All Is Dust

All Is Dust
Information
VR/AR	VR
Developer	Mannequin Games LLC
Publisher	Mannequin Games LLC
Platform	Oculus Rift (Platform)
Device	DK1, DK2
Operating System	Windows
Type	Full Game
Genre	Horror, Exploration
Input Device	Keyboard, Mouse, Gamepad
Game Mode	Single Player
Release Date	May 1, 2015 (Oculus Share), June 26, 2015 (Steam)
Price	Free
App Store	Oculus Share, Steam
Website	http://www.allisdust.com

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

All Is Dust is a free first-person horror game and VR App for Windows PCs, playable with the Oculus Rift. It was developed and published by Mannequin Games LLC, a team of students in the University of Utah's Entertainment Arts & Engineering (EAE) program. The player takes the role of Thomas Joad, a farmer and father in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, who over three nights tries to unravel "the mysterious and horrific events that are plaguing his once beautiful land".

The developers said the game was "made with the Oculus Rift in mind from day one". It was shown at the university's EAE Open House in December 2014, was listed on Oculus Share with a release date of May 1, 2015 for the Oculus Rift DK1 and Oculus Rift DK2 development kits, and was released free on Steam on June 26, 2015 after a Steam Greenlight campaign.

Reviewed 9 October 2026. Checked every claim, quote, date, team name, review score and system requirement against the Steam store page and API, archived official site, Oculus Share and Greenlight pages, SLUG Magazine, Pocket Gamer, GameGrin, Dread Central, UploadVR and John Schwarz's itch.io postmortem. About review dates.

Gameplay

All Is Dust is played in first person on a single farm. Steam's description tells the player to "explore the dried up farm to find clues to what's going on" and to "evade and outsmart the dangers of the field", and lists "explorative gameplay interspersed with terror and panic", hand-drawn cutscenes and "eerie 1930s themed music and SFX" among its features. The developers' press page described it as "a horror game about overcoming guilt in the American Dust Bowl", in which the player must "use their vision and their wits" and find important objects from the character's life scattered across a farm "where navigation and direction don't behave exactly as expected".

In GameGrin's review, the core loop was compared to Slender: the player runs around collecting pieces of paper while avoiding monsters, and more monsters appear as more paper is found. Unlike in Slender, the creatures stop moving while the player looks at them, a mechanic the reviewer compared to SCP-173. By the end of the game the reviewer counted about 15 to 20 creatures roaming the farm, and noted that it takes many hits from the monsters before the player dies.

Dread Central's review described the game as four chapters in which the player, seen as an arm carrying a lantern, travels between objectives while avoiding monsters, pressing the F key to interact. The game opens with about a minute inside a car while a radio broadcast discusses the failures of Dust Bowl relief; the player can look around but cannot steer, and the scene ends in a crash. Pocket Gamer also described the player's view as "a disembodied hand holding a lantern", running through "hazy cornfields".

Setting

The game's year is given differently in its own materials. The official website and the Oculus Share listing in 2015 said the story takes place in 1928, while the Steam Greenlight page and the Steam store description give 1931. Dread Central's reviewer criticized the 1928 date on the official site, since the same description promised 1930s music and sound effects.

Development

All Is Dust was a student project at the University of Utah's EAE program. The official site said the game was "in development by a team of students" there, and the press page described Mannequin Games as "a team of 15 students at the University of Utah" who came together during their time in the program. The team page listed 16 people: engineers Siddharth Bhavsar, Mark Breeden, Kehan Chen, Jinghui Dong, Huali Li, Binoy Mohanty, Gagan Singh, Nathan Nash and Swapnil Sawant; artists Christopher Cherrington, Tyler Ricks and Jing Zeng; technical artist Sherry Lin; and producers Owen Peterson, John Schwarz and Travis Turner.

According to the press page, most development was done in Unity 4, and the team switched to Unity 5 with one month of development left. In a postmortem on his itch.io page, John Schwarz wrote that he was the game's lead designer and provided its setting, story and characters. He described the design going from four maps with "teleporting corn", to three maps with teleporting doors, to one map played over three nights, and the protagonist going from "a dead man" to a character with a history and a family. Schwarz wrote that he researched the Dust Bowl and the psychology of fear for the team, designed the maps in a hub-and-spoke layout around a central safe area, storyboarded the cutscenes and animated two of them, and wrote and performed the voice-overs. He also wrote that putting the game on Steam Greenlight was a good decision and that he recruited YouTubers to make Let's Play videos.

Virtual reality support

The press page stated that the Rift was part of the design from the start: "Most Rift games have the player explore a new world, but we wanted to use the Rift to help the player explore their own psyche." SLUG Magazine's report on the December 2014 EAE Open House described it, in the thesis room, as "a horror game made for Oculus Rift", and its writer asked "Was it scary? Absolutely. Was it immersive? Too much so."

The Oculus Share listing named the DK1 and DK2 as supported Rift versions, with keyboard, mouse and gamepad as supported controllers and a single-player mode. While the game was on Greenlight, the official download page offered an "EARLY non-Oculus build" and said the team would release the Oculus-compatible version "no matter what happens". The Steam version is listed as "Oculus Rift compatible", carries Steam's "VR Supported" feature tag and has partial controller support; the game can also be played on a monitor.

Pocket Gamer included All Is Dust in a June 2015 list of Oculus Rift games playable on the DK2. The writer warned that it "can be a tricky to get this to work and when it does, the scale is off, making you huge", but argued that "horror games are really improved by the sense of presence that VR gives. You can't look away from the scary stuff when the screen is attached to your face."

Release

The game was posted to Steam Greenlight in April 2015 with a planned release of "Summer 2015". In announcements on the Greenlight page, the team reported entering the top 100 and then reaching number 73 in the Greenlight rankings. Oculus Share listed the game with a release date of May 1, 2015, and the Steam release followed on June 26, 2015. Oculus shut down Oculus Share in May 2016 as part of a move of developers to the Concepts section of its store. As of October 2026 the Steam version is still free and has no downloadable content.

Platform	Store	Release date	Price	Notes
Windows with Oculus Rift DK1 or Oculus Rift DK2	Oculus Share	May 1, 2015	Free	Listed as a full game; service closed in May 2016
Windows (monitor or Oculus Rift)	Steam	June 26, 2015	Free	"VR Supported"; English interface and audio

Reception

Critical coverage was mixed. GameGrin gave the game 5.5 out of 10 and said that "while the music does a decent job at putting you on edge, the game itself falls short quick", concluding that it was "a great way to kill half an hour" and that being free limited complaints. Dread Central featured it in its "Bottom of the Bargain Bin" column, where Ted Hentschke criticized the monsters, the children's drawings used as story clues and the audio quality, while saying the opening car scene "isn't a bad way to start the game". In VR coverage, Pocket Gamer's Jake Tucker called running through the cornfields "absolutely thrilling" despite the scale problem.

On Steam, the game's all-time user reviews are rated "Mixed", with 45% of 1,322 reviews positive as of October 2026.

System requirements

Component	Oculus Share (minimum)	Steam (minimum)	Steam (recommended)
Operating system	Windows 7/8	Windows 7	Windows 7
Processor	Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600	Intel Core i3 5015	Intel Core i7 4770
Memory	4 GB RAM	8 GB RAM	16 GB RAM
Graphics	Nvidia GTX 470	Nvidia GTX 470	Nvidia GTX 660 2GB
DirectX		Version 11	Version 11
Storage	2 GB	2 GB	2 GB

Sources: Oculus Share listing and Steam store page.