Dust: An Elysian Tail

By: Derek Yu

On: August 17th, 2012

Dean Dodrill’s beautiful brawler Dust: An Elysian Tail was released this week on Xbox Live Arcade. In development for four years, Dust was the winner of the 2009 Dream.Build.Play competition. Impressively, Dean (a professional animator) is responsible for almost all of the animation and programming for the game. The soundtrack was created by Hyperduck SoundWorks, who also did the OST for Iji.

Posted in Action, Fighters, Xbox 360 | Tags: DeanDodrill, HyperduckSoundWorks

Abcdefghijk

This game look gorgeous, but by watching the trailer i’m worried about its gameplay; they are showing very little of it and that is usually for a reason. And btw, Dean Dorill is the guy behind Jazz Jackrabbit animations. :)
Tatsu

I’m rather impressed by every aspect of this game; it’s not just nice to look at, but I can tell each aspect of its design is very well thought-out.

Some things that stood out to me:
-Combat can certainly be hectic, but the available move set makes me capable enough so it never feels as though the enemies are getting in cheap-shots.
-All characters have a lot of personality, which helps to make quests enjoyable.
-Solid level design makes exploration fun and keeps needless backtracking to a minimum.
-I was surprised by how easy it is to tell interactive platforms from background objects (which is a problem games of this style usually face).
-The material cataloging system is a novel way to provide item crafting without the need for mindless grinding.

I knew from the trailers that it would be pretty, but I really didn’t expect it to play so dang well. I’m normally pretty critical of games I play these days (I thought Muramasa had some huge design flaws). I’m currently about 5 hours in and I’ve enjoyed every minute so far.
gamecreator

It’s ridiculously cliche heavy but even though I don’t care for anime, I’ve gotta say the art and animations look pretty good.
guest

We didn’t watch the same video, did we?
Moczan

Any info about PC release?
News

GREASY FUR DEBAUCHERY
Anonymous

InB4 moaning about furries!

This looks gorgeous. I’ll add it to my queue and probably get to it in, like, 8-10 years. :-/
Jenna

Ah, I remember the times when all these games were always out on the ol’ pcs.. How many fucking xbla exclusives did we miss (not talking about this game)?

At least we’re getting castle crashers after ONLY 4 YEARS.
Davide Costa

Not any XBLA game get a PC/PSN release, like Shadow Complex (which I’m still angry about a lack of PC version).
Snow

Very nice. Even if you’re not a fan of furry art, this game is still very well done and beautiful. I love how they use animated cut scenes and dialogue for certain functions. Much excellence.
Alexei Baboulevitch

If you have an Xbox, try the demo on XBLA. It’s really quite good and I’ll definitely be buying this when I have some free time.
http://twitter.com/mcozma Mihai Cozma

Bandwidth limit exceeded. I like to see that for my website when my game comes out :P. Good job!
http://hyperduck.co.uk Chris Geehan

Hey guys, Dean apologises for the site being down, I don’t think we expected this type of reaction to the game, we’ve been face to face with it that long we kinda forgot to think how other people would react, to an extent! I recommend you follow the facebook page instead since we don’t know when the site will be back up at the moment, which is
https://www.facebook.com/DustAnElysianTail

Thanks for the kind words, really re-assuring to see the TIGSource community approving of so many aspects of this game. We also did the sound design behind it as well, and we had another guy direct the voices called Deven Mac, so it was a pretty tiny team. Anyway, no more rambling from me, thanks for the love! Hugs.

Chris.
jo

The fact that this game (and konjak’s Iconoclasts) didn’t even get an honourable mention for visuals in last year’s IGF is disgusting, especially considering what games did instead.
Bob

The good: the artwork is amazing and the gameplay is smooth. The bad: Lots of juvinile humor is really, really grating. (Ex: Dialogue for quests where a character with poorly voiced cornpone hillbillie accent tells you to “Get me my hittin stick! I need mah hittin stick fer hittin monsters!” Or ‘crazy’ character demands death to all toothbrushes..)

Overall the game is incredible, I just skip a lot of the dialogue and the story is really pretty bad.
BelugaBeacon

Is that Jenna Sharpe doing part of the voiceover?