Alabaster Dawn: Radical Fish Games is back, and it's even better than we hoped

If you know CrossCode, you already know why this name gets attention. If you don't, know that the indie community considers it one of the best action RPGs of the decade, and that its studio, Radical Fish Games, is one of those where every new project gets followed closely.

Alabaster Dawn is that new project. We played the demo. We have opinions.

Juno and the curse of Nyx

The setup: the gods have vanished. Their absence turned the world into desolation. Juno is a chosen outcast, tasked with breaking Nyx's curse and guiding humanity's rebirth. It's an opening that stakes out the situation clearly without dwelling on it: you understand where you are, what you need to do, and why it matters.

What strikes you immediately is the narration. No condescending tutorial, no clumsy exposition. The story unfolds with a fluidity and trust in the player that recalls the best productions in the genre. We want to see where it goes, which is precisely what a demo is supposed to do.

The combat: hard to find a single flaw

The demo offers two melee weapons, two ranged weapons, nine enemy types, four bosses. Enough to understand the system, and the system is very good.

Combat is fluid, readable, and demanding enough that victory feels earned without ever feeling unfair. Radical Fish Games knows the art of difficulty escalation: each demo boss teaches you something, forces you to read a pattern, rewards understanding over button-mashing. CrossCode comes to mind, obviously, but Alabaster Dawn already has its own identity in its combat mechanics.

The melee/ranged alternation isn't a gimmick: it creates situations where choosing the right tool at the right moment genuinely changes the outcome. Over two and a half hours, it never wears out.

The art direction

The pixel art combined with 3D elements produces something visually coherent and immediately distinct. The palette is rich without being aggressive, animations are polished, and the whole thing has that particular quality of games that know exactly what they want to show.

Comparing it to Sea of Stars is tempting and not quite right: Alabaster Dawn has its own identity. The world abandoned by gods carries a visual melancholy the art style serves perfectly.

What we know about Early Access

According to Félix, the creative director, Early Access will cover the first two chapters, the first dungeon, and around ten hours of content between main story and side quests. A roguelike mode is planned alongside, to fight enemies in more challenging configurations. And the transparency in warning upfront that this might be "another long Early Access" is appreciated: better to know than to wait without a reference point.

Ten hours for the first two chapters represents roughly 25% of the full game if the pacing follows CrossCode's logic. That's not nothing.

Why the 9

This isn't a score on a demo. It's a score on what this demo says about the final game if Radical Fish Games holds its level. And every signal points in the right direction: the combat is excellent, the narration is engaging, the art direction is controlled, and you sense behind all of it a studio that knows where it's going.

98% positive reviews from 1,810 demo players isn't an accident. Alabaster Dawn has something. If the full version holds this quality across the entire story, this game will be one of the great indie titles of its generation.

We're waiting for the rest with an impatience we didn't expect to feel.

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Review based on the demo available on Steam. Early Access is planned for the first half of 2026.