahrah, your magic sword, is saying “Well, I dunno, he was doing really bad…”. It turns out that your sword is correct; you arrive just in time for his last words. Fidget is devastated; this moment of lost innocence was really powerful.
Then at the end, Dust has bested the enemy general in single combat. But by plot fiat, he’s severely wounded. He has a last exchange with the general (half of Dust was formerly said general’s right-hand man), who then falls into a pit of magma. Dust collapses, spent. And it’s pretty clear he’s about to die. At the last minute, Fidget flies down. She’s trying to persuade him to get up, trying to persuade him that everything will be alright, that they did everything they were supposed to.
And she fails; magma sweeps over Dust. I cried. It’s a really lovely narrative about choice, fatalism, and the urge to do something right even when you know you’re doomed in the end anyway.
But. But then. Then there’s some scenes afterwards, with the leader of the indigenous lizard-people whose side you took in this war talking about how you saved them all. And then there is a hint that Dust is not, after all, dead – some dialogue from that leader, followed by your magic sword and a swirl of spooky mist coming up from the pile of debris and flying off.
And that really just undercut the emotional impact, I felt. Up until then the ending was a beautiful, perfect bummer, that had been foreshadowed in several ways for the entire game. The whole narrative had been building to this point, and then OH MAYBE HE’S NOT DEAD AFTER ALL?
Yeah, sure, okay, we know that video game players are not up for mature, nuanced endings, especially downer ones. Look at the furor over Mass Effect 3. Hell, Americans just aren’t up for sad endings; look at pretty much every movie that comes out of Hollywood.
But aaagh. Oh man the ending was so fucking perfect up until that last thirty seconds or so.