>>14690452
A lot of the art, most of the writing, voice-acting were trash, and the balance and progression were trash. I'm not even sure if the story was trash, because I don't remember anything except edge, deviantAutism and the details being horrible. Might just be the storytelling.
The design (in the broadest strokes) and the music were breddy damned gud. Level design occasionally had some issues, but on the whole breddy gud, too.
The gameplay's the biggest thing it has going for it, due to how fluid and/or broken it could be. You can preserve momentum on most of your moves, and utilizing the way your attacks can change or add to your velocity allows you to just jump past the bad parts of the game in rather literal way. If you don't feel like backtracking later to get some piece of shit collectible, you can abuse the movement. Do some weird shit with an enemy in the right place to get sent flying in the air and float with aerial attacks. Maybe you have to lead an enemy around and fly right into an "exit-only" kind of opening to make it work. Outside of the more complex tech, it's smooth, pretty effortless and extremely quick. If you really want to get somewhere, you can slowly but surely gain height with some fiddly air movement, but you generally don't need to do that.
Secrets hidden in a place with climbable walls but you get the powerup later, with spikes everywhere to force you into it?
Fuck you, I'm flying up there anyway and abusing the few hits I can take from spikes to get up there.
Oh, I need magical trash to open successive doors in a secret?
Fuck you, I'm going to fly up there.
Long round trip section with a rock wall that needs to be blown up with a timed floating bomb from the other side?
Fuck you, just enough time to get a different bomb there in time if you do some crazy movement.
Sequence breaking? Fuck yeah, sequence breaking.
Combat turning into a grind? Fuck you, I'm flying over entire screens because I just want to get done with this game already.
Also, these instances don't feel like the Super Metroid type of clever design. There you can tell that some thought went into making some unorthodox exploration possible, while some other options or exotic techniques were complete oversights.
In Dust, these all feel like oversights. It doesn't feel as thought-out, polished or even stable when you do things the wrong way. It's not hard to fall out of bounds, get yourself completely stuck or just break the entire game by pushing your luck.
8/10 it's okay.
Noogy's a weird fucker, but the game got some things right. Somehow he got Alexander Brandon on the music, so that's a plus.