Usually when you think of knock-off games you think about something low quality, not particularly good and full of shameless ripping from source material. Well, at least that’s what I think of. And Heaven Dust is an unapologetic knock-off of Resident Evil games. Yet, it’s surprisingly well made, despite being cheap and is actually really good. It does rip stuff directly from its inspirations, though. To the “I’m not sure this is legal to do” degree.
Heaven Dust is, essentially, a survival horror with a top down perspective. It follows the same basic core pillars of the genre – you have a big interconnected level to explore, constantly finding new paths and unlocking new doors, you have limited resources that you should plan around, it’s a horror themed story and you have all of the main elements of both action and adventure, including methodical combat and puzzles to solve. It’s not a fantastic example of the genre, but it’s a very solid entry that in some elements puts to shame some of the monoliths of the genre in how smart it is about focusing on the main genre pillars.
It has lots of optional stuff, several endings, rather simple in concept but more complex in nature puzzles, several sequences that can be done in any order, the entire location is just one huge map with no loading screens and most of the time it’s really fun to go through. The combat, just like in classic survival horror titles, is all about smart positioning and repositioning. All key items get reused many times, so you need to constantly remember picking it back up after using it, because the item might become useful elsewhere. Saving can be done at any point, but you always load in the last “safe room” you’ve visited which has an item box, because just like in RE titles the inventory space is limited. There are some pretty cool puzzle solutions, the way you unlock ammo is an interesting idea, you get optional upgrade items to unlock with tokens that sometimes drop off zombies. And there’s a lot of variety in parts of the map that draw direct inspiration from all of the RE games.
But… it also uses sound files and snippets of music from Resident Evil series. Not like “similar things”, but you get a boss that screams like Nemesis from the original RE3, you get a music track that’s one of the exploration themes from REmake and the “outdoors” tracks are reusing the outdoor ambience from RE1. There’s also a poster of RE5 on one of the walls in the game. And I’m not sure you can do this in a commercial game? Either way, it’s more bizarre than distracting and besides I feel like the game could’ve avoided this and still felt both a product of its own and a good tribute to classic RE. Even the story here is basically a retelling of the typical RE tale, just done in a more low budget way. And with lots of typos and mistakes, of course. I don’t think this is an intentional tribute to some of the gems from the original RE1 localisation.
Overall, Heaven Dust is a surprisingly fun top down take on survival horror. It’s not fantastic, but it’s really good and totally worth playing if you’re a fan of the genre. If you’re not, you might not enjoy it as much and would have more troubles understanding the basics and being frustrated at the very basic approach to settings (this feels like it was meant to be played on mobile as well). Personally, I liked it a lot.