Duskers

good

Very unique game, really isn't any like it. It's a mix between roguelike, puzzle, and a bit of horror. You interact with the environment through terminal commands that instruct your fleet of drones.

Game does get pretty tough - I haven't had runs last super long so far, though it's definitely possible to go for a long time. Can get a bit repetitive, but to some degree roguelikes are always.

Even with the disconnect of drones and a terminal, the game still does a phenomenal job building tension. Information is key in this game - often failure comes when you're not careful enough and go in without knowing what you're walking into. That, or your own stupidity (I've lost too many drones to turrets I've activated or out airlocks I though were sealed from me...)

Overall, I recommend it if it seems interesting to you.

If you enjoy being on ship duty in lethal company, PLAY THIS GAME.

Very fun. a little hard to learn but thats just because you have to familiarize yourself with the controls and it is very unique with how you interact or interface with the game. Definitely is worth playing and enjoying yourself struggle to type fast to avoid loosing drones. This is a game I will come back to and want to get good.

5D Multiverse Minesweeper with time travel ass game

I love this. I always run away when I see... Something...

more complicated minesweeper

Duskers is a uniquely believable approach to space exploration/horror using a minimalist presentation that is nearly text-only. I found the tension building and gameplay to both be excellent.

Duskers is just a little too dim.

Story

There's not a lot going on here, or at the very least there doesn't seem to be. Duskers puts players in the spacesuit of a lone human survivor drifting through the stars after all of humanity has mysteriously vanished. Armed with a small squad of large robotic drones, players are tasked with moving across space to explore randomized derelict ships, stations, and bases while sifting through any uncorrupted messages you can find to piece together just what has happened. Most messages are practically meaningless, and the majority of them don't actually tie into specific mission objectives in any particular way. The story effectively just has the player running through a few theories on the Fermi Paradox, but all of them seem to just end in "results inconclusive." Curiously, the game's fail state appears to be canon to the narrative, potentially implying this is all just a simulation, as losing the game allows you to reset with a basic ship and drones while keeping all of your story progress.

Gameplay

Duskers features an interesting style of top down dungeon crawling that is quite novel at first but unfortunately wears thin quite quickly. Players start off in space with a map of the nearby derelicts and star systems they can fly to. Your ship has a basic scrap bay, upgrade slots, and fuel tank; but you can actually clear out and commandeer other ships to replace the one your in, each with their own storage capacities and upgrade capabilites. As your ship's upgrades and even its slots can wear down over time, if you can't manage to keep them repaired, swapping ships is the next best thing. After choosing a derelict to explore, players are brought into a top down view of the layout while their drones await orders in the airlock. Drones can be controlled in one of two ways. You can select and directly control one, steering it along manually, or you can type out strings of orders. The later is more efficient in all actions except fine movement, and is actually the primary way you'll engage with the game. Typing in orders like "nav 1 r17" to send drone 1 to room 17 or "gat all" to direct your scrap gathering drone to snatch up everything it can find in the room it's in. Drones can be plugged in with a variety of upgrades like stealth fields, towing hooks, and even teleportation. And you'll need them too, because despite being the lone survivor, you are not alone. A very small (as in four) number of threats can be lurking behind each door and around every corner. Some fast and lethal, others slow and crawling. How you deal with or avoid them is up to you, but you'll also have to contend with random environmental threats such as incoming asteroids, failing airlocks, or door jams. Duskers' greatest strength is its novelty. Unfortunately it doesn't last particularly long, and the completely randomized nature of the game can make completing a simple task a hair pulling experience as you move from derelict to derelict just begging the game to give you the tool you need to complete the job. There's an interesting foundation for a deeper, more engaging game here, but as it stands, the game is rather lean and a bit buggy. By the third or fourth time you've had a shield completely fail to block incoming damage despite being active, you may feel compelled to just stop wasting your time when the random nature of the game is already doing that as well.

Presentation

Duskers presentation is exceedingly simple and not exactly "pretty" but it is unique and appropriate. For all intents and purposes, you're seeing exactly what your in game character would see while hunched over their navigation and drone control monitor; plotting a ship course or directing the squad through a dangerous maze. It's all very clean technical computer readouts and symbols representing walls or doors or drones or scrap. Switching to direct control of a drone will give you a very messy sort of advanced sonar view that the drone sees. Not so much the world as it is, but rather the shapes and angles that it is visually comprised of. Sound get repetitive pretty quickly, but it does the job, and there's no music to speak of. The game isn't going to win any graphics awards, but it's hard to imagine it looking any other way than it already does; for the sake of immersion.

lethal typos.

It's a zen garden for the geeky programmer addicted to horror and puzzles

spooky :0

pretty brilliant

If you're not fast at typing, you will be.

The game makes you think, within the first few ships of playing: "THIS IS SO EASY!!!!!!!!!!!!"
1 Hour later, next galaxy: "wait, radiation leak? Meteor METEOR!?!?!? NOW?
*explosion* OH GOD NO PLEASE LET ME OUT NO NO"

I first heard about this game in 2024, and damn, this game hasn't aged a day since 2016. The combination of map, camera, and command gameplay is really intuitive. Clearing out derelicts and expanding my resources is very satisfying and engaging. Whenever I get swarmed, attacked, or otherwise screwed over, it rarely feels like the game's fault. On top of that, the atmosphere is immaculate. There's a genuine feeling of fear and dread while exploring a derelict, especially on those first few runs. 10/10, highly recommended to any nerds looking for a fun and unique strategy game.

Make sure to play this game in a damp cold basement at night with all the lights off on a CRT screen with one of those old loud keyboards. Even if you don't go through all that effort, this game will make you feel like you're like that and it's amazing for it

disapointing.

No-one told me this was a horror game. I love that!

Good game is good.
Tension in this game is insane. I keep coming back months/years apart. I really need to sit down and digest this game sometime

drone

Your first runs will be glorius, then you'll get stomped by 10 robots and then it goes downhill from there

You play as skynet after the fall of humanity, travel from ship to ship and exterminate every biological lifeform and remnant of humanity left in the universe.

At least I think that's what the story was.

I named all my drones after movie robots and personal assistants 10/10

100% RECOMMEND

Always boss mode!

jimbob approved

Nice puzzles challenging you to think outside the box on managing threats. The aesthetic is exceptionally handled. Definitely recommend. Use of custom commands is highly recommended.

It´s fun, but difficult. Easy to learn, but hard to level up. Can play it all the time without getting tired.

It's being said that it gets monotonous. However, it never stops being entertaining. It's a gem that deserves to be tried, very unique, it's something special.

I really like this game.

It has that claustrophobic, creeping horror feel of the first Alien movie. It's fairly simple to understand the gameplay initially, but mastering it takes a good bit longer in terms of experimentation and refining tactics. It's been out for a long, long time now, but routinely still gets updates. It's stable as a rock - I've never experienced any bugs or crashes, and it's always been smooth to play even on lower-end hardware. AND IT SUPPORTS LINUX AND MAC -- thank you for that extra effort, devs!

The procedural nature of the galaxy creation for each run makes for a good bit of variety. And, I find myself getting attached to my little drones. The graphics are crisp and totally capture that Alien vibe, too. So absolutely, I recommend this game. The full price feels fair to me for what you get in the game.

And apparently the dev is tinkering with the possibility of Duskers 2 (WOOT!).

This is one of my favorite games. Equal parts frustrating and addictive. They hit the theme 100% on the head; I feel like I'm alone in the big dark of the Aliens movies. Very gritty, very real. At its heart it's a puzzle and programming game. You can move your little drones manually, but programming them to do their stuff is mandatory; there's even a meta batch file where you can create subroutines -- and you'll need 'em. I love that it's programming in 2 different ways: first, the straight-up coding of getting your little dudes to do what they do; second, the programming of utilizing all of their skills appropriately to survive. Tack on an awesome dark, lonely space theme and some very cool lore (which you discover as you go) and you've got a super fun game that I highly recommend!

Atmospheric. Tense. Just an awful feeling when you lose your favorite drone, balanced by the thrill of clearing a ship.

Masterpiece of a game.

Unique game - holds up today.

It has it's issues but it's definetly worth playing.

nice little game for cheap with a eery but not spooky athmosphere

Very unique idea but not worth full price, the actual game play can get boring long before you find the "whole story". It does require unique problem solving though (especially once you neglect to repair your motion upgrade...)!
Only issue is that the game play loop really doesn't change, its more of a delicate balance of balancing the durability of your mods to keep them from breaking lmao

A fun game.

Duskers manages to be a horror game without actually trying to be one. From the moment you dock your boarding party at one of the airlocks of a derelict ship or station you are faced with a degree of uncertainty.

What lies beyond the door? Will there be enough salvage to keep me going? Will all my drones make it back? These questions can sometimes be answered swiftly and violently. Despite, and perhaps even because of, the deliberately limited perspectives of the schematic screen, initially shrouded in the fog of war, and the grainy camera feeds from the drones (both of which can fail if not properly maintained) you are often placed in a position of anxiety as you try and make predictions based on the limited information available and choose a course of action.

Take your time, but not too long. Threats do not just come from hostile entities, but from the failing systems of a volatile wreck or the odd collision with an asteroid.

Maintain and customize your drones, or salvage new ones. Secure vessels that suit your needs, and commandeer them. Collect partially corrupted logs to unlock questlines and complete objectives to advance that particular storyline.

Be sure to wear your headphones and play in fullscreen for the best experience.

Highlights:
-A stylish, retro-futurist interface that relies exclusively on the keyboard.
-A massive universe, with a large variety of derelicts to explore and plunder.
-An understated narrative pieced together from recovered data.
-A mysterious setting that throws you into a universal graveyard where your only companions are your machines.
-Creative conflict resolution that relies on managing threats indirectly by powering and interfacing with derelict systems, and making use of a wide variety of drone parts from tow-cables to deployable-mines and even teleporter-modules.

I love this game. It's masterpiece of theme and verisimilitude in a unique text-based drone-controller space-horror rogue-like. Buy it. Play it. Enjoy it. It's a nice relatively simple palate cleanser to be played here and there. Strongly recommended.

Awesome game.

the base game is so good but their just isnt a late game the story doesnt get any big twists and the monsters dont get anymore dangerous at a certain point its like a demo a unfinished game play the game its REALLY fun but other then the base game their isnt much 7.5/10

Hope you don't have to log out in the middle of a run, you can't return to a ship and there is no saving in the middle of a ship run. That's just poor game design.

waged a meticulous genocide on the creatures hiding inside a derelict space barge. After savoring my victory, accidentally opened an airlock and lost half my drones - 10/10

This is a really awesome horror survival game that punches above its weight.

A very unique game with no equal, even still. Really captures the feeling of being alone in space with only your drones as a lifeline. The interface is lovably retro-atari looking until you look at your drones with the cameras and the graphics look modern. Has that creepy infested spaceship exploration vibe from the Alien universe. Soft of a puzzle game figuring out how to route enemies to different rooms, or avoid them, or kill them. Perfect example of a game that's easy to play, but hard to master. I never did survive long enough to figure out why everyone in the universe was dead. The game is challenging. Sometimes RNG just gives you bad options and you run out of fuel. Love that you can do pretty much everything with your keyboard. It helps to sell the idea that you are just a helpless hacker on a spaceship with only a keyboard and drones.

Why is this game not listed as a rogue-lite? I feel like that's important... because you will die. A lot.

10/10. Stay away from the vents.

This is the scariest game I have ever played, it gives me unparalleled anxiety and dread. I highly recommend you buy this masterpiece of horror.

Nice, immersive and creative console / "command line like" game.

fantastic, atmospheric game. great for laptops, needs minimal mouse input, played it a ton on road trips and plane rides.
there are some bugs and minor unpolished bits here and there but the overall experience is great.