Oh geez, where do we even begin? Duskers is a horror game about making the best of a hopeless situation in the nearly empty void of space, so naturally there are a lot of disturbing things that will haunt you as you play.
- For starters, you're the last living breathing human in the UNIVERSE, which can also border on Tear Jerker (Assuming you're even human to begin with). Something destroyed everyone else and left behind a vast sea of ruined ships and space stations. You're almost out of fuel to keep the ship running, and no one's answering your distress call. No one's out there to help you. No one's coming to save you, and aside from a few dogs, everything out there that somehow survived the apocalypse wants you and your drone companions DEAD.
- There's not a single planet in the entire game for you to land on, meaning there's no hope of finding safe harbor or establishing a reliable home base. The game doesn't even bother asking the question as to why there's no planets, which begs the question: what happened to them all?
- The game's interface oozes with paranoia comparable to 1979's Alien. Your only view of the outside world is through a computer monitor, through which you command your drone teams to explore the ruins of the universe. The vector graphic-style visuals combined with the abandoned darkness of the derelicts' halls and the game's eerie sound design and you've got a recipe for constant paranoia of your surroundings, especially if you enter a derelict with an infestation count that isn't '0'. The fact that you can only see the parts of the map that the drones see doesn't help matters.
- Wandering into a room with an inconclusive scan, only to have your drone instantly destroyed by something from out of your field of vision. No warnings besides a beep and a red square before the drone's video feed cuts out. Made even worse if your drone's video feed is decaying to the point where you can't see what's happening until it's too late.
- That, or an asteroid comes out of nowhere and blows open part of the map, threatening to irradiate your helpless drones before sucking them through the breach should a door be jammed open by the impact.
- Duskers' enemies might be simple in design, but the game's isolated, seemingly claustrophobic nature makes running into them all the more terrifying as you desperately try to save your drones from certain doom. Let's go down the list, shall we?
- Security Drones are malfunctioning automatons that quietly patrol the derelicts. While they have the same drawback as your drones (limited field of view and vulnerability to radiation), once they find a drone they'll hunt it relentlessly. Why malfunctioning? Because they don't attack other enemies, though this may even hint that they've been reprogrammed by someone... or something if the singularity plotline is anything to go by.
- Leapers are alien creatures capable of leaping across a room to attack your drones, made only worse by their ability to deal massive amounts of damage that can easily one-shot weaker drones. One leaper attack on your drones, especially if you don't have a turret to defend them with, can easily end your entire run in the blink of an eye. Oh, and despite them being organic, they're immune to radiation, so you can't lure them to a busted pipe or irradiated room to do them in.
- Swarms are the game's Demonic spiders. See 'Demonic Spiders' for more info.
- Slimes may be related to the 'Grey Goo' plot line, and their behavior only reinforces the theory. They start small, but they gradually self-replicate to hunt down your drones. Maybe you can stop them and make them recede temporarily with a sonic emitter, but once you turn it off... the slime is back within seconds. Also, you can't spot slime with the motion tracker since it's not a mobile entity, and unlike the other threats, it can appear anywhere outside your boarding craft (even in closed, ventless rooms) with no warning... a nasty surprise for a generator drone that you're not paying attention to. Finally, because slime reproduces constantly, it can quickly outpace your supply of bullets, mines, and traps, leaving you stuck with it blocking entire areas of the map.
- Even the derelicts themselves are practically out to get your drones. Older derelicts are more unstable, meaning they'll be even more prone to damage and malfunctions ranging from no longer accepting commands to operate doors to having their airlocks fail, sucking everything out of a room and filling it with deadly radiation. As such, you'll be on edge as you listen for the sounds of failing metal coming through the drones' microphones.
- Some of the storylines you can follow each produce their own grade of nightmare fuel:
- Pandemic: Some kind of supervirus ran loose and seemingly infected innumerable humans without any sign of how it got transmitted. Not even the genius of Dr. Holmes could figure out how to stop it, and eventually the trail goes dark. The game does hint that the leapers and dogs carry the virus, which only makes things worse for you. Did you risk infecting yourself when you brought back that dog?
- Grey Goo: Human nanotechnology seemingly went rogue and consumed everything around it that wasn't what became the derelicts. Logs hint that the systems were malfunctioning, which may reinforce the possibility, and could explain the presence of slime enemies and the absence of corpses on the derelicts (save for the ones created during a mission).
- Super Predator: Something more advanced and very vicious might have destroyed humanity, and was dangerous enough that the military used a superweapon to try and stop it. This could hint at said superweapon being turned on humanity, but could also explain the fact that the player never finds any aliens beyond the leapers. Whatever this Super Predator really was, it was enough to make the military's General Nomak afraid.
- This theory opens another can of worms, however. Are the leapers some kind of stray war dogs for a Super Predator civilization that has already annihilated humanity?
- Cosmic Event: Something big and unknowable happened and wiped everyone out system by system. Whether that be a mere cosmic fluke (like a massive gamma ray burst) or something more Lovecraftian, the game never answers the question.
- Singularity: An AI got too smart and went rogue, killing off humanity. If there's any explanation for the security drones all going after just your drones, this might be it. In short, there's an AI hiding out there with enough broadcast power to hack every security drone in the universe to come after your drones as you venture through the derelicts. Combined with the Super Predator and Grey Goo theories and it might explain why security drones ignore other enemies.
- Or even all of the above. Maybe the reason you never confirm any of the above theories (over the others) is because they're all true, making a perfect storm of super-threats that combined to end humanity in one short moment.
- The whole plot of the game can essentially be nightmare fuel for anyone worried about what the future could hold, even after we reach beyond our own solar system. Will we end up wiped out by something we don't understand and have our legacy reduced to malfunctioning machines and floating ruins plagued by hostile extraterrestrial creatures hiding in the dark? Sweet dreams.
