A Jon Hodgson cover didn't hurt with catching my eye. With all of the complaining about D&D covers right now in gaming circles, I would like to think that this evocative cover is something that we can all agree upon.
For me, Dust Devils comes across as a reworking of the "Devil And The Bluesman" trope, redone for the Western genre. And, really, it fits well. But there's not a huge amount of difference between the early cowboy music and the Blues, they approached a lot of the same topics coming at them from different angles of entry. The difference is that the Devil chasing down your Dust Devils character is metaphorical. Or is it? One of the nice things about gaming is that things can be as literal, or as metaphorical as you want. With the game as written, the Devil represents those things about your character's personality or psyche that drives them to do the bad things that they do. This is at the heart of good story telling, having a difficulty that your character has to overcome. Too many games want to make it easy on characters, but I think that the mark of a hero is someone who knows their shortcomings, realizes that they may be too much for them, but still struggles against them. They might not always win, but that doesn't make them less heroic for the trying. This is a valuable life lesson that years of Marvel Comics has taught.
I do think that there is a danger in overwriting the past exploits of the character, between the Devil and the Past of the character. My idea of a character is that is should be allowed to breathe in the current, during play, and that there can be a tendency to throttle that with too much back story from some players. Having a lot of big things in the past can undermine the play of the present, so for me this would be something to watch out for during character creation.
Now, this game isn't going to be for everyone. I'm really not interested in the whole "is it an RPG" territory. It is a storygame and it is one of those games where everyone shares control of the growth and direction of the story. Some people don't like that. A lot of the stuff in the section on conflicts is fairly standard RPG stuff, however, and most gamers (regardless of the types of games that they play) should be able to understand the underlying logic of how things work. The character creation and resolution systems do remind me a bit of the old Hubris Games' Story Engine (now published by Precis Intermedia). The explanation of Devils and how they are used in play remind me a bit about that game, but I could be wrong and it could be an old-fashioned case of parallel development. The main difference is that Dust Devils uses playing cards for it's determination.
Having an explanation of the different poker hands is "handy," because I know a lot of gamers who have never played poker...and having a table to point them towards would be much easier than having to explain it to them. It would even make a handy cheat sheet at the table.
I also like the fact that in Dust Devils stories have an end to them. As I get older, I become lest interested in games that last for years and years, or have no ending in sight. I am becoming more interested in stories with a beginning, middle and (hopefully) an end. Or at least some semblance of these things.
The game also has a lot of good advice for players and narrators. You get a good idea of what you are supposed to be doing with this game. That is something that I like. You also get some interesting worked examples of how to play this game in non-Western situations. Of course one of those examples is about samurai. That's another good thing.
Overall reading Dust Devils did what I think that a good game should do. It made me want to play it. I'm not sure when or how I will get a chance, but this is definitely on my gaming to-do list now.