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Introduction

Heaven Dust is an indie survivor horror inspired by the Resident Evil series.

Pros & Cons

Pros:
+ Interesting puzzles
+ Levels are fun to explore
+ Unique visual style
Cons:
- Lack of variety in enemies and guns
- Not much of a survival horror
- Very short (~2 hours)

Story

The plot is pretty straightforward. You wake up in a laboratory complex infested with zombies. As usual, your goal is to figure out what happened and what to do in order to save the world. The story is delivered by collectable notes. There aren’t many of them, and most of the time, they contain hints at puzzles. So while it is a cheap and boring way to deliver a story, it mostly works within this game and didn’t really bother me. There are also multiple endings, a couple of them are easy to find, while the other two are a bit more cryptic and require paying attention to what you read.

Gameplay

As mentioned earlier, the game draws inspiration from Resident Evil, specifically the first three games. Although there’s one distinction, instead of a fixed camera, you now have more of a top-down perspective. As for the core gameplay, it uses a similar combat system, where your character makes all the aiming for you and always fires at the target whenever you press a "shoot" button. Instead, it relies on puzzles to provide you with a challenge. Puzzles are interesting, although most of the time it’s just a matter of bringing the right tool to the right place. All of this is made harder by the limited size of your inventory and the size of the map. The game takes place in a large research complex filled with secret rooms and hidden pathways. It’s a fun place to explore and you’ll constantly unlock alternative routes that will speed up backtracking. If you manage to get stuck on a puzzle, you can spend in-game currency that is dropped by zombies to unlock hints. The thing I liked most about the puzzles, is that sometimes they force you to reuse some items. Like when you insert a battery to open some door, but then you have to open another similar door and by taking out the battery the first door closes. This creates an interesting navigational challenge.
There are a couple of bad things in there, like the shooting. The top-down camera also makes the shooting part a cake walk. I probably got hit like 5 times through the entire game. Unlike its source of inspiration, the game feels unbalanced. It basically showers you with ammo and heal items destroying the sense of a survival horror. The enemies are also lacking in variety. There are only your regular zombie humans and the final boss, which isn’t all that different from them. There’s also only one gun in the game, although you can upgrade it to make the game even easier.

Graphics & Audio

The game has an unusual visual style, that tries to mix cute anime characters and low poly 3D of a PS2 era. I can’t say that I particularly enjoy this mix, but it sure does help this game to stand out. As for the sound design, it sounds a bit cheap and zombie screams start to get tiring pretty fast. There’s also an issue with positional audio, like when the zombies coming at you from the right, you’ll hear their screams in your left ear. The music is ok though, it’s nothing to write home about, but it didn’t get on my nerves and communicated the desired atmosphere pretty well.

Performance

Specs: AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU 8GB, 32GB RAM.
At 1080 resolution, the game runs at steady 165 FPS without any issues. The game doesn’t have graphics settings, except for the fullscreen/windowed mode.

Conclusion

Heaven Dust is a short survival horror game that leans more towards puzzles than survival. While it does take heavy inspiration from the popular series, there are enough distinctions to make the game stand on its own. If you like games about puzzles and exploration, then be sure to check this one out.