Duet Night Abyss: This Free-to-Play Genshin Impact and Warframe Hybrid Deserves Your Attention

While Genshin Impact and Warframe are two widely different genres, mixing them together gives you Duet Night Abyss, an anime hack-and-slash looter shooter with a lot of promise.

Mixing popular genres sounds pretty common nowadays, so why does it deserve your attention? Well, Pan Studio, the team behind Duet Night Abyss, originally planned to have a gacha system on its weapons and characters, and even a stamina system mostly seen in typical gacha games, but they are now all given for free to serve a better gameplay experience, along with a revamped and more user-friendly monetization system.

Duet Night Abyss Almost Has Everything You Can Ever Ask For in an Action RPG

Many potentially great games have been hindered by poor monetization systems that rely on gacha mechanics that restrict much of the content behind a paywall or rely on pure randomness. With every character and weapon attainable for free, it still means you have to unlock them, adding more to the daily grind.

I’d say the change is a good thing, providing a more complete experience, and it felt eerily similar to looter shooters like Warframe and The First Descendant, while still retaining some elements reminiscent of a game like Genshin Impact.

With that out of the way, the game’s dual-narrative story provides a unique and immersive experience, further enhanced by one of the best VA casts in any game, especially if you are into watching anime and suddenly hear all these familiar voices when switching to the JP voice-overs.

You can tell there’s a lot of investment into the characters, but even more so with their customization. Right at the start, you’ll find many mechanics revolving around character power. As someone who plays a variety of games throughout the year and is used to learning everything from scratch, I felt overwhelmed with all the materials in the game.

There are materials for forging weapons, smelting upgrades, upgrading skills, upgrading characters, Introns, Demon Wedges, upgrading Demon Wedges, and more. These don’t even cover the consumables and Geniemons.

There’s a lot of depth into the customization because of it, giving way to more potential builds for the character. However, it is also what makes it hard to understand that they really could’ve condensed these mechanics even further for a more streamlined experience. You don’t want to farm two or three areas to farm different materials just for upgrading a single skill. This is one of the main reasons I mentioned “almost has everything” – complexity is great only if it doesn’t feel unnecessary.

Running through the story is highly enjoyable, though. The hack-and-slash feels satisfying, and experimenting with different characters and builds will surely enhance and prolong the game’s replayability. The grind can be a bit rough, especially if you aren’t used to these types of games, but Duet Night Abyss surely deserves a shot not just to hack-and-slash or looter shooter fans, but any fan of a good action RPG.

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