Dune: Awakening’s Endless Tutorials Left Me Parched for Real Adventure

So here I am, 2026, staring at my screen after dropping 70 hard-earned bucks on Dune: Awakening. The opening hours of any game are like a first date—you can tell pretty quick whether you’re in for a lifetime of love or a very expensive mistake. The question that always haunts me: “Am I ready to kiss 70 hours of my life goodbye for this?” With Dune: Awakening, I’m still not sure, and it’s all because the game won’t stop holding my hand. I mean, I’m an adult—I survived high school, I can handle a little sandworm.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some lunatic who skips tutorials and then whines about not knowing which button makes me crouch. The first few moments on Arrakis are genuinely thrilling. You pick your home planet, choose a skill set, and WHAM—you’re tossed into a movement and combat tutorial that actually feels necessary. Basic controls, survival mechanics, how not to immediately die of thirst… fair enough. I’ll take that spoonful of knowledge. But then something awful happened: the tutorials just kept coming. And coming. Like a desert mirage, except every shimmering dot on the horizon revealed yet another pop-up telling me how to build a bloody shelter.

The game’s tutorial philosophy seems to be “measure our tutorials in centuries.” And honestly, it shows. These guided missions hint at an incredibly deep gameplay experience, full of complex systems that whisper sweet nothings to each other. Crafting begets building, which begets resource management, which begets me praying I don’t get swallowed by Shai-Hulud. Great! That’s the hallmark of any decent survival game. But here’s the rub: the tutorials stifle that very depth by force-feeding me specific tasks like I’m a kid who can’t figure out a shape-sorter. It’s all “go here, press this, now craft exactly this one piece of armor.” Meanwhile, I’m screaming internally, “Just teach me the system, please! I want to know why this armor matters, not just that I need three pieces of desert scrap to make it.”

Let me give you a concrete example. An early tutorial proudly shows me how to unlock and craft a specific armor set by gathering designated materials. Cool, I’m now wearing armor. But later, when I wanted to research new armor schematics? Crickets. I had to stumble upon that mechanic like a lost Fremen wandering the erg. While figuring it out on my own was mildly satisfying, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been cheated. Why hold my hand through the boring stuff and then leave me in the dark on the genuinely interesting systems? Teach me how to fish, don’t just hand me a pre-caught fish with a side of spice.

Now, I get it. Some hand-holding is necessary—this isn’t Minecraft where you punch trees and learn from your mistakes. Dune: Awakening is an intricate beast, and if you drop newbies into the deep desert without a clue, they’ll just uninstall and demand a refund. But the current overabundance of waypoints, guided objectives, and pop-up tutorials lasting well over ten hours (and in my case, bleeding into the first 20) feels like the game is terrified I’ll miss something. It’s like a helicopter parent hovercraft following me across the sands. I started longing for the moment the training wheels would fly off my sandbike so I could finally eat it in a glorious, sandy crash. Is that too much to ask?

The real gut-punch is that these restrictive tutorials are actually a good omen of what could be. Through all the noise, I started glimpsing how the survival, crafting, and combat systems could synergize into something magnificent. I could almost taste the full campaign—traversing the dunes, building a base, fighting off Harkonnens with nothing but my wits and a very pointy stick. But that excitement is constantly undercut by the fact that I’m not discovering it; I’m being spoon-fed pre-digested game loops. Where’s the organic thrill of narrowly escaping a sandworm because you cleverly walked without rhythm? Instead, I get a waypoint that says, “Walk without rhythm here to avoid the worm.” Yawn.

If Dune: Awakening wants to keep me—and thousands of other players—around for the long haul, it needs to ease up on the copious tutorials and trust us to actually play the game. Let me suffer. Let me die of dehydration because I forgot to check my stillsuit. Let a sandworm swallow me whole because I ran around like a tourist. These failures aren’t just funny anecdotes; they’re how you bond with a survival world. As it stands, my first 20 hours in 2026 felt less like an adventure and more like an interactive instruction manual. So here’s my plea to the devs: take the training wheels off. I promise I won’t sue if I get eaten. At least then, I’ll finally feel like I’ve awakened on Arrakis for real.