Game Review - Duet Night Abyss

Game Review: Duet Night Abyss by Pan Studio, published by Hong Kong Spiral Rising Technology Co., Limited

Score: +12/-6 and WARNNIG

"Duet Night Abyss is a fantasy adventure RPG with a high degree of freedom. The game features "Multiple Weapon Loadouts x 3D Combat" at its core, and tells the story of "Demons" from dual perspectives."

Duet Night Abyss (DNA) looks like just another gacha game with a lot of game modes copied from other popular games like Honkai Star Rail and even a bit of Pokemon, but it also does a lot of core things very differently.

The combat is very easy and the game doesn't try to control your time as rigorously as other gachas with FOMO use-it-or-lose-it "energy" mechanics limiting your activity, so it's good for casuals and especially people who don't have regular daily play time but want to instead binge now and again when they have the time to really play/catch up.

Because DNA will be compared to other gachas, we'll be scoring it compared to them instead of simply scoring mechanics.

• WARNING In-game probabilities may be fake
• There are "Covert Commissions" you need to do to get a chance of blueprints needed, but the stated 10% chance of getting a blueprint is likely fake and the actual chance is much smaller.
• That 10% is probably not a straight 10% chance but the chance that one of the three rewards you get to choose from will be the Tier I blueprint you need.
• Even so, a probability close to 10% is really not observed.
• Of course there are edge cases in random samples so it's hard to prove, but over hundreds of cases, the probability should start to stabilize. But really it doesn't.
• It's probable that the 10% was overly generous and they adjusted it because people were grinding them too fast.
• This seems most visible in Demon Wedge Commissions which are probably the last tier of endgame and character power creep.
• Combat
• -1 Too-easy combat
• Literally a button masher and I'm up to the level 40-ish stage of the story. You just mash basic attack whenever you are out of energy to use your skills.
• You can defeat bosses 20+ levels above your own in the early game.
• This gap starts to close later and you will need to develop more aspects of your character to keep up with what you can unlock in the weekly boss fights/Nocturnal Echoes.
• Fortunately this is good because the major boss fights have mechanics that are difficult to doge and/or outright confusing as to what to do (e.g., Beast of the Snowfield where you are told to destroy the weapons to weaken the shield but the weapons just keep respawning so you might as well just attack the shield directly?)
• -1 Too much movement in melee.
• Enemies get flung around too much and you are constantly chasing them instead of finishing your combos.
• You can only lock onto special bosses. So against even unmoving objects, each normal attack causes you to be moved so much that you constantly have to realign yourself to face the object again for another attack.
• Because of this movement, falling off ledges is common when fighting enemies who are near ledges.
• -1 Bullet-sponge enemies starting around level 70 Commissions, especially with the Elites that spawn. Takes forever to whittle down their health.
• There are "elements" that you can occasionally use to your advantage, but only in certain content.
• -0 Unbalanced combat abilities
• Some characters like Rebecca (that you get early game for free) have crazy powerful abilities like an area-of-effect damage-over-time that can melt enemy mobs shortly after they enter it. This is almost The First Descendent (TFD) levels of farming power.
• Fortunately the effect on actual bosses is limited as those have piles of health, unlike TFD.
• The game likes to throw large amounts of endless trash mobs at you, so this is actually probably intended.
• +1 Few timed fights.
• This is huge. Most games give you power creep and then try to "challenge" you with timed fights, but this just deprecates non-DPS characters as the timer becomes more and more challenging.
• The main timed combat is "Immersive Theatre", where two full teams progress through a series of timed combat missions.
• There are other timed missions (Escort and Dismantle) but those are focused on tasks and generally you just race through instead of having to finish a fight in time.
• +1 No rush for character development.
• For example, there are weekly limited boss fights (Nocturnal Echoes) and in other games you always want to do the hardest unlocked fight because you get the most rewards.
• But in DNA, if you can't handle the hardest fights, that's not a problem because you get the same number of skill-upgrade materials as the lower difficulty fights and the other rewards (materials toward unlocking weapons and characters) are different and unique to that difficulty tier.
• So there are two very important aspects:
• Lower level content is still relevant.
• There is no real rush to maximize your fighting ability.
• +1 Endgame content for combat (and whales willing to spend for character progression) is Immersive Theatre's Immortal Repertoire with the toughest fights with the harshest modifiers. Where DNA is different:
• Instead of giving you cash shop currency (like many other games), this just gives faster access to certain characters and weapons which will eventually be rotated out into easier content. So there's really no huge rush to do a game mode you might not really like.
• The early part of Theatre has the best rewards. The hardest sections only reward additional currency instead of anything unique.
• +1 No randomized stats.
• This is HUGE. It respects your time.
• In other games, you can grind to get a piece of gear and then spend huge amounts of resources upgrading it, only for the randomized substats to be terrible, wasting everything.
• +1 Solo friendly. It looks like there's matchmaking and there technically is a multiplayer environment, but you don't have to interact with it.
• For players who want control of their time, solo live-service games are some of the best gaming options: You get continual content updates plus full control over your own time instead of having to schedule around other people or wait on other people or matchmaking queues to pop.
• In other gacha they eventually have some group content with the hardest instanced content and sometimes just don't adapt the instances to account for smaller groups.
• If you queue for co-op but don't get matched with a team, your solo match still counts as a co-op mode match. This is important because if you are playing at a low-population time but there is an event task that wants you to play in co-op, you can still complete it.
• TIP: If you don't like co-op but need to do co-op matches for a nevent, choose a low-tier Commission and hopefully you won't get matched with anyone.
• +1 Characters and weapons are earned in-game, not bought from gacha pulls.
• +1 No worries about power creep in future expansions requiring you to get new characters from gacha if everything is (hopefully going to stay) easy.
• You still have the option to buy characters and weapons outright.
• Everyone has a non-FOMO chance to get the fully upgraded version of each character instead of being pressured by a time-limited banner and having to drop thousands of dollars all in one go.
• +1 Gacha pulls are primarily for fashion. Fashion is definitely the endgame here.
• And other than full-body outfits, there are little customizations you can apply to characters and weapons.
• -1 Dyeing is NOT free. You can sometimes get the necessary items but you are ultimately expected to pay if you want to go heavily into customizing colors. And there's an optional daily task to dye things to encourage you to do this.
• It might look like this isn't a great monetization model but games like Infinity Nikki show people are willing to spend for fashion, so a lot will depend on how much the art style appeals. I fully expect contemporary outfits like swimsuits to show up sooner or later.
• Since fashion appears to be the endgame here, it's probable the combat is meant to be easy in order to keep the game relevant for everyone. And recent games like Blue Protocol: Star Resonance with its auto-combat (and even Honkai Star Rail and it's auto combat) show that not everyone wants to manage every aspect of combat. They just want to gear up and smash their way through.
• +1 Fairly decent story arcs.
• Not suddenly nonsensical like many gacha games. At least not yet?
• You can still see the thread of the starting story arc instead of feeling like it's been abandoned.
• Great cutscenes. Standard for eastern gacha but miles ahead of western studios.
• A substantial amount of main story content at launch.
• +0 Lots of side quests and minor activities scattered on the map.
• Nothing too special here but there is a lot to do.
• Some of it is very challenging but since you can basically farm what you need from repeatable instanced content, it's not as crucial that you complete these.
• "Geniemon" pet collection similar to Once Human deviation collection.
• +1 Unlimited instanced content (except major weekly boss fights).
• You can for example endlessly farm for money and character advancement materials without worrying about how to allocate your daily "energy" or buying more with in-game currency.
• Therefore you can also play every character you get instead of having to allocate essentially limited resources. You just have to grind out the time in easy content.
• +1 If the higher-level/harder modes are too hard, just grind more easy content and craft the advanced materials from the simpler ones. Out of money for crafting? Grind the money instances for more money.
• There's no pressure to constantly do the hardest content to get the best rewards because your daily "energy" is limited.
• +1 Fairly fast repeatable missions (Commissions). You can often just run from the mobs to focus on your objective and get out. This is like what people want to do in dungeons in other games except in DNA the trash mobs are generally so weak and plentiful that you can easily do so and are probably expected to do so unless you want to sit and farm them elites for rare drops.
• So even if you don't deliberately take a farming character with obscene area-of-effect like Rebecca, you can still clear content quickly--unlike TFD where you need endgame builds on a character designed to do so. Every character is probably viable.
• They do still want you to log in daily of course so under Combat menu > Memo tab there are daily tasks for Trial Rank XP. However you only have to do a few tasks to get the maximum reward and there are a lot of easy tasks to choose from.
• -1 They do slow you down in other ways so ultimately unlimited grind is sort of deceptive. Examples:
• Some items (e.g., certain Demon Wedges) have only one source and are enemy drops during an instance so you cannot use a Commission Manual to multiply the results of your run. And the drop rate is extremely low for some of these items which you ultimately need a lot of. Therefore although you are allowed to grind a lot, you actually need to, whereas if they had throttle the players with "energy" and controlled advancement rate that way, they could give out more guaranteed results.
• Some items have to be bought with earned currency and are limited to small amounts per month, e.g., Consonance Weapon blueprints.
• Some instances are still limited per week, e.g., Bounty/Chase to get certain blueprints, and on top of that it's random what you get from a fairly large pool (and there's no guarantee everything in the pool has the same drop rate).
• The final skill upgrade material you need is Twilight Thread and it is severely throttled. Despite all the freedom to grind and progress quickly, ultimately you will discover your progress is possibly more limited than other games.
• You cannot grind it and your ability to outright buy more is severely limited as well. Basically you get 6-8 per 4 weeks.
• Mystic Maze game mode gives you 1 per week
• Battle Pass gives you up to 2 per season (28 days)
• Premium Battle pass gives you another 2 per season
• Each character requires 8 Twilight Thread for their final skill unlocks, so no matter how fast you grind, you can finalize only one character a month.
• -1 As you approach endgame the grind spikes suddenly.
• The casual mechanics of the early game up till around Trial Rank 55 (level cap 70) is very suddenly replaced by a spike in grinding for resources just to level up one skill.
• If you were crafting weapons from blueprints you got an idea of this, but this massive amount of crafting and related materials farming and Coin requirements in the millions feels very sudden and almost like a paywall encouraging you to buy whatever is available in the cash shop to help you push through.
• Example:
• To get a gold tier Demon Wedge (a type of gear), you might need to:
• Get the blueprint from a Covert Commission - supposedly 10% chance and you cannot use a Commission Manual to multiply the results of a run
• Grind the Noctoyager Commissions to get the required boss drop (typically about 5) - and because it's a boss drop and not a mission reward, you also cannot use a Commission Manual, and it is random whether you get the drop you need
• Grind the coin/gold required to craft it. It's only 50000 but at Trail Level 55+, just about everything costs a lot of coin due to multiple layers of crafting, each requiring a lot of coin.
• All this (especially the randomness) stretches out your time into boring grind which you can try to do semi-AFK.
• Expulsion missions aren't so bad since they start right away but some missions like Defense require you to run quite a distance to the starting point for two short waves before you do it all over again.
• +0 At least you can do it semi-AFK so you can just check in every few minutes while doing something else.
• Fortunately, there's almost no FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) in the game, at least not yet. Hopefully future story content won't require too much character development.
• What you are most likely missing is the endgame timed combat Theatre game mode, but the rewards there eventually rotate into easier content and is really just a way for whales and no-lifers to get the newest and most exclusive content about 4 weeks ahead of everyone else.
• +1 Main story quest feels really good not just because of the extensive quest line and the already expansive and detailed world, but various phases cause widespread changes in certain areas (e.g., a festival comes to town and Icelake City is decorated), which makes the world more reactive and therefore "alive".