A tribute that looks to the classics it comes from without stopping at imitation, entrusting movement with the task of standing apart.
This title opens with a statement of intent: for a clockmaker, time isn’t a line or an abstraction, but a current you can bend and calibrate with the right tool. More than any trailer, this line hints at what the game really wants to do with its central theme, and it does so before Duskfade even declares its ambition from the first trailer, hinting at a desire to bring back the third-person action-platformer in the form it reached between the late nineties and the mid-2000s, the era when Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, and Kingdom Hearts defined the genre.
Weird Beluga signs it, a studio carrying a history and an ambition with real weight behind them: five university friends founded it in 2019 after winning at PlayStation Talents with a passion project, then dropped out of university to go independent, and the team arrives at Duskfade backed by a title that had already caught people’s attention, Clid the Snail, which won Best Game and Best Art at the Talents themselves in 2021.
Three of the five founders still steer the studio today – Tomás Manzano Sobrido, Diego Redondo González, and Ricardo Chorques Mesa – and their team takes Weird Beluga from the dark-toned twin-stick shooter of Clid the Snail to the three-dimensional clockpunk world of Duskfade, where the influences declared at the outset surface and set the standard the game itself has to meet.
This time-travel thread works as more than a nostalgic revival of the genre – it stands as one of the story’s core themes: breaking the chains of time as if to set it free to run backward, leap forward, and loop around, the way Ragnarok does in Norse mythology.
A World Frozen in Time
The story of Duskfade opens on a domestic note, and the call to adventure doesn’t come from anything epic: behind a locked door, Allira, older sister to Zirian, our energetic protagonist, works on a project far too ambitious, tied to the recent loss of Gramps Tristan – maybe an attempt to find a way to travel through time and bring him back?
An explosion born from that project, rather than an attack or a prophecy, pulls Zirian in and drags him to Tick Town, a dimension where time has stopped and where darkness, from that moment on, never gives way to day again. From this domestic premise, the game builds its entire narrative frame: freeing Allira from the Clock Tower, where Despair keeps her sealed behind four chains that need breaking one at a time, becomes for Zirian both a mission and a way to learn how to face the world without the protection of his older sister, who had stepped into the guiding, protective role Gramps once held.
Tick Town works as the central hub, connecting the four major areas of Tearvale, the region Zirian crosses while breaking one chain at a time – five macro-areas in total, each split further into numerous sub-zones: from Mount Cinder in flames to the Auric Palace, from Lantern Port with its fishing community to the Celestial Kingdom among the clouds, taking in the Desert of the Last Memory and Fangstone Canyon along the way. Every area, judging by the environmental worldbuilding, still carries tangible traces of the Master Clockmakers, who literally shaped it according to their own craft before disappearing: Mount Cinder itself, its volcanic heart harnessed as an energy source, or the Great Library, vertical and layered like an archive nobody has had the strength to reorganize since, both capture the idea of a continent built around treating time as material to work, not just something to endure.
Cuckoo joins him from the earliest moments – the automaton Allira herself built before the accident: beyond adding a combat companion, its presence gives an emotional counterpoint to a setting that, despite the warm palette and painterly care put into every scene, might otherwise come across as distant.
Around this core, Weird Beluga layers a worldbuilding that leans on clues scattered through the environment, on various conversations with the Cloudies, and above all on populating the ruins with Tempered Echoes, fragments of voices belonging to those who lived in these places before the silence the Tower brought – Joanna and Misty, mother and daughter whose story comes together piece by piece, or Markus and Sonya, both tied to the legendary Master Clockmakers, gone now for a hundred and fifty years and reduced, in the game’s present, to little more than a myth the characters pass down. Marlo, a fisherman Zirian meets at Lantern Port, stays the only other human he crosses paths with for most of the adventure, a detail that alone says how much of a minority Zirian’s own kind has become in a world mostly populated by Cloudies.
The Cloudies themselves, a people who wear purely ceremonial armor despite their peaceful nature, help make Tearvale feel like a lived-in place rather than one Zirian just passes through: some, like Tailcord, the cat-like master tailor of the Celestial Kingdom, offer Zirian new outfits in exchange for the Thieven Kittens recovered while exploring, while others, like the Traveller, follow him leg after leg, running the trade in Star Shards – the local currency, literally time collected and put back into circulation, which gives every chest found along the way a nearly philosophical weight on top of the practical one. Even the recurring references to the mysterious Twelve add another layer of depth the main plot alone would struggle to sustain: these details, dealt out sparingly along the way, are exactly what makes Tick Town feel like a place with its own history, independent of Zirian’s – one that culminates in an area called the Scriptorium of the Twelve, which the game leaves open to explore without offering immediate answers.
Despair, the first real threat Zirian faces, carries this same symbolic language into her design: she appears with a heavy yoke around her neck and a pair of hands gripping it forever, an image that makes the link between villain and the theme of staying trapped in a pain you can’t shake visible at first glance – fitting for a world where even the antagonist doesn’t escape the logic of imprisoning time.
Accept the Loss, or Fight to Turn Back Time?
Grief opens Duskfade from the very first moments, with the loss of Gramps something the player already knows at the start of the adventure, treated as the premise the rest of the story builds on. The Tempered Echoes, voices of those who lived in Tick Town before the silence fell over the city, carry the same conversation forward from different angles – Joanna and Misty, Markus, Sonya, each with their own version of what it means to stay behind when someone else is gone – building a chorus of smaller griefs around Zirian that echoes his own.
The moment this theme turns most direct comes with a flashback centered on Zirian as a child, grieving the death of his pet bird, Feather: he wants to turn back time to get it back, and Gramps answers with a lesson on how relentlessly time moves forward, asking him whether the idea of going back doesn’t tempt him, then warning that always looking to the past makes you lose sight of what the present still has to offer. It’s a small scene, almost marginal within the plot’s overall economy, and yet it plants the thematic seed the rest of the game picks up every time Zirian has to choose between standing still in front of a memory and moving forward.
Time travel, in this sense, quickly stops being just an aesthetic mechanic that fits the clockpunk setting and becomes the lens everything else passes through: the mysterious project Allira works on behind the locked door, the one that triggers the explosion the whole adventure springs from, ends up looking like an attempt to bend that same flow of time to bring Gramps back – a wish that flips, in adult form, the very question Zirian once put to him about his bird. And even if Allira’s motive stays a hypothesis rather than a stated certainty, the very structure of Zirian’s mission – breaking the chains that seal the Clock Tower – runs on the same principle: freeing time, literally, as an act that’s both a rescue for his sister and a reckoning with a grief the game never stops keeping open.
On a register tied more to worldbuilding than to grief in the strict sense, the scattered references to the Twelve leave open a question worth asking more than answering: a handful of environmental clues, dealt out sparingly along the way and culminating in an area called the Scriptorium of the Twelve, hint at a closer connection than expected between that legend and Zirian’s own family – Gramps included. Duskfade doesn’t give this reviewer, roughly halfway through the adventure, enough to go past the question, but it’s a thread worth flagging for anyone planning to keep exploring beyond this point.
Solid Platforming Among Gears and Clock-Hand Blades
Movement remains the pillar Weird Beluga builds the whole experience on, matching what Tomás Manzano Sobrido said about wanting Zirian to feel like he’s gliding through the world, chaining actions without ever losing momentum: the double jump with a roll, the grappling hook Arpeggio hands over later, rail grinding, and finally the Pendulum, which allows wider swings, all arrive on a carefully calibrated curve, introducing a new tool right as the previous one starts to show its limits.
The pure platforming sections, the ones built around the Timeflux Channelers and the rotating gear platforms, remain the ground where this design philosophy proves most convincing, because they let the rhythm of movement guide the player’s attention instead of forcing it with artificial obstacles.
At the center of every fight sits Minutero, Gramps’s sword, shaped literally like a clock hand: a weapon that transforms right alongside Zirian. The upgrade system, running on Star Shards and Upgrade Gears collected while exploring, branches out across several fronts – Minutero, abilities, gadgets, even Cuckoo each get their own upgrade tree – and the weapon’s first level jump quickly opens the door to a series of later forms, each built for a different approach to combat: the Pendulum, unlocked halfway through the adventure, extends its reach and turns it into a tool that’s as offensive as it is mobility-focused, since the first real combos depend on this very form. Rounding out the picture is a dodge that, timed right, slows the flow of time for an instant and opens a precious window for a counterattack – a mechanic that ties combat to the game’s central theme far more than a plain parry system ever could. As with the rest of Zirian’s kit, the weapon’s progression follows a careful rhythm, and every new form arrives right as the previous one starts showing its limits – the same design principle behind the movement system, applied here to the offensive side.
Combat as a whole follows a declaredly different logic from movement, one Esteban Marin Illana describes as grafting contemporary action mechanics – the reactive dodge just described chief among them – onto a base inspired by Ratchet & Clank and Kingdom Hearts: in practice, that graft feels late to arrive, since real combos don’t show up before the halfway point, when the Pendulum enters the picture, leaving the early hours to lean on a thin moveset and fights that repeat more than they should.
It’s in the boss fights that the system finds its clearest identity, helped by Weird Beluga’s choice – one Ricardo Chorques Mesa points to as a balance the team is proudest of – to alternate frantic combat phases with platforming sections where speed and precision matter as much as attacking: against Wrath, the first real test, blue orbs get countered by knocking them straight back, while three separate chase phases up the rocks demand reaching the boss as fast as possible – the third one also needs the grappling hook – or else facing a counterattack that’s nearly impossible to dodge. The fight against Sadness in the Amphitheater of Tears, built around jumping across unstable bubbles to break pendulum clocks within a time limit – with failure draining energy over time and triggering tremors that throw off movement – pushes the same philosophy until it tips, at points, into pure execution-based frustration rather than the satisfaction of clearing a real challenge.
On the exploration front, Tick Town works as a hub leading to zones with strongly distinct identities – from Mount Cinder in flames to the Ezarus Forest, all the way to Meridian Village with its optional minigames – each one scattered with collectibles tied to progression, from Star Shards acting as currency to Star Core Fragments and Clock Heart Pieces, which expand energy and health respectively. Among the more curious collectibles are the Rainbow Ingots, which recolor Minutero: customization that goes well beyond the purely aesthetic, since it also affects the weapon’s stats, tying the cosmetic side to progression in a way that makes hunting them all appealing even to players who usually skip purely decorative collectibles.
What’s missing is a map, and the Guide Bells only point toward the story’s main direction, so returning precisely to an already-visited spot turns into an exercise in memory more than orientation: for a game that invests this heavily in discovery, it’s a choice that breeds more disorientation than curiosity, especially in less linear areas like the ones around the Great Library.
A World Painted Without a Sun
Visually, Duskfade keeps the promise made since the earliest launch materials: the clockpunk setting, with its exposed gears and architecture suspended between the mechanical and the fairy-tale, rests on an art direction that favors painting over photorealism, a choice that stands out most in the wider vistas, where light seems poured onto surfaces rather than calculated by a physics engine. The environments carry that same care down to the smallest detail – vegetation, baskets, lanterns, crystals, destructible objects filling every corner – to the point that zones feel lived-in even when no script animates them directly, thanks to set-dressing work rarely seen in a production this size. Zirian himself, along with the main bosses, moves with a frame count higher than the project’s scale would suggest, and that translates into movement transitions that stay readable even in the most chaotic moments.
Not everything holds up equally well, though: bloom goes overboard more than once, to the point where reflective surfaces and shop signs produce a glare that clashes with the delicacy of the overall palette, while lighting in some areas introduces artifacts that distract more than they enhance the scene. Combat lock-on, too, doesn’t always keep up with the speed the enemy variety demands, complicating exactly the fights where the camera should stay a quiet ally.
Worth noting, finally, that this marks Weird Beluga’s first project to debut on the Xbox ecosystem alongside PC, PlayStation 5, and Switch 2 at launch, a detail that makes it even more notable that visual quality holds essentially steady across platforms, without the compromises that usually come with a multiplatform debut this size for a studio this small.
On the audio side, the soundtrack composed by Rafa del Olmo spans nearly thirty tracks and alternates an orchestral core with electronic touches and metal or ethnic textures, following a leitmotif system that gives a distinct theme to every character and every biome. It’s a choice that clearly aims for variety, and on that front the result holds up: change area, and the musical register changes with it, and some boss fights even earn a more aggressive, almost rock-leaning accompaniment that stands out sharply from everything else.
This reviewer, though, holds a personal reservation worth stating rather than hiding behind false neutrality: the orchestral inspiration winking at Kingdom Hearts slips, for my taste, far too often into Disney-soundtrack territory, to the point of becoming the element of the experience I struggled with the most. It’s a personal stance, far from unanimous, but I’m flagging it because it weighed on my time in Tick Town, and not lightly.
A Small Team Behind a Big Project
The toughest jump for Weird Beluga has less to do with the setting than with the technical language the team had built its experience around: moving from Clid the Snail’s fixed, top-down twin-stick camera to Duskfade’s freely controllable view, the studio had to rethink from scratch how levels, fights, and attacks stay readable no matter where the player happens to be looking – a problem that, for a team used to always knowing what the camera would frame, demanded a real shift in approach.
Cuckoo, too, comes out of a considered design choice rather than an aesthetic flourish: the team weighed several options, from direct character control to issuing commands during fights, before settling on an autonomous AI that decides on its own when to attack and which enemies to target, leaving the player only the option to upgrade its abilities as the adventure goes on. That choice answers a specific need the team stated outright: keeping a world built to convey the effects of catastrophe and the passage of time from also feeling cold or lonely, and handing the bond with Cuckoo the job of softening that feeling.
The same principle of readability guides enemy design: Weird Beluga worked less on unpredictability and more on expressiveness, trying to make every enemy type feel like a character with its own personality rather than a collection of attack patterns, tuning wind-up times, movement rhythms, and recovery windows around a specific emotional goal – some enemies keep pressing the player to make them feel hunted, others hang back waiting for an opening.
The artistic work probably hides the most unusual challenge of the whole project: since the sun doesn’t exist in Duskfade’s world, the team had to design up to five different lighting setups for every major area, so that revisiting an already-explored zone would genuinely feel like a place changed by time. On top of that come shaders built specifically to reinforce the hand-painted look and careful control over saturation and contrast to stay clear of photorealism, along with techniques like rim lighting and color composition aimed at keeping enemy silhouettes readable even in the most crowded combat arenas.
On the technical front, keeping performance stable across every platform demanded an optimization effort that started with Steam Deck as a benchmark, a choice the team says also smoothed out the port to Nintendo Switch 2, which arrived even before the console’s hardware reached the studio. Among the ideas dropped along the way, Weird Beluga mentions a time-rewind mechanic able to reverse the movement of enemies, environment, and player: an idea that fit the clockpunk theme but got shelved for suiting a puzzle-focused platformer better than the action structure the game had already settled into.
Holding all these choices together is a firm stance on AI use in development, one narrative designer Ricardo Chorques Mesa has stated more than once: the studio rejects it outright, claiming every asset in the game as the product of hand-made work.
Verdict
Duskfade proves just as honest as it looked in its first trailer: it doesn’t promise to reinvent the third-person action-platformer, and it doesn’t, but it executes, with a level of care rarely seen in a production this size, a formula that hasn’t had much room in the contemporary landscape since the days of Jak and Daxter and the early Kingdom Hearts games.
The game wins players over most clearly through its movement, calibrated around tools that always arrive exactly when the player starts needing them, and through its art direction, built on five lighting setups for every major area – no nostalgia appeal required.
Combat, on the other hand, struggles to keep the same pace for a good stretch of the adventure, held back by a moveset that only fills out at the halfway point, while the missing map remains a design choice hard to justify for a title that invests this heavily in discovering secrets and collectibles. The game largely manages to offset these limits once the boss fights hit their stride between platforming and action, and once the writing, past its more cautious first half, finds room to tackle grief and family legacy with a sincerity the fairy-tale packaging didn’t fully let on.
Weird Beluga, backed by its outspoken rejection of AI shortcuts and by handcrafted work you can feel in every scene you pass through, shows real production maturity with Duskfade, and it’s genuinely striking that a team this small managed to reach this level of complexity and care.
Thanks to Fireshine Games and Weird Beluga for providing the PlayStation 5 code used for this review.
Duskfade
PRO
- Hand-painted art direction, backed by lighting work that changes the face of areas you’ve already visited
- Fluid, well-calibrated movement
- Boss fights that effectively alternate combat and platforming
- Writing that tackles grief and family legacy with sincerity and depth
CON
- Repetitive combat in the early hours, held back by a thin moveset until combos arrive
- No map, with Guide Bells pointing only toward the story’s main direction
- A soundtrack that, varied as it is, slips for this reviewer’s taste into a register too close to Kingdom Hearts
8.2/10
