At first glance, Prelude: Dark Pain seems to have very few secrets. The aesthetic recalls Darkest Dungeon, the structure evokes big tactical RPGs, and its dark fantasy world lays out wars, religious cults, and supernatural horrors. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss it as merely the sum of its influences. After an introduction far too slow, the title from QUICKFIREGAMES begins to reveal a tight, thoughtful, and surprisingly rich combat system, which already today serves as the main reason to follow its development in Early Access.
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A revolt in the heart of Statera
Prelude: Dark Pain takes us into the world of Statera, a land devastated by an ancient force known as Dark Pain and further tormented by the rule of the Order of the Ashen Crusade. The faction governs part of the territory through violence and terror, promoting its cult in reverence of the mysterious Lord of Pain. The situation in Statera is made even more precarious by the consequences of the conflict. Reality itself is beginning to tear apart, and through the cracks between worlds emerge creatures bound to Pain, adding to the factional war a decidedly supernatural threat.
The protagonist of the story is Soren, a former warrior who abandoned the battlefield to live as a blacksmith. An attack on his family will force him to pick up his weapons again, gradually turning him into one of the central figures of the resistance against the Order.
The setting is one of the elements that most immediately strike you in the early hours. Despite some archetypes being familiar to anyone who has experienced dark fantasy, the world built by the developers possesses enough personality to spark curiosity, especially thanks to the numerous factions, the creatures, and the characters you encounter on your journey.
The current Early Access includes only the first act, so it is still too early to truly assess the overall effectiveness of the narrative and the impact of the decisions promised by the developers.
A decidedly too slow start
The first encounter with Prelude: Dark Pain isn't particularly impressive. The initial stages string together several mandatory battles clearly designed to gradually introduce the mechanics. A sensible approach on paper, but one that ends up excessively prolonging the tutorial. The issue isn't so much the difficulty of the fights as their sheer volume. For those already familiar with turn-based strategics, the core concepts are absorbed very quickly before the game finally relaxes its grip.
Fortunately the situation improves significantly once the first settlement is reached. Here, crafting, equipment upgrades, and group management are introduced, before finally allowing the player to move freely across the Statera map. From this point, the pace changes: the structure takes on the characteristics of a semi-open world viewed from a distant perspective, in which the player can choose which missions to tackle, accept side quests, gather resources, and encounter enemies directly on the map.
Few characters, many choices
It’s precisely on the battlefield that Prelude: Dark Pain shows its best qualities. The most immediate comparison can be made with Fire Emblem, but the similarities fade quickly. While the Nintendo series tends progressively to increase the number of units involved and the size of the maps, Prelude prefers to reduce the scale. We generally control three to five characters within relatively compact arenas, resulting in a much more focused combat experience. Every position, movement, and ability usage becomes important, and battles rarely become a simple matter of moving a large army across the grid.
During their turn, each character can move, attack, or use special abilities by spending action points. Normally, two action points are generated per turn, stackable up to a maximum of four. The ability to hold them back immediately adds an interesting strategic component. Using few resources during a turn can in fact allow you to prepare a much more powerful combination in the next one. It’s an apparently simple system that gains depth thanks to abilities and status effects. Burn and bleeding cause progressive damage, while conditions such as blindness or exposure can reduce an enemy’s offensive effectiveness or make them vulnerable to subsequent attacks.
The best part is that many of these effects can be chained: a character can apply a negative condition while a companion exploits exactly that status to boost their own damage, or a durable fighter can draw enemies’ attention, giving more freedom to weaker units.
The game therefore encourages players to think of the group as a single organism rather than as a simple collection of independent characters.
Even looking in the wrong direction can cost a lot
What sets Prelude apart from many competitors are mostly some seemingly minor attention to detail. Character orientation, for example, directly influences combat (no, we’re not talking about the sexual kind ndr.). Taking a hit from behind can cause more damage, while assuming a defensive stance allows the character to automatically turn toward the attacker, reducing the risk of further attacks from the side or behind. But there’s no opportunity attack, a missing feature that allows much more movement on the “chessboard”. The grid thus gains a tactical dimension. It’s not enough to decide where to place a hero: you must also assess from which direction the next attack might come.
The same applies to the maps. Elevations, obstacles, and environmental elements can significantly alter available strategies, while some missions introduce particular situations that force a reevaluation of approaches already well-established. It is precisely this attention to small details that makes even the most familiar decisions for the genre interesting: who to target, which enemy to eliminate first, when to save action points, or where to position a fragile character.
A roster that promises variety
QUICKFIREGAMES places a strong emphasis on character customization. The full version should offer more than twenty playable characters belonging to eight different archetypes, each with distinct growth options and numerous abilities.
But variety doesn’t simply come from having a warrior, a support, or an assassin. Some characters directly alter how the battlefield must be read: for example, Sade uses a cross placed on the map as a central point around which to develop parts of her magic, creating effects that can involve both enemies and allies. Others can instead place explosive elements or technological devices in the arena and later use them to inflict significant area damage.
It’s precisely these unconventional characters that highlight the system’s potential. Their abilities become even more interesting when combined with those of traditional archetypes, creating synergies that often emerge only after several battles. Some missions also restrict the available character choices, pushing the player to explore the entire roster rather than relying continuously on the same team.
Personalisation, crafting and a few readability issues
The progression allows you to further tailor the group’s composition. By leveling up, you can improve character stats and choose new abilities through relatively simple but sufficiently varied trees. The option to reset progression also encourages experimentation, allowing you to test different configurations without feeling you’ve permanently compromised a character.
All this is compounded by the equipment. Weapons and items can be obtained during exploration or crafted from materials gathered by fighting the various factions present in the world. And it is precisely here that some of the most obvious limitations of the current version emerge. The interface often fails to communicate effectively the vast amount of information required by such a system. Quickly comparing an item with the currently equipped one can become unnecessarily cumbersome, while understanding exactly which materials can be obtained from specific enemies is not always immediate.
When statistics, gear, abilities and status begin to accumulate, the overall character reading becomes harder than necessary. The crafting system itself therefore seems less important than combat, not because it is necessarily shallow, but because the interface does not genuinely invite exploration of it.
It’s worth fighting
Once you gain freedom of movement across the map, you can avoid some enemies. The temptation to do so can be strong, especially considering how long certain battles take, but Prelude inevitably rewards a more aggressive approach. Facing enemy groups allows you to accumulate experience and materials, both essential for improving characters and gear. Skipping too many battles can therefore suddenly turn a subsequent mission into a significant obstacle.
Currently the balancing seems to push toward a certain amount of grinding, especially for those who want to tackle the more complex confrontations without being forced to backtrack. It’s an aspect on which the developers might still intervene during the Early Access period, as the density of combat encounters risks occasionally interrupting the good rhythm achieved after the first few hours.
Darkest Dungeon meets the comic
The visual impact is certainly one of the most recognisable elements of Prelude: Dark Pain. The influence of Darkest Dungeon is evident in the use of sharp lines, deep shadows, and characters with aggressive silhouettes, but the game gradually finds its own identity. Some illustrations also recall the style of Mike Mignola, with clean figures, sparing use of colour, and scene compositions that sometimes directly echo comic book panels. Interesting too is the contrast between the detailed character illustrations and their more compact, caricatured versions on the maps, without losing coherence with the overall artistic direction.
The creatures tied to the scale of Pain and Ecstasy then allow artists to push towards a more disturbing imaginary, with horror suggestions that occasionally evoke Hellraiser. It’s a derivative aesthetic in its influences, but assembled with enough personality to not appear merely a simple imitation.
Less convincing, at least for now, the musical aspect. The compositions fulfil their role of accompaniment adequately but often rely on the most predictable elements of fantasy music: strings, epic choirs, guitars, and large orchestral explosions. Given how the visual aspect knows how to stand out, we’d have preferred a soundtrack equally distinctive.
Early Access still means Early Access
On the technical front, the current version still has several areas for improvement. During our testing, we encountered frequent stuttering, particularly noticeable during camera transitions in combat scenes. The issue becomes most apparent when the camera zooms in on a character performing an action and then returns to a tactical view. It doesn’t render the game unusable, but can become annoying given how often these transitions occur during a session.
Some qualitative aspects could improve the experience significantly. For example, it would be interesting to be able to speed up the lengthy introduction or have greater interactivity during conversations. Not necessarily through decisions capable of altering every conversation: even simple response options would help make the player more involved in the character relationships.
Positive note: even in its current state, the title is godibilissimo su Steam Deck and, in fact, given its nature, it is very well suited for portable play.
In conclusion
Prelude: Dark Pain doesn't reinvent the tactical RPG and openly looks to some of the genre's and dark fantasy's great names, but combines its influences with an intelligent tactical system, interesting characters, and a strong visual direction. If the developers succeed in improving pace, interface, and optimisation without losing the depth of combat, Soren’s journey through Statera could become one of the most interesting tactical RPGs to watch as it progresses toward its final version.
