Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune and its sequels are notoriously challenging to adapt. Critics met David Lynch’s 1984 “Dune” film with scorn, calling it an inscrutable mess with no clear vision–Roger Ebert said everything from the costumes to the script seemed unfinished–and conflicts with Universal during production reportedly made it one of Lynch’s least favorite projects. Meanwhile, Sci-Fi Channel’s multi-part adaptation, “Frank Herbert’s Dune,” overcorrected and drew criticism for explaining too much and leaving too little to the viewer’s imagination, before Denis Villeneuve turned the novels into two Oscar-winning films.
Developer Funcom sidestepped all these issues in its new online survival game “Dune: Awakening” by not adapting “Dune” at all, or not the tricky parts, at least. In “Dune: Awakening,” one of the most important events that didn’t happen in Frank Herbert’s novel or the film and TV adaptations does happen: Lady Jessica, concubine of Duke Leto Atreides and member of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, bears a daughter as instructed by her Reverend Mother.
This single alteration sets off a chain of events that spins into an alternate timeline that may or may not make sense to you depending on how familiar you are with Suk doctors, Mentats, Kwisatz Haderach, gom jabbars, and all the other staples of Herbert’s world. Like most modern fantasy and sci-fi projects, “Dune: Awakening” is frontloaded with a dizzying number of proper nouns meant to show you it understands the source material and no attempt to make sense of them for anyone who doesn’t have a wiki page close at hand.
Instead of Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica trying to find the Fremen for the Bene Gesserit, an anonymous character created by the player has that task, only the Fremen have vanished. The empire hunts them down, and any trace of their former relationship with House Atreides is, seemingly, gone. Meanwhile, you’re free to help or hinder the Atreides or Harkonnen factions as you see fit, raid wrecked ships for valuable materials, corner the market on spice by cooperating with other players, build a lavish mansion—whatever you see fit.
What influence the main story and your faction alignments might have on Funcom’s version of Arrakis, if any, is uncertain at this early point in the game’s life, when most people are still building rudimentary bases and trying to outrun sandworms. However, the setup is grounds for exploring Arrakis and Fremen culture in more detail without having to worry about how it fits, or doesn’t, with the world Herbert created. It’s also mostly in the background after the tutorial ends. “Dune: Awakening” encourages you to put the story on hold from time to time and focus on exploration and side quests, so you’re free to do what you like without the heavy hand of “Dune” lore hanging over you.
It’s worth leaving the main path behind as well. What matters more than the specifics of which house was involved in which assassination plot is what life on Arrakis is like, and Funcom adapts that brilliantly. “Dune: Awakening” borrows its basic structure from most survival games. You spend your time exploring, finding resources, crafting tools and machines to make survival on Arrakis easier, and survival is almost all about water management. Proper hydration affects everything from your maximum stamina to your health, to which pieces of equipment are best to wear at a given time. Funcom wisely kept other survival game staples, like fatigue and hunger, out of “Dune: Awakening,” and built the struggle for water and shelter into every part of the game.
Adventuring during the day exposes you to intense heat, which dehydrates you more quickly, so you run through your water supplies or die in the desert. Any successful endeavor has to be planned around whether you’ll have enough water, if you can find safety from the sun, and whether you have a chance of outrunning an impending sandstorm. Death is a hurdle, but not a major setback, thanks to a forgiving system that lets you keep everything in your pack—unless a sandworm devours you. Almost every expedition sends you into open desert at some point, and there’s always a chance your footsteps might attract a worm’s attention.
The prospect of losing all your items is enough to make the sandworms of “Dune: Awakening” a fright best avoided, but Funcom leaned heavily into the psychology of that fear, giving the worms an almost “Jaws”-like quality. The process starts with a noise meter showing how likely you are to attract unwanted attention. Then the music changes if a sandworm approaches. You can see its heaving mass writhing under the ground as it shifts mountains of sand and changes the landscape. The tumultuous noise when it finally breaches echoes across the region even if you can’t see the beast, a stark warning of what might happen to you if you’re not careful.
The genre staple of gradually gaining mastery over the environment does not apply to “Dune: Awakening,” even when you can start building heavy weaponry mounted on vehicles, and that’s for the best. Funcom looked for more creative ways to make you feel like you’re progressing in the game beyond just giving you more powerful tools. By the time you need to start mining high-quality ore, for instance, you’re on a part of Arrakis that’s more dangerous and demanding. You need better tools for a better chance of surviving, to dig further into the Fremen’s mysteries, and to establish a foothold on Arrakis—not just to get more items.
It helps that so much of the grind that’s usually inherent in these experiences is just not here. Resources respawn after half a minute, so even though you need an inordinate amount of things like copper ore and plant fibers for basic crafting projects, acquiring it is rarely a chore. Harvesting items is fast and easy as well, thanks to futuristic tech such as a scanner-and-cutter item that exploits weak points in constructions, destroys them, and drops dozens of items in your bag in less than 10 seconds. The focus in “Dune: Awakening” is firmly on large-scale events such as discovering a new region, building your own dragonfly-like flying machine, or making an economic alliance with other players than it is on the tedium of finding 100 rocks to build another harvesting tool. The magic of science fiction tools might not save you from worms and heat death, but it can save you time.
Funcom might not have broken new ground for interpreting “Dune” by keeping the high politics and religious warfare out of “Dune: Awakening.” However, it’s done more than any adaptation at creating a sense of what it’s like to exist in Herbert’s world, of the desperate grab for resources, the feeling of being at the mercy of an unforgiving ecosystem, and the struggle of making your way in a system that’s just as happy to watch you die as it is to lend a helping hand. The perfect adaptation of Herbert’s novel doesn’t exist, but as combinations of setting and game design go, few do it better than this.
The publisher provided the review copy of this title. Dune: Awakening is available now on PC via Steam.
