Duskfade was provided by Fireshine Games for review. Thank you!
I grew up during the glory days of the PS2, where we had classics like Sly Cooper, Ratchet and Clank, and Final Fantasy 10. However, my favorite game during that era was Kingdom Hearts. To this day, the series is my favorite of all time, with its flashy combat loop, convoluted story, and nostalgic worlds. So, seeing Duskfade, a game clearly inspired by Kingdom Hearts, brought back tons of memories and excitement. For the most part, it lives up to that anticipation, though I definitely needed a perspective change to really enjoy it.
Duskfade is clearly inspired by the best games of the PS2 era, taking aspects of them to create a compelling experience. Going into it, I was hoping for more Kingdom Hearts influence, and when looking at the protagonist, Zirian, it’s very clear a lot of influence was taken from Sora. However, when it comes to the actual gameplay, it felt way more like Jak and Daxter. That’s not actually a bad thing, but I did have to change my perspective a bit once I started playing.
The basis of the story revolves around Zirian’s adventure to save his sister. Out of nowhere, a giant Clock Tower appears, locking his sister in the tower while she’s working on something huge. After meeting a mechanical bird named Cuckoo, Zirian will have to travel to multiple different locations to unchain the world and open the Clock Tower to find his sister.
It’s a decent story that has a lot of interesting parts to it, even if it can be somewhat predictable. From the history of the Clockmakers to the stories of the individuals we come across, the lore is a nice mix of intriguing and haunting. This is accentuated by the gorgeous, wild landscape we will be traveling through, with each location feeling vast and distinct from the others. It can be a little too big at times, and I did find myself getting lost between the few spots where it would point us in the right direction, but it never took me too long to figure out where to go.
The journey itself feels appropriately long. Not overstaying its welcome, but padding it out enough to still feel fulfilling. It helps that there’s a good chunk of collectibles to find scattered throughout, and will require some sort of platforming or fighting to get to. This helps each location feel more populated instead of just big and empty, which is much appreciated.
The combat itself left me with mixed feelings, but overall, it was fun. It’s ultimately quite simple: we attack, dodge, and use special abilities to take down ink blot foes. It starts off a little boring, since a lot of the essential abilities and upgrades come later, but it starts to get a lot better once we start unlocking new moves. I would consider some of these essential, like the heavy attack and final strike. It makes the comeback feel a little monotonous at the beginning, but it really picks up with more variety as we progress and buy upgrades.
There’s a good chunk of enemy variety as well, with some that force us to move away from just spamming a button to attack. Some may be best to deflect projectiles, some may require a heavy attack, but all of them are challenging in a way that feels quite rewarding to take them down.
However, Duskfade's movement in general sometimes just feels either clunky or too floaty. Combat generally ranges between decent and aggravating, especially when dodges don’t land as they should, or there’s a slight delay that can screw it up. There are also some enemies that are a bit too vulnerable, like the little ink balls that can pop up from the ground and attack. They are easy to defeat in general, but when they come up to attack, it’s very tough to fight back. Despite that, the combat is still fulfilling once we start to gain more upgrades and expand our move set.
The larger issue is the platforming. There are just too many times when it can feel too floaty or clunky, to the point where it becomes more frustrating than enjoyable. It’s very easy to overshoot platforms you’re jumping to when using the air dodge, and it led to my death multiple times. There’s also a pretty high recovery time, which became a bigger issue when they were bosses that required me to jump and move around consistently. I was almost always shot by the beam of the second boss and knocked into the water, and it was aggravating.
On the other hand, jumps were more inconsistent than I’d like. Sometimes, the first jump would not go as high as usual, or the long jump wouldn’t actually go far or fast. Both of these led to my death more times than I could count, and it happened enough to feel like a consistent issue. With games that require platforming, precise movement is very important, but the inconsistency made it more difficult to enjoy jumping around and platforming to find the rest of the collectibles.
Despite this, the emphasis on platforming throughout the world can be fun. When everything clicks, and we are able to do a long jump to find shortcuts, it just feels great. I wish those inconsistencies didn’t exist, because without them, I would really love jumping around a lot more.
As I mentioned, there are a lot of collectibles to find in Duskfade, and some of them feed into progression. We will primarily be picking up shards, which are the currency we’re going to use for everything, but we can also find upgrade gears to unlock our abilities, and a bunch of items for our aesthetics, including yarn to create new outfits and ingots to change how our blade looks. While I am someone who prefers focusing on stuff to upgrade my character instead of aesthetics, there are enough items to find in enjoyable ways that keep me coming back for more. Some of them even require later abilities, invoking a Metroidvania-esque feel for backtracking to get everything.
Duskfade is an interesting one on the Steam Deck. It does have a dedicated Steam Deck preset, but it didn’t default to it for me. Still, the preset is decent, with a good combination of visual quality and performance. However, it fluctuates in battle and cutscenes, so if you’re going to use this preset, you will need to lock it to 30 FPS for the smoothest experience.
And honestly, this might be the best way to experience the game. The preset seems to be resting between the Medium and High presets, and settling on the Balanced Image Fidelity setting with Medium Shadows. There are most likely some other settings that aren’t accessible and are being changed, but the Steam Deck preset has the best balance for performance. We can also bring up the Image Fidelity setting to Quality for a little boost to the image, but it does drain more.
I tried playing the game on the Low preset to see if we could push framerate, and while it does stick at 50 FPS pretty often, there are still a good chunk of areas that will drop into the 40s and 30s. Cutscenes in particular are quite heavy, so I would expect those to drop as well. Ultimately, the sacrifices to visual quality don’t justify the fluctuating performance increase, so I would just stick to 30 with higher quality.
And by sticking to 30 FPS, we get decent battery life. The drain will stick below 15W, except for cutscenes that will go to 20W-22W, and we will get an average of around 3 to 3.5 hours of battery life.
Duskfade is a love letter to the classic PS2 Action Platformers, and does a great job of living up to it. While it wasn’t what I was expecting, it was definitely nostalgic in its feel, with a solid story and great combat that gets better as time goes on. The movement and platforming aren’t as consistent as I’d like, but I still found a lot of enjoyment exploring the beautiful world.
Despite the compromise that is needed, it’s quite playable on the Steam Deck, and I had a good time with it. Playing at 30 FPS didn’t bother me as much, especially with the better visuals that we have. So, at the end of the day, it’s an experience worth taking on the go.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Duskfade is a love-letter to the classic PS2 Action Platformers, but inconsistencies in movement hampers the experience. However, it's an enjoyable Steam Deck experience.
