The gaming industry operates by its own, sometimes cruel, rules. One of them is that if a project achieves resounding success and player engagement, the market is immediately flooded with its clones. Some are inspired, trying to bring something new of their own. Others blindly copy, hoping to snag a piece of the pie without putting their heart into it. Unfortunately, Duet Night Abyss (DNA) from Pan Studio seems to fall into the latter category.
This project initially evoked mixed feelings from the potential playerbase. The 2023 announcement, with its anime aesthetic and overt references to the iconic Warframe, made the hearts of fans of the genre beat a bit faster. “Look, it’s Titania! And there’s Misa!” – these were the enthusiastic comments that accompanied the very first teaser. Upon entering the game, we even see ALMOST 1:1 copies of the Warframe guns. Seriously, the developers didn’t even try to come up with anything of their own.
The promise of “gacha without gacha,” with no more lost 50/50s, the bold rejection of the hated energy system, and the focus on pure action—all of this created the image of a brave revolutionary in a field of tired free-to-play tropes. But, what about optimistic expectations and promises versus the harsh reality?
The very first closed beta test in February revealed the truth: behind the pretty veneer lurked a crude, technically flawed, and gameplay-poor product. Optimization, combat, story, the promised “advanced” movement—everything was done in a half-baked manner. It seemed the project needed years of refinement. And then—surprise! Instead of a lengthy hiatus, DNA triumphantly launched. The development team claimed that everything had been fixed, all the lacking areas had been improved, and all the controversial mechanics had been consigned to the dustbin of history.
But was that true? Let’s take a look at what this ambitious undertaking ultimately turned into.
Any RPG thrives on story. DNA tries to approach it non-linearly, switching between two protagonists. It sounds interesting, but in practice, it simply doesn’t work. The writers seem to have dumped a full collection of the usual tropes on the players: the generation gap, social inequality, the main characters’ mysterious past, and the infuriating mascot whose only function is to yell clichés in their ears.
Of course, things simply can’t go without the protagonist’s memory loss. The narrative predictability reaches absurd levels: the climax of each arc can be guessed even as you get to know its characters. There are no unexpected twists, heart-wrenching tragic moments, or even clever exposition. The world and its inhabitants are flat and fail to evoke empathy.
The only ray of light in this kingdom of narrative darkness is the character of Officer Rhythm. Her arc is written with a keen sense of drama: there’s motivation, personal growth, conflict, and a fitting conclusion. But a single strong character can’t carry an entire story.
Especially compared to its competitors, projects like Path to Nowhere, Nikke and Reverse: 1999 have already mastered the art of shocking and engaging players from the very first hours, DNA falls flat even compared to the rather weak plot of Wuthering Waves’ first chapter.
DNA’s visuals are… just about okay. And that’s its main problem. The locations look decent, but derivative (the central city seems like it was ripped straight from Honkai: Star Rail’s Belobog). The characters are cute, but their animations are quite wooden and clunky, showing that the developers didn’t pay enough attention to one of the most important elements of the anime style.
The enemies, however, are downright depressing. For the game’s first act, the designers prepared 3-4 types of Filthoids and a couple of humanoids. The lack of visual diversity among the enemies is a sure sign that the world wasn’t created with much love or imagination. There is nothing overtly ugly, but the game has not a single memorable detail either.
While the plot and graphics can be a subject of hot debates, DNA’s technical side is a death sentence. Built on Unreal Engine 4, the game exhibits a number of flaws that would have been unforgivable even five years ago. Crashes out of nowhere, presumably due to memory leaks, became my constant companions on this journey.
But the worst of all were the monstrous input lags, which occurred completely randomly: whether fighting a horde of monsters or a lone boss. It felt like you were controlling your character via satellite. The apotheosis of technical impotence were the cutscenes in the city. The developers managed to implement a system where each new scripted scene required a complete unloading and subsequent loading of the entire location.
Here we come to DNA’s most painful comparison—to Warframe. Its digital shadows can be found everywhere, but it’s in the movement system that the differences between the original and the copy are the most acute. Warframe has long been the benchmark for mobility in its genre. Its movement system, perfected over the years, is a graceful and high-speed dance. Bullet jumps, sliding, rolling, and aim glide are not just a set of buttons, but a language that the player uses to speak with the gameplay environment.
DNA, on the other hand, tries to memorize this language, but speaks with a terrible accent and muddles its words. Helix Jump is a pale shadow of a bullet jump: slow, short, and lacking the same rush of acceleration. Rolls are limited in number, and their animation completely destroys any momentum gained. Gliding is useless and provides no speed boost, even on slopes.
Aim Glide has become completely absurd: due to auto-firing while aiming, you have to constantly reload mid-flight just to glide. The result is that instead of graceful flight, you get clumsy spamming of the same jump. Some characters mitigate this problem a little, but basic movement in DNA is a punishment, not a pleasure. The inability to attack in the air with a melee weapon is a fatal mistake for an action game. This is especially pronounced in the fight with the Psyche boss, where during the flight phase you can only run around helplessly if your ammo is running low.
DNA’s entire gameplay loop reflects the same problem and can be summed up in one phrase: “press two buttons, then spam an attack, repeat until victory.” There’s no depth whatsoever. The arsenal is limited: two active abilities and one passive per character. This is woefully inadequate for creating interesting builds. Your gameplay style doesn’t even evolve as you level up and get stronger, either. At level 50, you’re doing the same thing as at level 5. Some heroes (like Rebecca) even reduce their participation to summoning pets (3 jellyfish with AoE damage) and then AFK.
In Warframe, the lion’s share of tactics is built on combinations of elements and statuses. You can turn an ordinary bow into a beast that explodes half the map, but only has 5 projectiles, or you can make a rapid-fire rifle that fries any living creature with electricity and toxin, it all depends only on the choice of mods. In DNA, this is completely absent. Everything comes down to three types of physical damage. And, without a complex damage system, mods cannot be interesting. They turn into boring “+HP”, “+to damage”, without offering room for creativity.
The most ironic thing about DNA is its attempt to pass itself off as a progressive project by abandoning gacha features. But the devil, as always, is in the details. Having removed one form of player exploitation, the developers simply erected another.
The farming and grinding is tailored to boosters. The resource extraction system is designed in such a way that, without purchased loot boosters, you get only pitiful crumbs. Free boosters, generously handed out at the beginning, are a hint: “Playing without donations is for masochists.” Meanwhile, farming the boosters themselves is practically impossible.
All the best items are hidden behind the Relic (Letter) system. You need to buy a Relic, complete a mission for it, decrypt it, and only then receive a random reward. The chance of getting the main prize (a character shard or a blueprint) is a paltry 10%. The Relic sources are strictly limited (5 rewards per week from all bosses). In an ideal scenario, collecting a fully upgraded character (and for their full power, duplicates are required, like Rhythm) can take up to nine months.
All this brings us to the actual monetization system. The removal of pulls turned out to be a trap. Now the developers are simply offering to buy everything directly. And here are the costs of these “direct” purchases:
- To unlock a character, you need 30 of that character’s Thoughts. Each Thought costs 150 Phoxene Plumules, making one character cost a total of 4500 Phoxene Plumules.
- The full character upgrade (the initial character drop + 6 duplicates) will amount to 31500 Plumules.
- The cheapest way to make your way to buying a character/dupe would be purchasing the Lunotress’s Monthly Pass for $4.99. Over the course of a month, it grants a total of 3,000 Plumules, so you’d need 2 months to get one character or 10 months to max one character.
- Purchasing Plumules directly would mean buying 5 of the priciest Plumule packs, each of them $99.99. The weapon prices are not far behind.
Duet Night Abyss isn’t a bad game, it’s a cautionary tale about how not to make a game.
Warframe created a complex, interconnected ecosystem of mechanics. Movement, combat, and leveling don’t exist separately; they synergistically enhance each other. Meanwhile, Duet Night Abyss borrowed mechanics selectively and superficially. They exist as separate, unrelated checklist items. Helix Jump is present, but it’s not integrated into the gameplay loop. There are missions reminiscent of Warframe, but they are poorly executed, without regard for their own systems.
The arguments of the game’s few defenders—”it’s Early Access,” “Warframe also had a bad start,” “we have to wait”—fall flat against the harsh reality of release and the ultra-aggressive monetization models that were implemented immediately. The removal of gacha for characters is a tactical move that tries to mask that. The result is a hybrid model: on one hand, brutal grinding, on the other, a paid “skip function” for a huge price. In an attempt to avoid criticism and competition for its gacha approach when there are bigger games out there, DNA created a system that didn’t eliminate the problems, but rather mutated them into a form that’s even less bearable.
