Dustborn is about many things. It’s about an undercover punk band's cross-country smuggling operation in a near-future Divided States of America. It’s about the power of words and the danger of misinformation. And it’s very much about Pax, a misfit played by actress Dominique Tipper from The Expanse. Pax is lead singer of the titular band The Dustborn. She's also an Anomal, meaning her words pack as much force as her baseball bat. She and her friends are on the run, trying to avoid both the cult-like Puritans and the oppressive authoritarian police state, Justice.

According to Director Ragnar Tørnquist, when Red Thread Games began development of Dustborn, it was just meant to be about a road trip—a simple A to B setup, designed to impose a linear structure and keep the scope manageable after the studio finished its ambitious first game, Dreamfall Chapters.

It didn’t work. Dustborn got complicated.
 

Endless horizons

Tørnquist is on his own road trip when we speak. He's impressively relaxed for a developer releasing a game in less than a month. Tørnquist is used to it after nearly 30 years in the business, and Red Thread's push for work-life balance means the whole studio closes over summer.

Two weeks into a month-long tour across South Africa with his family (not Tørnquist's first such trip, definitely not his last), he says what draws him to the road isn’t what you see, but what you don’t—that sense of awe at the vast, yawning emptiness all around. He hopes Dustborn inspires that very feeling.

“I love that sense of isolation, the open landscapes and seeing the horizon on all sides,” says Tørnquist, noting the contrast with his travels closer to home. “Coming from Norway…if you go to the ocean, you see the horizon. But everywhere else—it's beautiful, but there's no horizon. Everything is tiny, winding roads and steep mountains and forests.”

He found that isolation in the United States, trekking across the Grand Canyon or driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, as well as in his many trips across Africa.
For Tørnquist, the romance of North America's desert landscapes made it the obvious choice for a game about a touring punk band and a perfect fit for the vibrant comic book aesthetic that colors every inch of Dustborn. And its reputation as a cultural melting pot made it a perfect setting for characters of different backgrounds and identities.

“Dustborn is made from a thousand little things. A thousand little emotions bring reality to a game that's quite heightened in a lot of other ways,” says Tørnquist. His affection for the freedom of road trips, liberated from the tyranny of flight or train schedules, is but one of the countless fragments of himself and his team’s experiences that give life to Dustborn.

You may share some of them. Practically everyone has their own road trip stories. Who could forget the hair-raising feeling of being trapped in the car as an argument slowly builds? Or the magic of a night spent outdoors, no sounds but the wind and a strumming guitar?

Although Tørnquist sits in the driver's seat at Red Thread Games, he wants the entire team to leave their mark. The music played by The Dustborn is no exception. They could have chosen bluegrass over punk, but washboards and twanging banjos didn’t fit composer Simon Poole’s style. Likewise, snarling hardcore didn’t suit Dominique Tipper's voice, and Tørnquist’s lyrics could easily have been lost with a heavier style. They settled on melodic pop-punk, the best showcase for everyone's skills.

This collaborative approach adds real-life texture to Dustborn's outlandish dystopia, providing moments of relative calm and quiet. Where Baldur’s Gate 3 has its camps, Dustborn has the pit stop. These interludes let Pax and her band of misfits gather round the campfire to rest, bond over deep conversations, and play (or even compose) new songs through rhythm-action sequences. Or just bicker, tired from another long day’s drive.
 

Words will tear you apart

Words have always had power. Having written games for 25 years now, they’ve always been Tørnquist’s weapon of choice. “I wield the pen, not a sword,” he says—and then pauses. “Or I wield the keyboard, I guess.”

In the age of social media and increasingly polarized political campaigns, Tørnquist and others at Red Thread feel words have been weaponized more than before. But what if they were really weapons? “If words have this immense power…what if they had actual power? What if that power could be manifested into the real world?”

Pax is an Anomal, whose words possess powers Tørnquist’s keyboard could only imagine. Pax's linguistic powers are used, both in conversation and battle, for negative ends—pushing with forceful shouts, bullying with aggressive yells. Comic book-style lettering appears with every use, and Tørnquist acknowledges a debt to Garth Ennis’s comic series Preacher, whose protagonist Jesse Custer commands obedience with his divine (and profane) Word of God.

Not all Anomals are like this. Sai can create a shield in a wonderfully literal demonstration of positive self-talk. Pax’s sister Ziggy can hype herself up to impossible speeds. And Pax’s ex-partner Noam’s power is best described as gaslighting.

“When you say gaslighting that's immediately negative, right?" says Tørnquist. "Of course it is. But Noam uses it to calm things down, to make people escape conflict. And I think that's an interesting question. Is that ok? Or is that a violation? Those conversations are had in the game.”

Unlike Noam, Tørnquist won’t tell others what to think. “We leave it up to the player to make that call for themselves.”

Red Thread Games wants players to see that what they say matters in Pax’s journey across America. “It's not subtle, let's put it that way,” admits Tørnquist.
 

Them’s fighting words

Tørnquist made his name at Funcom in the '90s and '00s as writer and Lead Designer for the adventure games The Longest Journey and its sequel Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, before working on urban-fantasy MMO The Secret World.

Asked about his shift from puzzles to action in Dustborn, Tørnquist says “Honestly, I think looking back, the puzzles were often some of the weakest parts of The Longest Journey and a lot of adventure games at that time.”

Dustborn might have combat and might feature a spunky band with in-your-face attitude, a departure from The Longest Journey’s ethereal and contemplative mood. But even so, Dustborn isn’t a radical shift from Tørnquist's work in the '90s. The emphasis on point-and-click puzzles is gone, but Dustborn is still a genre-bending narrative game, grounded in character relationships and conversations, dealing with challenging spiritual themes and big ideas.

Dustborn wouldn’t have combat if it didn’t fit with its fraught and conflict-based story, full of dangerous factions. Having previously worked with Red Thread Games’ Lead Designer Martin Brisard on The Secret World (a naturally combat-heavy MMO), the team wasn’t new to combat, but they were new to this specific type.

In keeping with their retro-futuristic and comic-inspired look, Dustborn needed to feel different. Out of time. Red Thread's reference points weren’t Dark Souls or God of War, but the pick-up-and-play brawlers of bygone years: Streets of Rage and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Tørnquist was surprised by the difficulties presented by arcade-like combat. “I think making a more complex, more strategic combat system may be... I'm not going to say easy. It's never easy. But it might be something that’s easier to design. A brawler is all about the moment-to-moment feel. Every single thing has to feel right. It has to feel responsive. That was a huge challenge.”

Dustborn's first combat system relied on word-based combat—but it was overwhelming. Players couldn’t quite grasp what they should do. It was hard to understand enemy dialogue and choose their own responses while managing the usual demands of positioning and timing.

The now-simplified combat system is the result of seven iterations. AI companions pull their weight rather than frustrate—and can even carry players on lower difficulties. Various upgrade paths for Pax’s magnetic bat add fun mechanics but avoid adding too much complexity.

It was a long road to Dustborn, but they're almost to their destination. Now Red Thread Games can sit back and watch others hit the road instead. Players will come away from Dustborn knowing words have power. Hopefully they've also learned to use them wisely.

Dustborn is available now on the Epic Games Store.