All is Dust Review

After hitting the stores recently, Mannequin Games debut exclusively on Steam with their first game, All is Dust, a free horror title that showcases what they’re capable of.   

All is Dust is set during The Dust Bowl; a period of time in the 1930’s where America is ‘under attack’ by a wave of dust storms that greatly damaged agriculture and ecology. You are on a farm that has come under the Dust Storm and upon trying to find your daughter, Patricia, it is clear that something else in lurking within the flurry of dust.

The game follows the basic Slender mechanic; run around, find paper, avoid monsters, in turn, monsters get more monster-y the more paper you find. It has two very distinct differences from Slender though.

The first is that there’s more than one monster. Whilst they all do the same thing; more appear as you collect more paper. This can get extremely hectic, especially towards the end of the game where it is almost impossible to keep up with all of them, which leads me onto my second point.

In Slender, the whole point is to not look at him. All is Dust takes a page of of SCP-173’s book and instead makes you look at the creatures to stop them from moving. As I said before, when there’s about 15-20 creatures all roaming the farm, this gets nearly impossible to fully keep watch of, adding quite a lot to the challenge of the game.

As for horror… eh? Whilst the music does a decent job at putting you on edge, the game itself falls short quick. It’s scary at first, but after you have to glare at them intensely for half an hour, the only time you ever really jump is when one of the buggers magically appears behind you and screams in your ear before just vanishing.

Oh yeah, it’s very difficult to actually die. It takes a lot of hits from monsters before you actually die from them and I found myself succumbing to an annoying stationary Fire Pit more times than the 15 moving monsters.

Overall, All is Dust is a great way to kill half an hour if you're looking for a quick way to pass time. If you’re willing to spare money, there are plenty of better horror games out there to choose from. But it’s free so you can’t complain too much.