Duskfade (Switch 2) review: the Unreal Engine 5 platformer feels like a lost PS2 classic – for better and worse

At its best, Duskfade recalls the really good PS2-era platformers, Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Kingdom Hearts – that whole period when developers were throwing enormous colourful worlds at us and filling them with enough stuff to make you want to poke around every corner. Duskfade has that appeal almost immediately, and while it borrows liberally from those games and never really expands on those old ideas, there’s a genuine pleasure in seeing this particular formula brought back with a modern coat of Unreal Engine 5 paint.

Its world is particularly lovely, a strange clockwork fantasy filled with enormous whirring cogs, ancient ruins, sandy temples, rails cutting through the landscape and some increasingly bonkers locations, including a flooded undersea mansion where getting a jump wrong can mean a near-instant death. The environments have enough scale to make you feel like you’re travelling somewhere, rather than simply working through a collection of disconnected platforming challenges, and on Switch 2 the larger spaces have room to show off the art direction.

The story itself is considerably more serious than all of this makes it sound. You play Zirian, a young apprentice caught up in the emergence of a mysterious Clock Tower and the spreading darkness that follows, with his missing sister, Allira, at the heart of the story, as the adventure explores loss, memory, and the desire to put things right. Duskfade delivers that story through a constant stream of jokes, colourful characters and sepia cutscenes, so the tone can be a little all over the place, and slow to get going without ever really teasing the twist you know is coming.

Duskfade has a story to tell

The early hours can be a slog because Duskfade throws a lot at you before giving you much reason to get excited about the mechanics, slowly introducing the familiar platforming toolkit as Zirian learns to grapple, air dash and eventually grind along rails and glide. Anyone who's played a 3D platformer in the last couple of decades will recognise most of this immediately, and while the game is perfectly competent, I was waiting for it to give me something that felt like its own thing.

The payoff comes once you've got enough abilities to start combining them, because the movement becomes much more interesting when you can grapple across a gap, air dash towards the next platform, hit a rail and launch yourself towards somewhere that looked completely inaccessible a few hours earlier. There are crystal clusters sitting just out of reach, chests tucked away in awkward corners, and even before reaching the end of the game I was mentally cataloguing places I wanted to revisit. That is usually a pretty good sign that a platformer has got its exploration right.

It helps enormously that Duskfade looks so good on Switch 2. Built in Unreal Engine 5, it leans into expansive environments that stretch into the distance, and the combination of giant machinery, ancient architecture, and fantasy weirdness gives the game a strong visual identity, even when the underlying gameplay is perhaps too familiar. There are moments when the sheer scale of the environments really sells the adventure, particularly when you can see rails, towers and distant structures laid out in front of you and start wondering which bits you can eventually reach.

The problem is that the closer you get to the actual platforming, the more Duskfade starts reminding you that PS2 platformers weren't always perfect. The camera is usually fine until you're moving quickly through a gap using the grapple or trying to land an air dash on a narrow platform, and there are enough occasions when it fails to give you a useful view of where Zirian is headed that it becomes a genuine source of frustration.

The platforming itself is generally solid, so it’s particularly annoying when a missed jump feels less like your mistake and more like the camera didn't quite give you the view you needed or lead you to the next grapple point, making complex platforming a game of trial and error as you memorise when to manually swivel the camera to catch the line you need.

Combat is equally hit and miss. Zirian carries a giant clock hand as his main weapon, which is a brilliant bit of character design and fits the clockwork setting perfectly, but actually fighting with it never feels particularly fun. Enemies can be dealt with well enough, but the combat doesn't develop into something I wanted to master, so encounters often feel like interruptions between the more enjoyable exploration and platforming.

Where Duskfade does show invention in combat is with its boss fight encounters, which play out as much as platform puzzles as they do parry-and-dodge fights. This can be jumping a whirl of cogs to tease a robot into shooting its own electrical power sources, to leaping onto invisible platforms and gliding to new heights to reach a recharging aged wizard. Even if you're not a fan of old-fashioned boss fights, the focus on plaforming is refreshing.

Fun exploration, but why?

The upgrade economy has a similar imbalance, with crystals turning up constantly while the cogs needed to actually spend on upgrades are much harder to accumulate. I regularly ended up with maximum crystals and not enough of the currency that would let me do anything particularly useful with them, which makes the progression system feel oddly stingy in a game that showers you with crystals to collect, and as a consequence does make the risk and reward of exploration redundant.

That’s a shame because so much of Duskfade works. The platforming is satisfying for the majority of the game, the environments are enjoyable to move through, and there are enough secrets, other than crystals, tucked away to make taking the long way around worthwhile (music boxes, coins to buy collectable cards and more). I like Zirian, I like the strange clockwork setting, and I like that the game is so obviously made by people who have a real affection for the platformers they grew up with.

What I don't love is how often Duskfade seems content to recreate those games rather than build on them. It has the colourful world design of Jak & Daxter, the movement and rail-grinding familiarity of Ratchet & Clank, some of the fantasy flavour of Kingdom Hearts and all the expected platforming ingredients, but there isn't a huge amount here that feels genuinely new. The art direction is grinding the game’s nostalgic cogs hard, because Duskfade has created a world distinctive enough to make those familiar PS2-era mechanics feel fresh, for a while.

There aren't many games like this anymore, proper colourful 3D platform adventures with big worlds, silly characters, secrets tucked into every corner and new abilities that make you rethink places you've already visited. Duskfade doesn't reinvent that formula; it's not perfect and has its flaws, but there’s something refreshing about a game that is this unapologetically nostalgic.