One of the heavy burdens of being a heroic games journalist is seeing a few dozen cool new games every week and only having time to write about two or three. Sometimes, however, the heroic video game journalist takes a valiant stand against fickle fashion and decides to write about a video game released during last week’s Dark Ages. On a note: have you played the action-RPG Alabaster Dawn? It launched in early access on May 7 and still has a demo. Based on around thirty minutes, it’s very good.
The developers are Radical Fish Games, creators of CrossCode, an affectionate caricature of an MMORPG/isekai summed up with disarming accuracy by Khee Hoon Chan as “a really great game that you could sink 117 hours into.” Where CrossCode felt like a top-down 16-bit game, albeit with a lot more bells and whistles than what you’ll find on Mega Drive, Alabaster Dawn is a tilted 2.5D affair with more organic layered game spaces.
It has absurdly charming sprite art and animation, capable of the kind of nuanced emotion that makes you wonder why anyone bothers with oily Unreal Engine photos full of individually ray-traced skin pores. The terrain features are also beautiful: watch the leaves swirl in the wind from the descending meteors during the opening cutscene.
Oh yeah, we should probably talk about meteors. Alabaster Dawn takes place in a realm ravaged by the curse of Nyx, who appear to be close cousins of the Zerg from Starcraft. In their wisdom, the gods armed a small group of chosen warriors with weapons capable of felling these abominations, only to arbitrarily withdraw their gifts during the climactic battle (opening mission of the prologue).
The chosen ones are all dead. All except one, Juno, a young girl with bright eyes who was expelled from the Chosen before the battle even began. At the start of the game, she awakens from her magical sarcophagus and discovers the landscape reduced to sheets of pink and purple chitin.
Thus begins a quest to restore humanity, rebuild the colonies, and master a combat system that draws inspiration from Devil May Cry and Kingdom Hearts. There are eight weapons, two of which can be equipped at a time. Each has their own tree of combos and super moves to unlock.
The fight is fluid and enjoyable, even if the concept is hardly a headache. I’m mainly here for the character art and also for the concise and quirky script, which already displays a bit of the self-referentiality found in CrossCode. For example, Juno just expressed mild dismay over the old action-RPG device of hitting a glowing green flower to restore health. “But it’s pretty!”
I’m not sure we’ll get to see this again, but we have 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 full story with 7 chapters and an estimated playtime of around 40 hours.” The current version is 6-10 hours long and takes you until the middle of Chapter 2, although there is a roguelite mode to optimize replays. Learn more about Steam.
