Radical Fish Games doesn't just make action RPGs — they make cult phenomenons. CrossCode, their debut, sold over a million copies by word of mouth alone, powered by combat that felt like a love letter to Secret of Mana filtered through a speedrunner's brain. Now Alabaster Dawn, their follow-up, hits Steam Early Access on May 7 with ten hours of content that already proves the studio has leveled up in every direction that matters.
You play as Juno, the Outcast Chosen, who wakes in a world shattered by the shadow of Nyx — a curse that wiped out the gods and most of their followers. The premise is standard action RPG fare on paper. In practice, Radical Fish uses it as an excuse to build a world where the environment itself shifts and evolves as you progress, with areas transforming based on story choices in a way that makes backtracking feel like discovery instead of busywork.
Combat That Steals From the Right Games
The real headline is the combat system. Radical Fish cites Devil May Cry and Kingdom Hearts alongside CrossCode as inspirations, and the result is a top-down action RPG that feels significantly faster than anything in the genre. You control four elements, each mapped to a pair of weapon slots from a pool of eight unique weapon types. The combo system rewards experimentation — swapping elements mid-combo opens up juggle states that let you chain attacks across damage types in ways that feel genuinely creative rather than rote.
CrossCode's biggest criticism was its puzzle difficulty — some late-game rooms demanded the reflexes of a fighting game player and the spatial reasoning of an architect, simultaneously. Radical Fish has publicly acknowledged this, telling Power Up Gaming that Alabaster Dawn's puzzles are designed to challenge without punishing. The early evidence suggests they've threaded the needle: the puzzles in the first two chapters are clever without being cruel.
Early Access Done Right?
The May 7 build covers roughly half of chapter two across ten hours of gameplay. Radical Fish is being upfront about the timeline — they expect at least two years in Early Access, with a full seven-chapter story targeting 40 hours at launch. Console ports for Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series will follow the 1.0 release, likely in 2028.
The game is already Steam Deck Verified — a smart move for a pixel-art RPG that plays beautifully on a handheld screen. If you liked CrossCode, this is an easy buy. If you bounced off CrossCode's late-game difficulty spikes, Alabaster Dawn might be the version of that formula that finally clicks.
