I know next to nothing about survival MMO Dune: Awakening, but I just spent 40 minutes in its Steam Next Fest demo character creator, so I guess I have to play it now

Let's just clear the air: I don't know what Dune is. I've never read the books, I've never seen the movies, all I'm certain of is that every actor that plays Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan in 1984, Timothée Chalamet in 2021) has to be sexy. So it is out of this powerful affinity for sexy people that I chose to play Dune: Awakening's Steam Next Fest demo character creator, which I spent so much time with I guess I need to play the game now.

While Dune: Awakening's creator doesn't offer as much heavenly minutiae as the designers in games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard or Cyberpunk 2077, it does provide a reasonable balance between customization and pre-made, hot-and-ready characters.

Sliders for things like lips, thighs, and eyeballs all go up to a value of nine, allowing enough room for personal flourishes without getting too twiddly. That said, I do wish Dune: Awakening had more variation in its array of tan or dark skin tones, which is a historical issue in video games, but the survival MMO's creator at least offers enough flexibility for me to, basically, be happy.

Part of me is even impressed with the Dune: Awakening creator. I understood the game's origin and class options as poorly as a butterfly survives the rain – I ultimately took up the Reverend Mother's call to go to Arrakis as a Bene Gesserit Acolyte from Chusuk, because it sounded yummy. But I know for a fact that Dune: Awakening has made some innovations in nose science. It might be the only video game to allow me to nearly perfectly replicate my big, wide, curved nose, the product of a Bulgarian mother and Bengali father who I'm sure meant well.

That's a big deal for me. I've been searching long and hard. I may not be able to tell my sandworms from my tapeworm, but I'm intimately familiar with the dark magic of character creation; I've spent at least a gazillion million hours on carefully designing my gorgeous protagonists in games like Bloodborne, Bloodborne in my second playthrough, Bloodborne in my third playthrough, and so on.

When I'm at my most sick – meaning, if I don't plop an ingeniously placed beauty mark on goth drow in 50 seconds, I will go anaphylactic – I've even picked up great games solely for their character creators and then dropped them immediately after finalizing the last butt slider. May my abandoned children in Monster Hunter World, Final Fantasy 14, and Baldur's Gate 3 forge their own paths in life.

With this in mind, I recognize that it's possible that my 40 minutes in Dune: Awakening's comprehensive character creator might mean nothing, just another afternoon of exchanging sweet nothings with a hair color picker, but I'd like to believe I've changed. Because, really, I haven't been creating and crushing all these warriors, magicians, peasants, and princesses, out of some crowlike desperation for shiny things. I've been chasing a nose.

Dune: Awakening is so much more than a survival game or an MMO – it's a unique sci-fi experience shaped by Frank Herbert's 60-year-old lore and all that came after it.