Book Review - The Art and Making of Dune Awakening

The Artbook Collector
1 day ago
5 min read

October 21st 2025

Dune: Awakening dropped players onto the harsh world of Arrakis, tasked with surviving and finding the Fremen. While avoiding the Sandworms, enemies, and other players can be dangerous, learning about what it took the team at Funcom to make it has been made a much easier task thanks to the arrival of The Art of Making of Dune Awakening!

The book from Insight Editions (or Titan Books in the UK) was published on October 21^st and invites players to enjoy the art and insights behind the online survival game set in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe. Now I can share my thoughts on whether this is as valuable as spice, or should be left behind in the sands.

Build Quality

The 224-page book is a little larger than most, coming in at 9.5” x 13” (24.1cm x 33cm) with a hardcover. This makes it a good size and I really like the cover, the images online don’t highlight that it shines like the spice covered sand in the movies because it’s reflective. The lettering is also embossed too, helping to make it feel like a premium book. Beware though, it’s not finger print friendly! The paper quality is also very good as you would expect too.

The problem here is the binding as it is tight to the spine, meaning that the ribbons and backing do not flex, preventing the pages from laying flat, which becomes an issue later on in the review as it affects some of artwork. You can see below the how the pages sit, with the second image highlighting that even while pressing down, the issue persists.

Content

As the title suggests this isn’t just an artbook, but also a deep dive into the development of the game. It strikes a nice balance throughout and isn’t an overly heavy read either, it uses large text so it doesn’t overwhelm a page. It’s detailed and interesting, without becoming a long novel which I like. Author Andrew Farago did a great job and I appreciate the spread dedicated to the life of Frank Herbert at the end too.

Within the text there are many interviews from the team at Funcom too, including Creative Director Joel Bylos, Producer Nils Ryborg, VP of Interactive Media at Legendary Entertainment, Sam Rappaport. This makes up the bulk of the details about the game and covers a lot about its early inception and development. You learn about how they not only wanted to match the visual design of Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 Dune movie, but that they even visited the set and shared concept art and other materials. They discuss the alternate timeline choice, gameplay, factions, tools, story, and more. It’s very comprehensive and those that have spent many hours wandering the sands will find some fun details here.

The art in the book covers a lot too, ranging from sketches to 3D models used in Dune: Awakening that fans will enjoy seeing. It showcases designs for the suits, tools, characters, bases, architecture, vehicles, and other details of the survival game. The pieces used also play to the books size, because despite lots of room given to the text, they fit a lot in, striking the healthy balance mentioned before. The type of concepts you see are balanced differently in certain chapters, as seen in the Traversal chapter that uses a lot more 3D models over 2D art for the vehicles like the ornithopter.

The artwork and models are fantastic and you can see that the designs fit in right at home in the movies’ universe, despite being in a separate timeline. The detail across the board is impressive, but the characters art and architecture stood out the most to me personally. The different visual styles of the bases highlight the difference across the factions just like the movies and shows the care that went into creating meaningful differences for the players choice in the game.

What I noticed immediately is the very high print quality, helping to elevate the art. It can be tough when printing dark colours, as they can be washed out, but you get some true blacks here that I can only compare to looking at a OLED screen next to a standard TV. Both are great, but this is step up which is fantastic.

However, this all begins to fall apart over the next couple of sections…

Credits

Sadly, there are no artist credits to be found, not just absent on pages the art is featured on, but in the entire book. No list at the front or back of the book highlights the names of the people that contributed to the work you are seeing, which is a real shame. I prefer to see each image credited, but at the very least the names should be noted somewhere, there's certainly room to do it as there are small descriptions on each page of the art being shown. It’s not a big deal to everyone, but there’s no game without them, let alone a book.

Use of Space

The biggest let down here is the page design, which isn’t the fault of the layout choices. In fact, I like what they did here. The placement of the art works well and the background design is simple, allowing the art to shine. A lot of space is given to the text, which I don’t mind here as the arrangements look clean and they still fit a lot of images in at good sizes too. All of this is great, but it’s the binding that lets it down.

Page design is everything, but it has to account for how it will be displayed in a physical book as opposed to on a screen. Unfortunately, this suffers from a large amount of image loss in the centre fold, because so many images cross the middle of the spread. The front and back are hit the hardest, where this problem affects many artbooks and can be seen in the photos below. I’ve learnt that the riskiest move is crossing the fold, because if the pages do not lay flat, you can obscure parts of images as seen here. The middle of the book isn’t as bad, but still not ideal and it’s painful to see good art let down by a binding issue. A good portion of the art can still be fully enjoyed, but it is a bigger issue here than in most artbooks.

Value

The artbook has an RRP of $50/ £40, which is a reasonable price in the artbook world. At 224 pages this is expected, but it does come in a slightly bigger size and with a well-made cover. As always, prices fluctuate and as spotted on Amazon UK, the book is already down to £29.99 a handful of days before its release. There is no discount currently on the US site, but these will come and go and other retailers may have offers already too. Without the previously mentioned issue, this would be a great price for the book.

Verdict

The Art and Making of Dune: Awakening had the potential to be perfect for fans, a wonderfully presented book with a variety of art and an insightful look at the game’s development. However, that all comes undone because of the binding issue that affects so many pages. Sadly, with a large portion of the book using art that crosses the centre fold, it’s hard to overlook. It’s tough to write reviews sometimes and this is one of them because it was so close to being great. It doesn’t completely ruin the book, but it does make it hard to recommend.

If you're a fan of Dune: Awakening and would like to add the book to your own collection, you can do so here;