I’ve given open world survival games a red-hot go in the past. I’ve played Funcom’s own previous effort in the genre, Conan Exiles, and gave it every chance to impress me. I’ve yet to find one that has left me with an impression other than that this is just a horrible genre that is fundamentally at odds with any type of game that might want to tell a story. With that being said, Dune: Awakening somehow – albeit grudgingly – has won me over.
Dune: Awakening is better than Conan, and indeed it’s the best of the survival games I’ve played. During the early access period, feedback from fans led Funcom to pivot towards a game with a single-player experience meaty enough that you never need to touch the online play if you’re not a fan of that. That was the right decision because Dune is right up there with the sombre fantasy stories, and real people have a habit of disrupting efforts to put atmosphere in games.
And so the console release – the PlayStation 5 version I tested – debuted with the single-player mode option, and that is what I played. In Dune: Awakening, you get to step into the shoes of a prisoner who is rescued, after a fashion, by a mysterious person named Zantara, and then has to forge their way across the dismal, brutal, hostile world of Arrakis. Eventually they’ll get all the bikes and ornithopters and other bits of equipment that you need to explore deeper into the world, while learning more about who you are and your role in the fates of the handful of non-hostiles that you encounter along the way. However, grand political narrative of mass-scale, clandestine operations Awakening is not.
The concept’s on point in one respect. Any story set on Arrakis needs to make it clear that simple survival will be a reward in its own right and, particularly in those early hours as you scrape together enough to build a primitive shelter, run from sand worms, and try to get the jump on scavenger bases for both their materials and blood (which you can turn into water using machinery), Dune: Awakening does make Frank Herbert’s magnificent prose about his most famous character – sorry, planet – real and immediate before you.
Yet there are also red flags right from the outsef. There’s no Paul Atreides, for a start. He’s never even born because Lady Jessica gives birth to a daughter. The game was developed in collaboration with Legendary Pictures and the Herbert estate, we’re told, and the details are there in terms of the set dressing, the lore around how technology works, and the general goals of each faction. But if they’re contriving an alternative timeline that just overlooks anything in the narrative that’s inconvenient to the construction of a video game, is it really, truly Dune? I’d argue not. What made Herbert’s work a classic was the way it dealt with religion, political ideology and the parallels between the conflicts of Dune and real-world tensions, and all of that is overlooked in this video game because a video game narrative needs to weigh towards connecting with gameplay systems, rather than dealing with deeper themes and philosophy.
And boy does Dune: Awakening love throwing systems at you. There’s a monumentally large skill tree, giving you the ability to craft dozens upon dozens of different pieces of equipment or elements to deck your base out with. Of course, building all that stuff requires a massive quantity of supplies, and so soon enough you’re dedicating a great chunk of time to breaking up rocks and metal sheets to get the raw materials held within. All the while you’re heading back to your base where the best crafting equipment is, trying to avoid your character getting heatstroke, and keeping up with hydration. And avoiding the damn worm.
It’s busywork, basically, and it’s rote. Craft X because it lets you unlock Y, which you can craft and then unlock Z. Build bigger shelters, build more of them, make them prettier. Get more resources. Grind, grind, grind. I know that at a fundamental level this is just a less-abstract version of “numbers go up” progression that we see in traditional RPGs – that all the stuff you’re collecting and manufacturing is replacing the level-ups and statistics – but perception is everything, and while I always have all the time in the world for RPGs, I do typically find this exhausting.
If you can separate yourself from the liberties taken with Dune, I have to acknowledge that survival gameplay is on point for Dune. You’re always going to feel like you’re scrambling just to eke out existence in this enormously hostile world, and yet for a world of sand and rock and very little else, Awakening’s Arrakis is breathtaking in its magnificence. You’ll find yourself dashing between shadows during the day to avoid the effects of the blistering sunlight. You’ll be racing to get everything you need to done and back to a shelter (making sure it’s properly powered) before a sandstorm hits, and carefully scouting out scavenger lairs for the scraps that pass for treasure in the world. As you progress, that sense of scrappiness does ease a little because, assuming you play well, you’ll have various stockpiles to rely on, and Awakening is at its best and most pure as a Dune experience in the early game, but you do never quite forget that you’re in a difficult environment as you play.
Ultimately I did find myself enjoying the gameplay, despite myself. Combat is simple but feels like you’re making do with weapons and armour you’re slapping together with what you’ve got. As much as I don’t enjoy building stuff in survival games, this one’s building system makes the experience of snapping together pieces and laying out the shelter so easy that I found myself playing around with it more than I normally would. The plot, as much as it annoyed me for never fully engaging with Dune’s philosophy, also rolls on with decent pacing and, in fairness to it, it provides just enough of a break from the grind of collecting stuff, and there were times when Awakening felt more like an RPG than a survival game. So I appreciated that much about it.
So insofar as I’m ever going to spend time playing survival games, Dune: Awakening will be my go-to. I acknowledge that I’m a purist as far as Dune goes, and I was never going to get along with an “alternate timeline” that largely misses the point of what Herbert was saying with his novel, but once I get past that resistance and my inherent distaste for the formula of survival games, I actually found myself enjoying this one. It’s like the rare time I find an FPS that I actually like, and that’s actually kind of impressive.
