Prelude Dark Pain Preview: A Classic RPG in Need of Polish

Prelude Dark Pain is being released into Early Access, which means that the game is still in development and should be receiving regular updates as it progresses toward a not-yet-revealed full release date. When you first start playing, it does feel like an unfinished game, but I play a lot of Early Access games, and it's not in a state that's unplayable. It's just that you can tell this is an unfinished product, and for some players, that can be enough to make you decide to wait for a later version and see how far it's come.

Set in the dark fantasy world of Statera, you play a warrior-turned-blacksmith named Soren who gets thrown into an uprising against the Order of the Ashen Crusade after your wife is taken and about to be blamed for an event she wasn't part of. From here, you have to recruit allies, gain strength, improve your gear, and help the Blue Nets bring the Order of the Ashen Crusade down.

Your Journey Has a Slow Start

The first thing that struck me about Prelude Dark Pain is that the opening is quite slow. It's not slow in the sense that nothing is happening, but the problem is that you start with multiple unavoidable battles in a row, and it gets tedious. While I understand that this is a tutorial section, it drags out so long that I was worried that this would be the pace throughout the entire game. It isn't, thankfully.

After the series of fights, you get your first stop in a town. This gives you the chance to learn about blacksmithing and how you can upgrade, dismantle, and craft gear to strengthen your party. From here, you're able to leave the town and go onto the world map, which is a welcome shift at this point. The style of the map puts you at a distance, so you aren't exploring everything up close the way you might in open-world RPGs like The Witcher.

The pacing feels way better when you get out of the tutorial section and leave the first town. At this point, you're able to take side quests and decide if you want to attempt to avoid battles by avoiding the enemy characters on the map. You're also able to find spots that prompt an interaction, allowing you to find materials that could be used for improving your gear later.

Combat Is The Focal Point of Prelude Dark Pain

As a tactical RPG, you might not be surprised to find that most of the game revolves around combat. Even when you get the chance to move around the map and not fight every enemy, you're still going to spend most of your time in combat. The actual combat is turn-based, but it's closer to the style you see in games like Fire Emblem and Baldur's Gate, where movement is part of combat, rather than turn-based games like Final Fantasy 10, where you decide abilities and can swap out party members, but not change positioning.

I actually like this style of turn-based combat, but to be fair, I enjoy turn-based in general. It feels more rewarding than a hack-and-slash combat style, especially when you struggle with a difficult encounter and finally beat it. Prelude Dark Pain rewards you for learning what each character's abilities are, the range of each attack, and how to budget your points. You also get a lot of variety regarding how you want to customize your characters' role in combat. Not a lot at the beginning, but as you progress, you're able to start tailoring your party to suit your playstyle.

Because you need experience to get points to improve abilities and skills, I recommend fighting every enemy you can on the map. It's tedious, and you might get frustrated at how long combat can drag out, but this is how you're going to get experience and materials for gear. I tend to find that it's better to consistently gain experience and materials, so I'm ready for harder fights later, rather than wait until I reach an encounter I can't beat, then have to go back and grind until I'm stronger.

A Classic RPG Feel

From the beginning, Prelude Dark Pain gives me the feeling of older RPGs from the '80s and '90s. The world is depressing, and people are just trying to survive while a faction causes problems, and now opposing factions appear. You end up getting drawn into the conflict even though you wanted to live a simple life, taking up arms against the evil faction. Also, there's magic and dragons. I felt like there are all the hallmarks of a classic fantasy adventure.

As for the story, you have some control over how events unfold in Statera. There are points where you have to make a decision, and what you choose at that point will impact later events. I believe that deciding to do side quests might have an impact as well, but I'm certain that I haven't gone through every variation on that front.

My Hope for the Future

As an Early Access game, Prelude Dark Pain is going to enter the phase of development where players are able to offer opinions that are likely to be heard, and possibly acted upon, by the devs. I would like to add opinions from my own experience in-game so far to help make this the best possible version of itself.

I had a lot of stuttering. It was the worst when the camera zoomed in on a character during combat when they executed their turn. When the camera zoomed in, then zoomed out, I had fairly consistent stuttering with the game image. While I played, it was a minor annoyance, but as somebody who gets regular migraines, I could see that being a problem if I was already getting the start of one.

Also, I'd love to have dialogue options, even if it's just to add flavor to conversations without changing the overall outcome. I would feel more engaged with conversations this way and less likely to skip through them, but it also gives you a deeper connection with the world. I'd also like to be able to expedite the opening section, because if you've played similar games, then the combat is easy enough to learn and the number of battles you have to go through is unnecessary.

It's early, but I'm hopeful for the game, and I look forward to seeing how it changes over time. I really enjoyed the art style, and it reminded me a lot of Don't Starve. The combat is satisfying once you're able to start adjusting your party and skills to suit your style, which is great for a game that has such a heavy focus on combat. Overall, I think that Prelude Dark Pain is off to a good start, but it's definitely still a work in progress.