I’m… not so proud of this review, but for posterity, I’ve left it here. If you want a more informed opinion, I’ve since re-reviewed Dustforce.
One day, a guy named Terrence Lee met 3 australian guys who left their jobs and schools to form the Hitbox Team. They made Dustforce after a year. The end.
Thus is the story (in shortened form) of the notes contained within Fastfall, the soundtrack of Dustforce. I know this, because I bought it. I bought it, because these guys deserve to succeed. Just knowing that this is the story of the small independent group that made the game makes me want to buy the soundtrack again, to support these guys.
Dustforce is a precision platformer, in the manner of Super Meat Boy, where you play a janitor. No, I’m serious. A janitor. You run and jump around like a ninja, carrying around a broom, dusting everything in sight. Yes, it’s an absolutely ridiculous premise. At the very least you’d expect the game to be equally ridiculously cartoony. Well, it may be cartoony, but the game looks absolutely gorgeous. I just love the game’s style. Whoever directed - if even a director exists for these types of indie studios - did a great job on matching the music and the graphics. Just listen to this.
The goal of the game is to clean all the dust off any given level. There are a lot of them, separated into four areas. The dust is represented by leaves in the forest, or gray fluff in the mansion, or brown-and-red rubbish in the city, or green goop in the laboratory. To dust something, you just touch the surface. No other effort is required on your part. The tools at your disposal are the four movement keys, dash, jump, light attack and heavy attack. Dash and jump are pretty obvious; as for light and heavy attack, there are a few enemies in the game that require dispatching. These range from bears who just want the leaves off their fur, to green-goop men in which scientists are trapped.
Some of the genius in the game lies in the fact that there is a single achievement. This single achievement is to get a perfect score on every single level in the game. This is an absolutely monumental task. On each level, you’re graded on two things: completion and finesse. To get an “S,” the highest grade, in completion, you must clean up every single speck of dust in a level. Nothing must be let go, not even a single tile. For an S in finesse, your combo must never drop. Your combo meter counts how many tiles of dust you’ve cleaned; when you are hit, or you simply don’t dust anything for a certain amount of time, your combo dramatically drops off the screen.
There’s a petition on the steam forums to get some more achievements into the game - I say, no, emphatically, absolutely, no. Please don’t. The real achievement isn’t just to complete the levels - it’s to beat others. At the end of each completion of a level, or in a tome located in each of the four areas, you can see a leaderboard of the top ten players according to score and times (in that order) of that level, your time and rating, and those of a couple of other people around you. The real achievement is to get to the top of that leaderboard. This is a real challenge; even just a week after release, people have got this game figured out to the ground. And you can see this, because you can watch their replays.
Fie, you say, what nonsense is that! What is the point in the game if you can watch other people and duplicate exactly what they do? And to that, I state this simple fact: For 99% of all of the levels in the game, you will know exactly what you have to do to get that SS. The only challenge is pulling off the nimble keyboard (or gamepad) dexterity to accomplish that goal. The game isn’t a puzzler; the point isn’t to puzzle out how to do it, it’s to do it, and do it well. Even if you know to dash at that spot, or to use a heavy attack here instead of a light one, the real accomplishment is doing it.
Levels are sorted by varying difficulty. All of them are located in a “nexus” area, filled with doors that represent each level. Some of these doors are locked. Their colors (silver, gold, bronze(?)) indicate their varying difficulty. After completing a level perfectly - this is called an SS run - you obtain a key for a higher-difficulty level. After an SS run of an unlocked door, you obtain a silver key which unlocks any silver-lock door. After SS-ing a silver-door level, you obtain a gold key. And after that, a bronze-looking key, which I won’t spoil for you here. Completing a level gives you a real sense of accomplishment; as you move up in difficulty, that sense of accomplishment grows and grows.
Not just that, but you really get better at the game. That seems silly - of course you get better at the game. But you have to understand, you feel real frustration when you try, and try, and just can’t beat a level. But then you come back to it later that day. You practice. You complete it, and just feel exhausted, and never want to come back to it again. A few days later, you return to the level, and SS it on your first try, without even remembering the level layout. That’s the real greatness of the game; you can really, tangibly feel that you are mastering this game, little by little. It’ll take you 15 minutes just to complete some level, then 12, then 2, and then suddenly, just magically, you pull off the perfect SS run, and you yell and jump and your neighbors come knock on your door and berate you for being too loud. True story.
This is a great game. It really is. If the story contained within the soundtrack notes is true, that the four guys at Hitbox really just up and left your jobs and schoolwork… Just wow. It’s something I always wanted to do, but never have the guts for. Whoever reads this, just go and buy Dustforce, if only for the sake of supporting these guys. Last time I checked, only 15000 people had played the tutorial. 15000 times 10 is $150,000, which seems like a lot, but for a year of work between 4 people it’s not really very much at all. And I guarantee you’ll love it.
Back to playing Dustforce.
Dustforce is out on Steam now.