Duskers is just a little too dim.

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.

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.

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.