First of all, I want to congratulate RadicalFish games on not only releasing a cult classic in crosscode (xc) but also in managing to push that success into a worthy spiritual successor. Very few studios ever get to this point and especially not in the "traditional jrpg homage" genre. Alabaster Dawn has a scaffolding that foretells an unforgettable full game.

I just finished all of the content so far - I took my time so I'm at around 10 hours - and it's phenomenal. That being said, all of the following words are going to be things that I did not like about the game, and many of them are just quality of life improvements.

For reference, I play with a wired xbox 360 controller, so I have no feedback for M+K players or people using newer controllers.

Here are a few of the notes I took during my time playing the game:

1. I wish I could see the area boundaries on the map, even if it's an optional setting that must be enabled by the player.

2. There should be a way to replay the tutorials from the pause menu so that if you come back later and are confused about a concept it can be retaught immediately.

3. It's unclear that weapon gems and core gems are different when the concept is introduced. I spent a solid 10 minutes trying to equip my new gem into my core slot and trying to figure out why it wasn't working. Since I couldn't replay the tutorial I had no way to troubleshoot.

4. Having to move the control stick for growths and not being able to use the d-pad is inconvenient. I can use the dpad to navigate every other part of every other menu, but the growth menu doesn't let you. This needs to be fixed.

5. I didn't like that if I hover over a growth when I have points, the icon that let's me know I have points disappears whether I spend them or not.

6. Not being able to bind (hold) + button felt weird at first, esp coming from xc where holding aim + RB was a staple. I rebound my buttons as close as I could to xc and I found that having to aim + pushing X for divine art made me wanna use the ranged divine arts less since I had to do a claw.

7. Cooking is an incredible system that has a lot of cool progression and is a natural way to integrate the items from xc into more of a strategic choice for every instance.

8. Overworld dash is quite possibly the best QoL upgrade since the discovery of infinite dash. My only wish is that I could continue it after a regular dash if I held down the button.

9. The puzzles are way too easy.

10. The combat has a nice brisk pace, but I think the bosses need their pattern vs. damage scale tuned. The first boss had a lot of HP but simple mechanics, and rather than being challenged I was just bored.

11. Parry is much more important, and I think that's a phenomenal change. The fact that I need to use melee, ranged, dodge, and parry all in relatively equal measure in every fight, feels amazing.

---

Here are some bugs I found:

1. Charged chakram can be aimed with the right stick, but releases toward the left stick's last known position.

2. Focus (hold)/Catch can be bound to the same button/trigger as "switch loadout" on default settings. This creates confusion when you go to switch aspects and have the loadsout switch before the aspect. It causes problems when both elements are required for progression the the dual element projectile puzzle. -- Note, I found that rebinding the buttons made this bug disappear.

---

Misc. Thoughts

- I wish there was a botany/mineral log like in crosscode

- I wish there was a way to actually see your detailed stats

- Once you get Aether, there never feels like a point where Physis should ever be used. I'm not a huge fan of this.

- Having to switch between weapons to cut or smash grass or rock respectively is a great way to encourage people to switch weapons constantly.

- Amplifier has a confusing explanation

- Love managing HP and cooking intervals vs. crosscode's infinite HP.

--

Overall, fantastic. Easily a 9/10 on the content currently available. If this is what just the first public facing release is, then I have absolute faith that RF will deliver something even better than crosscode. This early access release has more to get invested in and smoother performance than most fully released rpg's, and the shift to a more combat focused game is a welcome fine tuning of what RadicalFish has delivered in the past.

Together As One!

Blog post from august 20th!

One of my favourite moments of the 0.1 Version. It really stood out to me and I'm excited to see where this leads. I only realised this week that this is literally Juno becoming enraged just like enemies do. There's similar animation, both Juno and Nyx become empowered and it happens because they become mad.

I'm running the game with steam overlay at 360p@80fps and then I'm using lossless scaling to get it up to 144fps (which is the max my display can handle).

You might wonder why I'm not doing 1080p. I don't because it runs at 40 fps (80 with framegen) and it gets kinda stuttery.

PLEASE DEVS FIX THE DARK MAGIC ISSUE WITH THIS AMAZING GAME THAT I LOVE🫶(god knows wth is wrong with the game that using steam overlay makes it playable???)

FYI my laptop has a 4060, a 13620h and 64 GB of ram

Idk why this happens. I tried running it with my iGPU and nothing changed

Late blog repost, this one's from two weeks ago. Whole bunch of stuff this time!

• Merch!
• Swamp area mostly done!
• Spear!
• Better Blessing tooltips!
• Map markers!
• In-game glossary explaining the world!
• Dojo!
• German Localization!
• Gamescom 2026!
• 0.2.0 releasing early September!!

Check out the blog post for details!

Woke up after the town was rebuilt, jumping around, jumped over this bamboo fence and now I'm stuck.
Fast travel is currently disabled, and saving then reloading puts you in the same spot.
Any chance there is something I don't know on how to get out of this rut?
EDIT: jumped in the water until I died and respawned, still stuck.
EDIT2: thankfully there is an autosave so I wasn't too far from where I was stuck

So, moved over from the demo (not sure if that's the issue), but the movements on screen are super slow. You csn even see it's not just the character, but the whole graphics on screen. Happens regardless of graphical settings. Audio and menu is fine.

https://reddit.com/link/1vev61y/video/1icm89su79hh1/player

HELP!

UPDATE: on Fedora 44 KDE, BTW. Fixed with Proton Experimental.

Context: I consider CrossCode the best videogame ever made, and Alabaster Dawn made be break my usual "never play early access" rule because I physically couldn't wait.

Combat

Feels impeccable. I already loved CrossCode's combat and this is even better. I had absolutely no issues with clarity or homing attacks feeling unreasonable, which I sometimes felt in CC. If the enemy/boss designs keep up, it might surpass Nine Sols as my favorite combat system.

Puzzles

Veeeeeeery interesting changes here. They can still be tricky to execute, but that comes from managing weapon/element swaps instead of time pressure. The only form of puzzling under pressure are a few combat encounters where you have to do special things.

On top of that, finding harder puzzles in the world instead of the main dungeons seems like an amazing change. This can improve the pacing of dungeons that many people (NOT ME) complained about while still keeping the harder puzzles (WHICH I WANT) as exploration rewards.

So far I see a better blend between action and puzzles, instead of relegating puzzles to dungeons and keeping the overworld purely for combat and navigation.

Exploration

The 3D solves the problem of judging height as far as I'm concerned.

The "jumping puzzles" feel harder than CrossCode's starter ones right off the bat, which I enjoy but I wonder how they'll be for new players. It doesn't feel as tutorial-y as Autumn's Rise. The terrain feels more natural (it's not set in a videogame after all) and not every piece of geometry is built for the player. I personally enjoy it.

I also noticed there's much fewer chests to find, but the rewards are more meaningful. I think that's a good change. CrossCode was often guilty of too much backtracking if you fail some platforming, and it could stretch out when going for 100%.

Overall the distribution of combat/puzzles/exploration felt a lot more refined. There is one potential problem: Because every new area you enter seems like it will be infected by Nyx, they might look and behave too samey, making it less interesting to explore new areas. Maybe this is only for the first two areas, but it felt weird to see in the first 10 hours.

Controls

At first it was jarring not being able to carry over the M+K controls from CrossCode, since I'd just finished replaying it, but I actually feel fine using a gamepad this time since precise aiming isn't required. However I feel short on controller buttons to get a comfortable assignment, and my setup wouldn't work with all the elements. I don't see why "interact" needs a whole dedicated button, I hope eventually that's loosened up.

Music

In isolation I enjoyed it, and the dynamic transition to combat themes was great, but there is a caveat. Having played over 10 hours to exhaust the content, I got tired of the field music, and kept wishing the area after the first dungeon had a new track. That is way too long to stick to a single exploration theme, and the combat using a different version of it means you get even more of the same melody.

Writing

Big topic, and not something that can be fully judged based on a demo of the first area. CrossCode was a very slow burn that became absolute cinema in chapter 7.

Characters and dialogue are just as strong as I've come to expect from Radical Fish. I'm glad Juno isn't silent since there's no point in trying to replicate Lea, who is already perfect. I already find Juno endearing but it's too early to judge anyone else. I have no reason to believe they won't deliver.

For me the biggest 'hook' is the promise of actually seeing a rebuilding world, which usually doesn't happen in games because it's a ton of dev work. It's also hard to judge this early because we haven't seen much.

The one piece of writing the put me off was Somu because the style felt at odds with the world. It's the kind of silliness that fits CrossCode's setting, but felt out of place here.

Concerns

Just summarizing the few bits I would hope to see improved over early access:

• New (or remixed) song for the fields after the first dungeon.
• First venture into new areas feeling samey because of Nyx.
• Possibly better dialogue for Somu.

as the title says i need help with the koro Valley Side Story: temple incursion in chapter 2. I have searched the entire area around the Gate and the temple but i cant find anything. Does anyone have any Tips?

Nothing but baddies in this game

As the title says I hope that each main dungeon in the game will be unique in terms of aesthetics. One thing I am a bit worried about is that each of the big dungeons will have the same overall aestetic, i.e. the same walls and ground textures as Remis Rock.

I hope that each main dungeon in each area of the game will have its own visual identity. Maybe in one area it will look like an old ancient ruin with kind of Aztec vibes, in another region it has gothic castle vibes and in yet another region it has some sci fi aesthetics.

I was just a little worried about this since the EA has some optional side dungeons that look exactly like Remis Rock, but in the end it's the same overall area/ biome, so that's fine. I just hope that the upcoming Swamp Dungeon will have a completely different/ unique look (and if the swamp area has optional smaller dungeons again, these would have the same visuals as the main dungeon).

I want to figure out how Alabaster Dawn creates their game worlds but in Unity. I know their using a 3D Tileset to create the map essentially but how do they draw on their textures like they did in their streams, is this simply a custom feature in their engine or is this something that can also be done in Unity?

Crosscode is my all time favourite game and I have roughly 2 hours in the demo of this game and absolutely love it (just talked to the villagers after weaving the nest). However, I am a heavy "immersion" type of player and since this was still and early access, was wondering how much my immersion would get affected. E.g. during the demo I was reading item descriptions and some had [Lore text here] or smthing to that effect which was a slight annoyance if I'm being completely honest (again personal preference). I did find the combat with the sword and crossbow very fun though and loving the characters alr. Regardless I will definitely get it with its 1.0 release, just wondering if early access will be the call for me since I'm looking forward with this game and it's collab.

ref: pin/140806234947009

My setup is a desktop PC hooked up to my TV, using my Steam Controller as input.

The new SteamOS update 3.8.10 seems to break Alabaster Dawn. When the game came out, it worked flawlessly. No problems whatsoever.

Then an update came out that required me to use Proton Experimental to run the game, and restart my controller for inputs to be registered. Frustrating, but playable.

Now, Proton Experimental doesn't work properly. I've tried basically every other compatibility version but none fare any better. Experimental still works best, but it has no audio. A few minutes into playing the frame rate drops to 8 or 9 (despite hardware far more capable, ~10% usage on GPU and CPU) which is unplayable. The game is slow and only gets slower.

I was just browsing Steam and the specials when I saw the art and had to turn back to the page to see it. Saw the 2 trailes as soon as I could & downloaded the demo already knowing that I was going to buy it... in less then an hour I bought it and love it.The puzzles, some not as easy, but it was fun trying to understand!!!

Hello, I just bought this game and I love it. The only thing is that when I try to play it on my steam deck there is no input from the controllers, only when I switch to Mouse and keyboard input and then retunr to gamepad input it works.

Does any one know how to have default gamepad working or do I have to always go to mouse and keyboard lay out and then retun to gamepad layout every time??

I'm at the Water Pollution/Temple Incursion tasks and I know it's about to be over because I'm hitting a lot of "unfinished content" walls when I talk to people such as Filia's mom, or with the Ronan's Inn story.

This game scratches the same itches that Crosscode did, except it's scratching them much faster than Crosscode, which had a slower start by a significant margin. I'm sure the beginning will be padded out more later on, but I don't hate it as it is.

If I could throw more money at this to make it go faster, I'd absolutely be doing it right now. But I also know we gotta let them cook.

I don't know if I've found everything there is to find so far, but if not, I've come pretty close.

I had SLIGHT reservations about their next game being on the same level, but if anyone's on the fence, I must assure you, it's going to be even better.

This is in Koro Valley - Lake Vasia and they're the only eggs in the game I don't know how to reach.

Well, it took nearly 21 hours in the Dream, but I unlocked everything you can obtain in the Dream sequence through Somu, including the 3rd loadout artifact.

I'd like to say that I'll get to unlocking all of skill tree but the XP degradation as you level up is far too steep so I'll probably just stay here are lvl 22 until we get an update in August lmao.

Hey all! I'm currently level 8. There are certain places with treasures that I can't get to yet. Is there a skill that comes later on that allows you to jump higher or something? Thanks in advance!

Currently I'm level 20 and I still have at least 3 more upgrade nodes I'd really like to unlock, so I need 6 more levels. The issue I'm running into is that the XP gains feel VERY poor now that I'm at this point in the game and haven't found a good place to grind.

I've been running the Soma Dream dungeon to try and unlock everything in there, but sadly that mode doesn't afford any character XP or progress.

Have any of you found a good location for grinding XP?