Soulframe has the bones of a great action-RPG, but I’m enjoying it partly because it feels too late to enjoy Warframe

Thoughts from a few hours in Digital Extremes' pre-alpha prelude

I've been trying to work out if I'm keen on Soulframe only because I feel guilty about missing the boat with Warframe. I reviewed Digital Extremes' hit free-to-play shooter in 2013, back when people were still calling it a spiritual successor to the developer's boomerang-throwing action game Dark Sector. I didn't like Warframe much at the time. Think I gave it a 6/10. Warp forward a decade, and that 6/10 game has become a thriving live service phenomenon - fifteenth on the Steam Most Played charts at the time of writing, and profitable enough to spawn its own annual TennoCon expo. It's also become an intoxicating, confusing morass of dynastic sci-fantasy politicking and genre-shifting expansions, ranging from capital ship mechanics to questions of time travel, wrapped in layers of cosmetics that make Destiny look about as colourful as Gears Of War.

I definitely didn't see all that coming. I doubt Digital Extremes saw it coming either. Warframe today feels like a lab experiment run amok. I love its appetite for novelty, but there's a lot for a returning player to catch up on and, frankly, it feels like homework. As such, I had a couple of broad motivations for playing Soulframe's pre-alpha "prelude": I'm keen to see what Digital Extremes can do when they aren't encumbered by 10 years of world-building, and I want to get in on the ground floor before they absolutely swamp this thing in updates.

The question is whether Soulframe will grow in quite such a chaotic manner, given that - as I've somewhat belaboured in previous articles - it feels like a reaction against the sheer busyness of Warframe. Right now, it's a quieter, slower action-RPG set in a storybook fantasy realm, where you play an outcast warrior battling an army of ecocidal imperialists on behalf of kindly/monstrous Mother Nature. The prelude quests and areas see you rescuing various garrulous ancestral spirits, who then serve as blacksmiths, archivists and the like in a portable campfire dimension, the Nightfold, which you can access everywhere by flopping backward through the veil.

The prelude takes place in a coastal open world area, where you'll currently find scattered enemy campsites, ruins with treasure chests, and some larger castles or towns. Beneath the open world lurk "living" dungeons created using procedural generation, which currently consist of mildly mazey sunken cities linked by cyclopean passages, where the surrounding stone occasionally shifts and splits as though in pain. Searching these spaces for weapon blueprints and crafting materials is a focus, but not an overpowering one. I've spent most of few hours in the prelude contemplating the foliage, following my magic sparrow waypointer toward promising silhouettes on the skyline, listening to friendly ghosts say weird shit about old kings, and getting into leisurely fights with various knights, archers and enslaved magical animals.

Soulframe has splendid atmosphere. The prelude area is a sleepy paradise of wooded crags, winding brooks, thatched roofs and parapets. It's a place of thick sunlight and vapour: there's a full day-night cycle but it always feels like dawn or dusk. While nowhere near as rewarding to explore, the landscape is reminiscent of Elden Ring's early Limgrave stretches both in the golden ambience and in the presence of aimless invading soldiers, who have set up poisonous braziers and clockwork gargoyles that fill the streams with quicksilver.

The costumes and interiors share Warframe's opulence, with quilted cloth capes and armour that seem more appropriate to a harvest ritual than battle, but the opulence is relatively contained - at this stage in development, anyway - which gives individual pieces a chance to impress (I really love my cape). There's also not a lot of people around at the minute, but the "Ode" enemies you fight have an amusing personality, squawking at you in their harsh, theocratic jargon as they advance brandishing curved swords and maces.

If the staging is dreamier - your character visibly rises from pastoral slumber every time you log in - the melee focus is what really sets Soulframe apart from Warframe. The basics are basic: light and heavy attacks, a block and parry and a dodge. But they're persuasively executed, with a discreet autolock that has yet to wrongfoot me, and some muscular, graceful animations that make a well-timed counter feel appropriately triumphant. Little touches sell it: when you defeat a warhound, there's a nifty context-sensitive move where you knock away its helm to allow the beast to run free.

Aside from performing combos, you can lob your blade and call it back to your hand Thor-style, a superheroic flourish that also lets you slice cables to drop chandeliers and the like on approaching goons. You also get magic abilities (inexhaustible, but with a cooldown) in the shape of three spell slots, with options ranging from a forcefield to a linear earthquake spell that feels like bowling at skittles. Another little touch: when exiting spellcaster mode, your magic orb tumbles to earth behind you with a dink and dematerialises.

Exactly which magic you get is determined along with your stats by your choice of supernatural Pact, which you can swap out and upgrade at any point by flopping backward into the Nightfold. I've played with two Pacts thus far, one geared for stealth and sorcery, the other for no-nonsense stabbing and resilience. I imagine that, as with Warframe's warframes, the developers will carry on adding to their number while carving off other bits to sell as cosmetics in the course of Soulframe's voyage across the tumultuous waters of live service.

Speaking as no great fan of live service games, I'm interested to see how Soulframe evolves as it opens up to more and more players (the game seems to be in the throes of a very drawn-out soft launch, with more people being added to the prelude as time goes by). What I want from it right now is greater intrigue: in particular, deeper, more purposeful dungeon and ruin design than the visually enveloping but functionally bland offerings in the prelude. I want spaces on par with Sen's Fortress in Dark Souls.

Beyond that, it's going to be fascinating to compare Soulframe's evolution with that of Warframe. After all, it has the knowledge of Warframe's evolution to learn from - will it pursue similar wild reinventions, or are the fundamentals sturdy enough this time that Soulframe can gestate more elegantly, perhaps boringly? How much of what I've written above will hold true in a decade's time? Assuming RPS hasn't disappeared beneath the ocean by then, will some other writer introduce a preview by admitting that they feel like they missed the boat with Soulframe?