Harddrive-by: Worst Game of the Year Edition – Dustborn
There have been bad years in gaming before. 2017 was the year that loot boxes became so obnoxious that Belgium banned them entirely. 1999 was the dessert year of almost no releases. 2011 was the year that free-to-play made more money than games that were paid for, Microtransactions were here to stay, and FPS games hit rock bottom. 1983 saw a crash that lowered gaming revenues by 97%.
But 2024 was the year of the Woke Meltdown. The reasons for this are obvious enough. When Covid destroyed Hollywood in 2020, the Mercedes Marxist geezers that run State Street, Black Rock, and Vanguard saw that the only entertainment venue that was making a ton of money was video games so they decided to start “Forcing behaviors” as Larry Fink put it in a moment of startling honesty.
2020 was also the year that “Narrative Designers” put out their shingles specifically because of the BLM riots. They and the old geezers with money decided the People’s Revolution they’d been dreaming about since 1968 had finally started, rather than the completely predictable consequence of locking people up in apartments for six months.
The Narrative Designers began shaking down triple AAA studios, with the full support of the big three of high finance. Granted studios that were owned by media companies like the Pre-Zaslav Warner Brothers were going to go hardwoke whether they wanted to or not.
Regardless, the turd snowball started rolling down from the mountaintop in 2020. It reached the bottom this year.
Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League, Skull and Bones, Star Wars Outlaws, Concord, Veilgard, and Foamstars. Assasin’s Creed Shadows was supposed to bomb this year too but apparently, Ubisoft didn’t want three AAA bombs in a single year so that one has been pushed out to 2025.
But in this year of fail, one game had to fall harder than any of the others.
That game is Dustborn.
This game was funded by three different government grants. Norway, The EU, and the USA (yep your tax dollars at work). The purpose of Dustborn was to counteract Misinformation. Government-funded viewpoints are called propaganda, which is exactly what this game is.
The setup is that you are a punk band named, Dustborn. You’ve broken into a government facility and are trying to get from LA to Maine so you can cross into Nova Scotia the Land of the Free Healthcare.
They’ve stolen the personification of Misinformation represented in this game by a floating, Glow-in-the-dark sperm blob. Sorry, but that is exactly what it looks like. The blob can get into your head and once it does, well it can be extracted through superpowers which the members of Dustborn have but you probably won’t ever be right again because of the MISINFORMATION.
The members of this band are all awful. The leader is the worst, Pax; is an angry, pregnant, heavily tatted-out black woman. She has the power to use language as a weapon. Sai, is a sex-obsessed hyper-obese woman with vitiligo (I have no idea how that became a symbol of oppression but it is now). She is technically an observant Muslim who prays a lot during the game. She asks if a hotdog is Halal, it’s a turkey dog so yes, but then the rest of the Crew make dick-sucking jokes at her expense because she can’t stop doing that which I thought was Harem.
There’s a female-to-male non-binary trans albino (I think) with a prosthetic arm.
And Mexican Hasan Piker (or at least how the left likes to think of that twat). He’s the closest thing to a good person in this game and is constantly treated like shit by the rest of the Crew because of it.
Pax is just absolutely evil, everything she does is demonstrably horrible. One of her powers is Trigger, she uses it to get the cops to kill each other for insufficient racial sensitivity.
Another power of hers is Cancel. When a redheaded woman named Fred points out to a crowd that Pax’s mother is a cult leader who grows Opium to support it, Pax uses Cancel to turn the crowd she’s speaking to against her.
Another power is Bully, she can make people do stuff they don’t want to and feel bad about themselves.
She can also Normalize. Making people think that something they find utterly repugnant and morally abhorrent is perfectly normal and nothing to object to
Both of Pax’’s parents were lesbians, no father at all. Oh, and one of her mother’s is named Rosa. Just let that sink in a minute, then the cringe will hit you.
Look, I know you think this is a parody game put together by 4Chan but I swear to you the devs are in deadly earnest.
The game was made with the Unity engine with their own shaders to give it a comic book look. Yeah, the story does feel like it’s something current-year DC would come up with.
In this year of the worst games ever, this one stands out for its complete and total moral depravity. It truthfully isn’t really a game since most of your actions are on rails, the game will simply stop until you take the one action it’s offering you, making it more of an interactive movie. So does it at least succeed as a story? Hell no. It’s bloated, ponderous, and far too in love with its own cleverness. And it’s opinions were approved of and paid for by three governments including that of the United States of America.
It started life after the 2016 election. That’s right it was in diapers for eight years. I suspect that the Norwegian devs (note they aren’t complaining about their own problems) kept this one in development because it was keeping them on the gravy train. Then it ran out of gravy and they had to ship it.
Not that there was a lot of point in doing that, at its peak player count on Steam was 86, as of this writing there are FOUR players on it.
This is one of those extremely rare games where the gaming critics were literally the majority of its playerbase. I know there’s two and a half months to go but I’m calling it now.
Dustborn is the worst game of 2024.
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