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A weirdly upbeat game about space murders - Dubium Quick First impressions

3K View2023-06-19

DUBIUM

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Skip it for now, unless you’re very excited about social deduction games and the goofy sci-fi aesthetics work better for you than they do for me. Dubium has a lot of good things going for it, but the theme and visual style seemed totally at odds with the idea of scrambling to get a space station back online in order to destroy hazardous materials stored on board—while always looking over my shoulder for a fellow crew member waiting for the right moment to kill me.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played two hours of Dubium, which included about a half-dozen mission attempts. Each session was capped at twenty-five minutes, and in that time, my team of “Frontiers” and I had to reactivate a disabled space station’s oxygen system, get the power back on (optional, but a good idea), track down a set of keycards, and use those to retrieve the power cubes scattered around the station and destroy them. Some of these steps, like using keycards and repairing the oxygen system, had little minigames to complete (if you’ve played Among Us, you know the deal), while others simply involved watching a percentage meter climb to one hundred. A randomly selected Frontier was designated as a traitor, who could stealth-kill and otherwise waylay the team's progress. Missions ended when the Frontiers completed their mission and climbed aboard the escape shuttle, or when the traitor was able to collect enough keystones to fulfill their objective and leave everyone stranded...or of course, they could just kill off the rest of the crew.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Great premise. Dubium has a brisk pace and there was always something that needed doing during my runs. The station—there’s just the one map for now—has multiple levels and modules, so I often felt like I was running off on my own to do something critically important. That added to the tension any time I encountered another crewmember: Could they be the traitor? Why were they in this area with me? Were they going to try to kill me as soon as I tried to fix anything? Missions were over in twenty-five minutes at most, so I never felt like I was wasting a huge chunk of time, even when I ultimately failed.

• Neat characters. Each Frontier has their own personality, style, and special ability that gives them a way to figure out where other crewmembers are at any given time. The characters all have distinct looks and lively animations that give Dubium a kind of Pixar-meets-Solaris vibe.

• Communications. There are several options for communicating with teammates in Dubium, and the experience is customizable enough to suit most preferences. Voice chat is handled natively, and I preferred to use push-to-talk mode for proximity chat. However, there’s also an emote wheel that allowed me to send simple messages to teammates nearby and across the station, so I felt like I had options no matter what the situation was.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT

• Minigames. Some of the minigames for routine tasks aboard the station are fine, but most are pretty dull—but dull is better than nothing, which is what I got to do for several repeated tasks. Searching a dead body for a keycard and extending the solar arrays involved nothing more than watching a meter fill up and hoping that I wasn't killed from behind by the traitor.

• Dissonance. I’m not squeamish about video game violence, but there’s something genuinely off-putting about Dubium. The splash screen when I launched the game showed one character gasping for breath, her eyes wide in terror. When I pressed a button to advance to the menu, a large man grabbed the sides of her head from behind and started to twist. Then the bouncy soundtrack kicked in! I saw that every time I began a session. The whole game has this tension between seriously terrifying stuff like running out of oxygen in space and being stabbed by someone you thought was your friend, and an art style that looks more inspired by The Incredibles than The Expanse. I found it genuinely jarring, and it made me reluctant to play the game.

• Long queue times, poor bots. With the exception of early access launch day, it's taken me several minutes to get into a full squad of five players in Dubium. Occasionally I've seen bots used to fill in for missing crew slots, which is a bummer: the AI-controlled crewmembers obviously aren’t interesting companions and as far as I can tell, don’t even try to disrupt the mission when they’re pulled into the traitor role. Hopefully this will improve over time, but at the moment, it takes away from one of the things I really like about the game, which is its quick, in-and-out pacing.

💬 Will you be accepting Dubium’s dangerous space mission, or will you be staying put at mission control this time? Let me know in the comments!