Soulframe's full reveal shows a "slow and pensive" fantasy RPG built on the bones of Warframe

rockpapershotgun.com:

I like Warframe, Digital Extremes’ shockingly enduring free-to-play action RPG, but I do find its sci-fantasy direction a bit much. The mashing together of tinted alloys and astral flame, the blend of over-the-shoulder shooting and swordplay, the environments that occasionally look like GPU boxart on steroids – it’s impressive, but a lot to digest.

The Canadian developer’s new project Soulframe has the same sense of swagger, with menus consisting of beautiful, quasi-medieval illustrations decorated with scrolls and dancing figures. But it’s a quieter thrill, a stately and absorbing world of hazy forests and sun-pierced catacombs, which calls to mind both Dragon’s Dogma and the overlooked tiny MMO Book of Travels. After catching a hands-off presentation in advance of this year’s Tennocon, I am pretty keen to play.

Soulframe’s world is divided between the forces of nature and the soldiers and magical automatons of an organisation called the Ode. You play a disgraced Ode soldier, stripped of your memories and thrown into the wilds. The story consists of fighting the Ode’s minions while rediscovering the talkative spirits of your ancestors, with whom you can form Pacts that bestow abilities – the game’s equivalent of Warframe’s classes. In the course of reclaiming your past, you move between a rustic open world of recurring enemies and procedural dungeons that are constantly changing, as indicated by surface earthquakes. During exploration, you can also warp to your tent in the Nightfold, an inter-dimensional customisation hub that will grow from a single tent to a village of ancestral spirits who provide access to crafting and progression systems, like smithing.

“It shares a lot of the structure, the procedural levels and