Winning a match of The Duskbloods on Switch 2 got my blood pumping – but, wow, what a weird game it is
It's like someone gave Nightreign some Night Nurse (in a good way)
Whether you call a network test a beta, a demo, or just a network test, it's generally the first opportunity that most of us get to go hands-on with a FromSoftware game, making it a thrilling moment. The Duskbloods has been a mysterious concept for well over a year at this point, but this past weekend I was able to play it for a couple of hours to see what it actually involves.
A Switch 2 exclusive from FromSoftware is always going to be an eye-catching prospect, but I didn't expect the game to begin with quite such a cinematic introduction. In fact, it opens much like a single-player game from the studio, with an enigmatic cut-scene, and a journey through some very scenic areas before a boss who'll likely kill you.
Before long, you'll have the controls down, but you'll need to complete at least a few more tuturials before you understand what the game actually is. The answer? It's a lot like Elden Ring: Nightreign, but way slower and more digestible.
A match of The Duskbloods starts with you selecting an area of the map to spawn into, at the same time as seven other players. Over the course of three rounds, you'll explore that map, killing enemies to level up, but also completing objectives that accumulate a currency called Virtue.
At the end of each round, the players with the least Virtue will be culled, and the game ends with the top three players fighting in a small PvP arena, each with two lives. That's the broad strokes of the game, but there's a lot to learn as you explore. There are a bunch of ways to gain Virtue, for instance.
Some players will naturally gravitate towards basically hunting down their rivals, and this can be profitable. Thankfully, death doesn't set you back too far, since you respawn quickly with no lost progress – your loss is more in the form of others' gain.
If you want, though, you can largely play the game as if the other players are just high-level enemies you want to avoid. My first match, for instance, saw me doing just that, simply exploring the map and killing high-value enemies to eventually enter the final battle with more Virtue than anyone else despite never having killed a human enemy.
I won that battle, largely by having something resembling a brain and just holding off while the other two players ground each other's health pools down. I can't pretend it wasn't thrilling, though, and it was also pretty funny to take a photo of the post-match screen with its series of confusing tallies – breaking down where I got my Virtue with symbols that I still don't understand.
While exploring the map, you can find Kin, which are basically summons that you can level up if you concentrate on it. They're hugely helpful in both PvE and PvP, and I found at least three different ones to experiment with. That's one layer of build-craft, with another being the character you choose to play as. This test had four, but there will apparently be more than a dozen at launch.
This is a huge differentiator from Nightreign. There's no scrambling to find good weapons, since your base attacks and even your magic powers are determined by your character pick. Instead, the main variable is how far you manage to level up, what Kin y you use, and whether you can earn some upgrades to branch out your stats and resistances.
The reality is, though, that with only a few hours of in-game time under my belt (largely thanks to the network test's very precise windows), I still feel like there's a huge amount to learn.
What I can say is that I thought the game ran well and looked lovely, though I only played it in docked mode since I was at home. It's targeting a frame rate of 60fps, which is key for smoothness, and while I saw some stutters, given it's not yet out, I'm pretty happy with performance.
Elden Ring hits Switch 2 this very week, and I think that game's far larger map and open areas could be more of a challenge for the hardware, but either way I'm thrilled to get major FromSoftware games on Switch 2 at all.
The Duskbloods already feels like one of the most intriguing games I've played this year, and we don't even know exactly when it'll be released. When it does, I can't wait to dive in to find out just how all of its many hidden systems work.
