Outside of Nintendo’s releases, we don’t really get to see too many games primarily aimed at families as a whole or even specifically younger audience anymore. Weird Beluga is a small team trying to change this with its latest outing – Duskfade – that attempts to tell a story that wouldn’t be too out of place in an animated movie, paired with gameplay that feels like it was ripped right out of a bygone era of gaming.
At its core, Duskfade is a relatively simple 3D platformer with hack-and-slash action combat, and brings to mind many classics from the PS1 and PS2 era (like MediEvil). Duskfade sets itself apart from these titles with its incredible production values that showcase polish and charm dripping from just about every single frame of the game.
“At its core, Duskfade is a relatively simple 3D platformer with hack-and-slash action combat, and brings to mind many classics from the PS1 and PS2 era”
The general story setup for Duskfade is quite simple. Taking place some time after the death of their grandfather has left Zirian and his sister, Allira, grieving. While life has continued for Zirian in the meantime, Allira has decided to lock herself in her room to work on something that will radically improve both of their lives. However, her experiments go horribly wrong, and a massive mystical clocktower springs out from the center of town. With Allira still seemingly trapped inside, Zirian decides to pick up his grandfather’s blade and sets off to rescue her.
During your initial incursion into the clocktower, you will also meet the secondary protagonist of the story – a mechanical bird named Cuckoo. Despite being quite helpful when it comes to navigating through the clocktower, Cuckoo seems to have some gaps in its mind that it is trying to sort out. The two then decide to team up and explore the world together with the main goal of destroying the clocktower. To achieve this, they will have to travel to four different corners of the world and release the mystical chains that are seemingly keeping the clocktower upright.
While far from the most innovative game out there in terms of narrative or style of storytelling, Duskfade does manage to get deeper with its core plot than its whimsical visuals would indicate. A core theme behind the entire story is the notion of grief, and how various characters often tend to find their own ways to deal with losing loved ones. Along with Allira and Zirian themselves showcasing two distinct examples of people dealing with grief in their own ways, the various citizens of the world that you can interact with also often tend to have something they’re grieving over as well. In terms of a narrative throughline, this works fairly well throughout the game, and is executed with subtlety, ensuring that you’re never really beaten over the head with a large bat emblazoned with the word “GRIEF” on it.
Similar themes can also be found in the various explorable zones of the game, where grief comes together with the idea of nostalgia to showcase a world that was once at the pinnacle of technological prowess but has since started falling into ruin. The core story also has an underlying plot that revolves around the Master Clockmakers having long-since disappeared before the events of the game. Along with rescuing Allira, discovering the relationship between these Clock Masters and the protagonist’s grandfather forms the main narrative backbone for Duskfade as a whole.
When it comes to the world itself, Duskfade shows quite a bit of imagination. Rather than simply opting for the naturalistic landscapes that one would expect from a fantasy setting these days, you instead get to double jump, grind, and wall run through some downright fantastical environments that can range from a ruined village now covered in flames to a series of strange crystal-laden floating islands, and even some beautiful gothic buildings that seem to be tearing themselves apart due to temporal rifts popping in and out of existence.
“While far from the most innovative game out there in terms of narrative or style of storytelling, Duskfade does manage to get deeper with its core plot than its whimsical visuals would indicate.”
While the variety of these environments doesn’t quite become obvious right from the start, the brisk pace at which Duskfade moves ensures that, before long, you’ll find yourself exploring mystical clocktowers floating in the sky on your way to a massive volcano that seems to be in the midst of an eruption before then entering an idyllic forest where little seems to be wrong. While the way I may have described these levels might make the world seem disjointed, Duskfade is actually quite clever about how it transitions you between areas, with a few loading screens along the way acting as a metaphor for large distances between said zones being covered.
On the gameplay side of things, Duskfade is first and foremost a 3D platformer. Most of your time will be spent running around the world and navigating the various environmental obstacles along the way. While much of this gameplay is quite simple, with the player occasionally being asked to combine things like rolling, double jumping, and wall-running, there is also an attempt to add some depth to the platforming with the inclusion of more advanced moves. For example, jumping right after a roll will propel you much further than a typical jump-and-roll combo would. However, these moves never really feel necessary to proceed along the critical path, and are instead more useful for discovering secrets.
Over the course of the game, the platforming gets expanded on quite a bit with additional tools that are gained, like a grappling hook. Through these tools, new parts of the world become available, and traversal in general starts to feel smoother. The same tools also work as a great way to introduce additional challenges during platforming.
The grappling hook, for example, is introduced through a few simple, low-stakes platforming segments where failure doesn’t really mean much aside from needing to be more aware of where the grappling points are. As the same level progresses, the challenge starts getting deeper, and soon enough, you’ll find yourself needing to deal with the ebb and flow of magma that periodically reveal and hide platforms.
The level design generally feels great, and the platforming controls never feel floaty. Any jumps that I missed during my time with the game were largely my fault, and a second attempt quickly allowed me to avoid making the same mistakes. The fact that Duskfade is quite generous with its checkpoints also helps, especially once you start getting deeper into the game where mistakes can often result in quite a bit of damage being taken because you found yourself bouncing on magma with no safe platform to land on, for instance.
No discussion about platformers can ever truly be complete without discussing collectibles, and Duskfade has plenty of them, ranging from upgrade gears to musical sheets that can be used to change up the background track. Many of these are quite cleverly hidden out of your typical line of sight, with a slight shift in the camera angle often revealing them. Getting to them, however, tends to be slightly more challenging, and you’ll often find yourself needing to make a mental note about collectibles you can’t quite pick up yet because you haven’t unlocked the platforming capability. Thankfully, the fast travel screen for each area of the game also shows precise counters for how many you have found, and how many still have to be discovered.
Duskfade also has combat, and this is where the gameplay feels like a bit of a let down. Most encounters in the game can be handled by simply mashing on the single attack button you get, and as you get further into the game, you’ll grow your arsenal of moves with things like new combo enders and special abilities. Despite this, however, combat tends to feel quite floaty, and outside of a few boss encounters, doing more than simply mashing on the attack button and occasionally dodging feels like a waste of time.
“No discussion about platformers can ever truly be complete without discussing collectibles, and Duskfade has plenty of them”
Progression being quite simplistic also doesn’t help matters; during your travels, you’ll find plenty of currency that, along with a special item called an Upgrade Gear, can be used to unlock new moves and improve your damage. These upgrades don’t quite feel as meaningful as they should, however, since the combat never really gets complicated enough to demand the use of your new dodge-attack-follow-up.
Boss fights are one of the major highlights in this regard. Sticking to the classic game design axiom of a boss testing what the player has learned so far, these encounters tend to be slightly more complex than simply hitting the enemy and avoiding a few attacks. Fights tend to have different phases where even your platforming capabilities are put to the test. The main boss of the Volcano area, for instance, not only forces you to jump to higher platforms to avoid rising magma that engulfs the entire stage, but you’ll also have to start using the grappling hook when even the high ground becomes impossible to stand on.
One of Duskfade’s greatest achievements is how good the game looks. It fully leans into its self-described clockpunk aesthetics, combining the clockwork machinery of the world with a magical flair that makes the entire experience feel like it could have been a dream. The storybook aesthetics also allow for its characters being incredibly expressive, and while the voice acting is far from the best out there – its quality comparable to a typical show – seeing the emotions on the various characters’ faces certainly helps further sell the stakes of the narrative. The only real complaint I have in this regard is the fact that the occasional pre-rendered cutscenes are locked at 30 FPS, which makes the experience feel choppier than the smooth fast-paced gameplay of Duskfade would otherwise indicate.
Outside of these pre-rendered cutscenes – which admittedly are relatively rare and only kick in when you hit major plot beats – Duskfade ran quite well. On a PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, and a Radeon RX 7800XT GPU, I was able to maintain a steady frame rate of over 140 FPS while playing at 2560×1440. Since platforming games often depend on timely inputs that can often be affected by sudden frame drops, Duskfade presented zero issues in this regard.
Generally speaking, Duskfade is a great game with a fun story full of mature themes and a likeable pair of protagonists in Zirian and Cuckoo. While its combat might feel simple and shallow, the gameplay doesn’t feel out of place for what the game is trying to be at its core – an approachable 3D action platformer that can be enjoyed by just about any member of the family without wearing out its welcome thanks to its brisk campaign that can take around 10-12 hours to finish.
This game was reviewed on PC.
