Dustborn, the story-driven action adventure game from developer Red Thread Games announced in June, will be published by Quantic Dream, the company announced. It is planned for release on consoles and PC via Steam in 2021.
“Quantic Dream shares our passion and love for great narratives and interactive storytelling,” said Read Thread Games creative director Ragnar Tornquist in a press release. “It was vitally important for us to only work with someone who truly understood and appreciated our vision for this game, and we couldn’t have asked for a better partner to help us bring Dustborn to players around the world.”
Quantic Dream CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere added, “We are very excited to work with the team at Red Thread Games on this beautiful project. From the very beginning, we were captivated by Dustborn‘s ambition, its visual and gameplay originality, its colorful characters and the themes it addresses. Our goal as a publisher is to enable Red Thread Games to express their vision in the best way and then share it with as many people as possible. Quantic Dream will provide Red Thread Games with its own technical and editorial resources.”
Here is an overview of the game, via its Steam page:
There is no hope.
Dustborn is a third-person, single-player, story-driven, road-tripping action-adventure about hope, love, friendship, robots—and the power of words.
Set in a vibrant and perilous post-infodemic America inspired by graphic novels, a band of misfits and outcasts must cross a divided continent to transport a mysterious package from California to Nova Scotia.
Welcome to the divided states of America.
The year is 2030, three decades after the Broadcast.
You play Pax: ex-con, outcast, con-artist, and Anomal with superhuman powers fueled by disinformation. Your job: to transport a package across a divided America. But this is not a one-woman job. The fanatical Puritans are on your ass, the authoritarian Justice is in your way, and you’re four-months pregnant. You need help. You need a crew.
Joined by a motley mob of misfits with their own weird powers, you must overcome the many obstacles that stand in your way—through manipulation, subterfuge, and force—to reach your final destination and escape your troubled past.
You just can’t without your crew.
Recruit and manage a band of outcasts and misfits with weird powers, compelling personal stories, and conflicting personalities. Manage your headstrong crew through words and actions, and use their powers to fight your pursuers and overcome obstacles along the road, as you stand united in the face of overwhelming adversity.
A road trip across a divided continent.
Take a road trip across the continent, from the Corporate Republic of Pacifica to the Free Nation of Nova Scotia. Explore new places, take on unexpected assignments, and recruit new crew members. See the beautiful sights along the highway, rendered in a colorful graphic-novel-inspired art style, as you traverse an America irrevocably changed by civil war, mass migration, and global warming.
Wield weaponized words against enemies and friends.
Words have power. Like, actual power. Fight your pursuers with weaponized words, and use wordcraft in conversations to manipulate people with the power of disinformation. Discover, record and remix arcane Echoes to craft new words, and learn to wield a lingual arsenal against enemies…and friends.
Additional Features
- From the crew that brought you story-driven adventure Dreamfall Chapters and fjord noir mystery Draugen, and the creative team behind The Longest Journey and The Secret World.
- Explore pit-stops across America, from a former government re-education camp in the Oregon wilderness, to a decommissioned school for gifted children in Nevada; from an abandoned Utah mall to the derelict robot factories of Detroit—and through the mysterious Great Plains Exclusion Zone, where strange experiments take place in the ashes of the Broadcast.
- Converse with your crew and other characters along the road through a dynamic and emotionally reactive branching conversation system, where your choices shape relationships.
- Travel undercover as a folk-punk-rock band, and maintain your disguise by learning to play a set of original songs around the campfire…before proving yourself in an epic Battle of the Bands!
- A vibrant and original dystopian vision of the near future, with a colorful and mature graphic novel look by art director Christoffer Grav (Dreamfall Chapters, Draugen), written by Ragnar Tornquist (The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, The Secret World, Draugen), and featuring an original 80s-inspired electronic score by award-winning composer Simon Poole (Dreamfall Chapters, The Secret World, Draugen, Moons of Madness).
Watch a teaser trailer below.