Duskpunk is a dice-based RPG putting you in a world where misery roams the streets of the city of Dredgeport, thanks to a combination of a seemingly never-ending war, criminal gangs, and the sway of the most powerful including the Emperor. You are a nobody who somehow escaped the butchery of the Front, but need to find your footing in a city where luck is thin and where relationships can turn sour quickly.
You have a choice of four classes in Duskpunk – Veteran, Writer, Criminal and Engineer – each of which has different starting stats. The veteran is a solid pick if you want to fight your way out of situations, with the disadvantage of not having the charisma or intuitiveness to find other solutions. The criminal class is for those who want to sneak around and use intuition. Engineers can construct workarounds for problems but are useless in a fight, while writers use their words to win arguments and bring people round. As you progress through Duskpunk you will earn ability points by completing tasks to up each skill, so can raise all of the stats to deal with most situations, as well as earning additional abilities.
Duskpunk’s gameplay is similar to Citizen Sleeper, but with different issues to keep track of and worry about. Groat, the game currency that you use, is a big one as it will determine if you can buy food, shelter, and drugs to deal with stress. Groats go as quickly as they come, so you won’t ever feel financially comfortable. Stress can be raised by pushing beyond your character’s limits and through nightmares. As the stress meter builds, dice faces break, meaning your rolls as less likely to give you good outcomes. Initially, the only way to reduce stress is to take a drug which is expensive and hard to acquire, but as you explore more of Dredgeport different ways to reduce stress open up including meditation and talking to others. A wanted level can also appear depending on your actions, so you have to figure out ways to evade the authorities before they catch you. Health is another attribute to watch and if it reaches zero then a skill becomes broken. These skills can be fixed by recuperating, but that costs time and Duskpunk is a game where time matters a lot.
You will find yourself mixing with different factions through Dredgeport, each with their own goals, from controlling the drug business, unionising, all the way to toppling the government. As you become familiar with these groups you will be given aims, aka missions, to undertake which can vary wildly from handing out pamphlets to digging up corpses. A majority of the aims are time sensitive and it doesn’t seem possible to complete them all, so you need to decide which factions appeal to your character more.
The representatives of each of these factions, such as Zai of the Machinists and Dresden of the Lich Dealers, are decently written but, for me, did not quite have the depth to pull me in to build a real connection with them. There are some powerful groups in Duskpunk, but the decisions you make are what really impacts the wider world, even through inaction or not completing an aim. While there are a number of choices to make, there are only a few real endings that your actions can lead to. It offers some replayability, but also shows that some actions you take will not have an overbearing impact on the final outcome, though they can impact the fate of individual characters.
A bit more of the world treating you as a just one person where events happen without your involvement would have been good too, making Dredgeport feel more like a real city that moves around you and not because of you. The story is pretty engaging and does explore a number of themes including workers rights, the balance of power in society, isolation, segregation, and survival. Again it is not the most in-depth look at these themes, but Duskpunk does provide an accessible way to learn about these issues and tie them to our own experiences.
For much of Duskpunk, you will either be looking at a map of Dredgeport to pick locations to visit, or reading the conversations you have with the different characters to advance the game. I like the user interface of Duskpunk, finding it easy to navigate and understand. You have the map, the aim journal, and an inventory to show what you are carrying. Aside from groats, you can also trade rumours, tip-offs, and rare goods for money or influence. The characters are nicely drawn too with each one having a really distinctive look, while the map has small details like birds flying around, the flow of the river, and smoke rising from the factories. A lot of work has gone into making the world seem alive, even if it is a map.
