One of the grievous burdens the Heroic Videogames Journalist must shoulder is seeing a couple dozen Cool New Games each week, and only having the time to write about two or three. Sometimes, however, the Heroic Videogames Journalist takes a Valiant Stand against Inconstant Fashion, and decides to write about a videogame that came out in the Dark Ages of Last Week. On which note: have you played action-RPG Alabaster Dawn? It launched in early access on 7th May and still has a demo. Based on 30 minutes or so, it’s very good.
The developers are Radical Fish Games, creators of CrossCode, an affectionate MMORPG/isekai caricature summarised with disarming precision by Khee Hoon Chan as “a truly great game you could devote 117 hours to”. Where CrossCode looked like a top-down 16 bit game, albeit with many more bells and whistles than you’d find on Mega Drive, Alabaster Dawn is an angled, 2.5D affair with more organic-feeling, layered playspaces.
Watch on YouTube
It has absurdly lovely sprite art and animation, capable of the kind of nuanced emoting that makes you wonder why anybody bothers with greasy Unreal Engine mugshots full of individually ray-traced skin pores. The terrain fixtures are gorgeous too: witness the leaves flurrying in the gale from the descending meteors during the opening cutscene.
Oh yeah, we should probably talk about the meteors. Alabaster Dawn takes place in a realm ravaged by the curse of Nyx, who appear to be close cousins of Starcraft’s Zerg. In their wisdom, the gods armed a small group of Chosen warriors with weapons capable of felling these abominations, only to arbitrarily retract their gifts during the climactic battle (opening prologue mission).
The Chosen all died. All save for one, Juno, a bright-eyed youngster who got herself kicked out of the Chosen before the battle even began. As the game begins, she wakes up from her magic sarcophagus to find the landscape reduced to slicks of pink and purple chitin.
So begins a quest to restore humanity, rebuild settlements, and master a combat system that takes cues from Devil May Cry and Kingdom Hearts. There are eight weapons, two equippable at once. Each has its own tree of unlockable combos and super moves.
The brawling is fluid and enjoyable, if hardly skull-cracking of concept. I’m mostly here for the character art and also, the concise, off-beat script, which is already displaying a bit of the self-referentiality you find in CrossCode. For example, Juno has just expressed mild consternation about the age-old action-RPG device of clobbering some glowing green flower to restore health. “But it’s pretty!”
I’m not sure we’ll have scope to review this, but we’ve got some time to think about it – Alabaster Dawn will remain in early access for two years, the developers estimate, with the final version offering “the complete story with 7 chapters and an estimated playtime of about 40 hours.” The current build packs 6-10 hours, and takes you up to the middle of chapter 2, though there’s a roguelite mode of some kind to eke out the replays. Read more on Steam.