Duskfade

Duskfade dropped across every major platform on August 13, 2026. This 3D action platformer from Weird Beluga follows a kid named Zirian and a mechanical bird named Cuckoo trying to rescue his sister from a clock tower that has trapped the world in eternal night. Jump, slash, jump more, collect crystals, fight bad guys, break the chains locking the tower, jump around some more. None of that will feel unfamiliar if you grew up on PS2-era games like Kingdom Hearts or Jak and Daxter, and that lineage is not subtle. Duskfade is essentially a new PS2 game built in 2026.

Zirian lives in Tick Town with his sister Allira. Something breaks in the workshop, a clock tower erupts in the middle of everything, and the world freezes at dusk. Zirian grabs his grandfather’s sword, a clockwork blade called Minutero, teams up with the little mechanical bird Cuckoo, and sets out to save the town and his sister. Platforming collect-a-thon, Kingdom Hearts-flavored combat, familiar villain and hero shapes, themes borrowed loosely from the genre it is paying tribute to.

Some people online knock it for wearing its influences so openly. I do not see it that way. This is not trying to replace Kingdom Hearts or Jak and Daxter. Play it and it reads as a love letter to old platforming-action games, built inside a genuinely new world worth exploring. Better than the games it is bowing to? No. There are moments where you can see through the curtain, flaws I wish had gone differently. I chalk most of that up to team size. From what I can find, Weird Beluga is around ten people. If that holds, what they built with that few hands is impressive.

I played the demo earlier this year and worried it needed more polish. The finished build has noticeably more. Cannot fully prove that is not placebo or a different monitor, but it feels sharper. Good sign. You brace for “just an indie game,” then hit the first world and it is huge and well designed. Clearly a talented team with real artistic vision, and the level design is obviously where the hours went. At points it feels like walking through a fantasy theme park, the way Disney World felt as a kid. Character designs are childishly cute in a way that sounds like an insult and is not; it looks like the people who made this still remember drawing on notebook paper, then got good enough to build a whole world around it. It has a sense of humor too: a sleeping cloud guy in world one hopes nobody breaks his crystal-filled pots because that is how he is paying for college. Small touches like that give it real personality, and the unique cloud characters scattered around take real mapping effort you can easily miss if you are not looking.

Combat is the weak point, and I agree with the general internet take. I want a parry. I played on Hard, which has real bite; inattention gets you walloped. That is not the same as the combat being satisfying. Harder difficulty mostly just means enemies hit harder. Kingdom Hearts has that locked-in flow. Duskfade is visibly working toward it and is not there yet.

The other soft spot is the shop. You collect a lot of crystals, since this doubles as a collect-a-thon, and the store does not offer enough to spend them on until well into the game, at which point you still do not have enough for the handful of items available. More variety in the shop would help combat feel less stale during the long stretches between upgrades and new abilities.

Voice acting in cutscenes is minimal, and you will wish for more of it. A lot of the story and backstory comes through text boxes, including an eerie mystery you piece together through discovered memories. I wanted those voiced instead of paired with ghostly ambient noise over text.

None of that ruins the game. These read as places that would get stronger with a bigger team or more resources, so I cannot really fault them for it. I highly recommend picking this up, especially if you grew up on PS2 action-platformers or Kingdom Hearts. This is the kind of team and game worth supporting, partly because it is small and independent, and more because this is the kind of world I want to see more of, from them and from the genre generally.