| Duet Night Abyss | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Register & Pre-Order | Review |
Duet Night Abyss Review Overview
What is Duet Night Abyss?
Set in a grim dark-fantasy world teetering between magic and technology, Duet Night Abyss explores the deep social divide between ordinary humans and Charons—a race capable of wielding powerful arcane energy. Feared and oppressed by the rest of society, the Charons have become the focal point of a growing resistance that seeks to overturn the existing order, while some of their kind choose to side with their human overlords for survival or ambition.
At its core, the game is a semi–open-world hybrid that fuses third-person shooting with action RPG combat, offering players the freedom to fluidly shift between precise ranged gunplay and intense close-quarters melee encounters. This fusion extends to movement as well, where players can slide, dodge, and weave across battlefields with a mix of shooter agility and RPG-style finesse, creating an experience that’s both cinematic and deeply engaging.
Duet Night Abyss features:
⚫︎ Third person shooter and hack-and-slash gameplay
⚫︎ Semi-open world exploration
⚫︎ Public hubs
⚫︎ Co-op gameplay and modes
⚫︎ Purchaseable or farmable characters
⚫︎ Cosmetic gacha
⚫︎ Customizable weapon and skin palettes
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Duet Night Abyss's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
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 Steam |
 Epic |
 App Store |
 Google Play |
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| Free-to-Play | |||||||
 Dedicated Client |
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| Free-to-Play | |||||||
Duet Night Abyss Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Anything and Everything's Obtainable by Grinding Cosmetics for Days Even Your Playstyle is Customizable Its Story is Pretty Strong Tons of Content, Including Co-Op |
Anything and Everything Requires Grinding Builds and Teams are Rather Limited You Can Really Feel the Artificial in the AI Buying Characters Directly is Very Expensive |
Duet Night Abyss Story - 8/10
Duet Night Abyss builds a strong, intrigue-filled narrative by playing on the confusion that comes from showing every faction’s good side, setting up plenty of tension and expectations for future conflicts. It also does a great job of using its stages to tell the story, constantly manipulating them to match the tone and intensity of each scene. Unfortunately, it also suffers from the all-too-common-for-the-genre issues such as compressed storytelling and the occasional lapses in logic.
Duet Night Abyss Gameplay - 10/10
At its core, Duet Night Abyss is a straightforward game where you run around shooting—or slicing—anything unfortunate enough to have a red health bar. Sure, there are all sorts of flashy skills and ultimates, but its simplicity allows for an incredible amount of polish, aside from the rather stiff melee combat. The gunplay is insanely fun, though, especially when paired with its RPG systems—the real source of depth behind its uncomplicated exterior and where you’ll spend most of your grind sessions mix-and-matching every facet to create playstyles truly your own.
Duet Night Abyss Visuals - 9/10
Great character designs, ever-shifting stages, stunning visual effects, and intuitive icons—what’s not to love about (almost) everything your eyes can feast on in this game? Well, for one, some corners were clearly cut, especially on distant or smaller objects, likely to ease memory load. Accessories also tend to clip through whatever they touch—a side effect of the lack of sliders to reposition them, which is a real, though minor shame considering how much effort was clearly poured into letting you customize your character to your heart’s content.
Duet Night Abyss Audio - 9/10
As is usually the case with these high-budget mobile games from the East, Duet Night Abyss’ audio is nothing to scoff at. It can easily match or even surpass buy-to-play titles at the higher end of the pricing scale. Not only does it feature full voice acting—at least for the main scenarios and individual character lines—but its musical pieces are also quite memorable and extremely effective at pulling you into every event. Unfortunately, though, the sound effects feel like an average joe among its more overachieving peers; and for an action game, that’s somewhat of a sore spot to have.
Duet Night Abyss Value for Money - 8/10
Famous for its sudden announcement regarding the removal of its gacha system, Duet Night Abyss instead replaced the hotly controversial mechanic to collect characters with farmable shards players can either spend hours grinding for or directly purchase. Now, if you believe that “time is money,” then this change isn’t really that big of a deal; you’re still going to “spend” a lot in the game, either way—not to mention outright buying characters is quite expensive.
Duet Night Abyss Overall Score - 88/100
Anyone looking for a mobile game to play with friends should undoubtedly give Duet Night Abyss a spin. Beyond the occasional “donation,” it really only demands your time and commitment. That time will be well spent, though, considering the game’s wealth of content, stunning audiovisuals, and the incredible opportunities for self-expression it offers its players.
Duet Night Abyss Review: The Grind is Delightful and Real
Release Date, Finally
Duet Night Abyss is the kind of game that's quite hard to ignore. In a platform severely lacking in shooters from the east, it, alongside Snowbreak: Containment Zone, are one of the few character collection titles of the genre, essentially sharing a rather massive audience that will have either no choice but to try them out, or wait an agonizing period of time before another one releases that might possibly apppeal to their tastes.
Hence, ever since I first got my hands on the beta versions, I’ve been itching to play Duet Night Abyss for real with my friends. After all, right from the start, it really felt like it wanted players to come together to tackle high-difficulty content. That was why I poured a lot of time into the test servers while maining Hilda—the maid toting a grenade launcher despite her uniform. Sadly, she’s nowhere to be found in the full release, which, I’ll admit, was a bit of a downer.
Still, besides its aesthetic similarities to Code Vein and Punishing: Gray Raven, Duet Night Abyss has been a rather solid game since the start. But at the same time, it has changed a lot since then, especially after the removal of the gacha and stamina system. Now, it simply only demands time—lots of it—in order to keep the engine of progress running. And honestly? As someone who loves grindy games and consider them therapeutic, I rather welcome this change.
A Beginning of Loss, a Journey of Discovery
Anyway, Duet Night Abyss follows the story of a young girl who lived most of her life in a small trading village on an island with her best friend, Berenica. Indifferent to the outside world, though, she was ill-prepared for the day when monsters invaded her home and an expedition from the neighboring empire took her best friend from her. With nothing else left for her, she set a path for herself: save her friend, no matter the cost.
As you would imagine, this kind of plot is an easily effective way to hook people into continuing. After all, who doesn’t like a story where a lone individual takes on a gigantic empire? But really, what comes after the prologue is where the real stroke of the writer’s great ideas begins.
You see, Duet Night Abyss’ story isn’t a one-sided tale. It also follows a counterpart from the empire—the very same one that took her best friend away. But in that story, it shows that the empire isn’t just a pure evil punching bag set up as the everlasting antagonist. It also has its own issues, its own intrigues, and so much more.
To the casual reader, it might just seem like the writer is trying to humanize the empire. Perhaps so, yeah. But when you actually start playing, it hits you: there’s a significant number of playable characters directly from the other faction. Yes, even the ones that took Berenica away from the main protagonist. Now, having your enemies as playables isn’t new at all. That’s why it stands to reason that there’s a meaning behind it—foreshadowing, perhaps.
But on top of that, Duet Night Abyss also displays a somewhat unusual, if rather abrupt, willingness to, well, throw tragedy at your face. In a way, it almost feels like it’s deliberately designed to cut off any misconceptions people might have about the game’s themes early on. “Characters are going to die,” it says as it delivers quite a sad ending to one of its earliest chapters.
And on that note, the way it commits to these themes is actually rather admirable. That, and the stories themselves are written well enough to be an integral part of the experience of playing the game..
Entry-Friendly Challenge
“Warframe with waifus” is probably the most common way people describe Duet Night Abyss’ gameplay—and honestly, they’re not wrong. It shares plenty of gameplay DNA (get it?) with Digital Extremes’ hit title, and it definitely leans toward a cast dominated by female characters. Oh, and yes, it’s also a third-person action shooter that blends tight gunplay with fast-paced melee combat almost seamlessly.
The core gameplay loop is extremely straightforward: you control a character equipped with both a melee weapon and a firearm, giving you freedom to switch between them at will depending on the situation. Controls were easy to switch between, too, with your left click committed to melee and your right click to your firearm. And to help you close gaps or reach higher ground, the game provides you with Helix Leaps—powerful, targeted jumps that let you traverse large distances or gain vertical advantage in a single bound.
You also have a set of RPG-standard abilities: an active skill, a passive, and an ultimate, all governed by cooldowns and a Sanity Gauge—the game’s equivalent of MP or SP. In addition, you can summon partners from your roster to fight alongside you, provided they’re equipped with no more than one weapon.
There’s a wide range of other features packed into Duet Night Abyss, too. In fact, there’s so much that listing them all would easily fill a full page of size 11 text on Google Docs. Yet, despite the sheer volume of systems, it never feels bloated. Instead, it delivers a finely tuned action experience that keeps offering new surprises—at least until the late game.
And, of course, there’s fishing.
They Replaced Gacha with Grinding
Let’s immediately talk about the elephant in the room: yes, Duet Night Abyss does not have a character gacha system. Instead, you obtain new characters by gathering 30 of the appropriate shards from Covert Commissions. That doesn’t mean we’ve completely escaped the mercy of RNG, however; drops from only have a 10% chance of giving you 10 character shards for reminiscence/unlocking. Otherwise, you’ll only get a few of them—or, in the worst-case scenario, a pittance of materials as a participation reward.
In the first place, you can’t even run commissions whenever you want. Unlike other stages in these free-to-play mobile games, Covert Commissions are locked behind a type of ticket known as Secret Letters. These are character-specific, fortunately, so if you’re only looking to get Berenica, for example, you can buy her Secret Letter, and the dungeon you run will only drop her shards.
Actually buying those Secret Letters is where the real grind starts, though. The currency used to purchase them comes from a variety of sources, ranging from achievements to daily missions. The latter alone provides enough to purchase a Secret Letter a fraction more than once every day. In other words, you really won’t run out of these if you commit enough time to the game—the only problem is whether you’ll be lucky enough to get those shards in the first place.
Well, of course, if you’re willing to pay, it’s about 70 USD to get enough shards per character, give or take. Still cheaper than your average gacha game, though, I guess? And besides, the main protagonist, who is now a playable character, is actually quite strong and enough to tide you through until you get your first character!
Cosmetics are Still Gacha, Though
But it’s not like Duet Night Abyss completely removed the gacha system altogether. That is, instead of using it to collect characters, it’s now reserved purely for premium cosmetics—similar to how several free-to-play MMOs like Phantasy Star Online 2 handle a part of their monetization. And, oh dear, are they gorgeous. They're quite over-the-top, too, with the premium pose from Psyche's banner allowing you to summon a vintage car out of thin air to take photos with.
Of course, you’re not required to pull from it to enjoy the game. You can absolutely take stock Psyche into battle and perform just as well as someone who’s spent hours (and dollars) dressing theirs up, assuming similar gear investment. On the other hand, if you enjoy looking stylish—and let’s be honest, who doesn’t—you’ll find it hard to resist rolling for those outfits.
At least the pricing is fairly standard, sitting at around 10 pulls for roughly 25 dollars. You can also earn gacha currency through missions, milestones, and other activities, so even if you’re a free player, you’ll still get your fair share of chances. All in all, it’s your usual gacha experience—just focused on cute costumes and cool hats instead of new characters.
Incredibly Modular Accessories and Skins
The cosmetics in Duet Night Abyss aren’t simply alternative costumes and trinkets for your characters to wear, though. It goes the next mile by making the very things that you use to customize your characters customizable themselves.
Picture this: you were playing with the gacha because you were bored and didn’t really expect to get anything out of it. Then, boom, you suddenly got the mythical golden hourglass visuals and got yourself a new Psyche skin! You realize, though, that you much prefer her default black-green colors, so you couldn’t bond with your rewards. Worry not, though, because Duet Night Abyss allows you to customize almost every aspect of a skin’s palette to your liking!
In fact, even the melee and ranged weapons can have their palettes customized. That’s an insanely good feature considering that characters only have one signature weapon, so their secondaries are often aesthetically mismatched with their design. And even if you don’t get their signature weapon, you can easily just recolor anything else to look good with your character.
Nearly Everything is Customizable
Your character’s clothes, hats, and trinkets aren’t the only things you can customize, though. Entire playstyles can be molded to your preferences all thanks to Duet Night Abyss’ design allowing you to equip every kind of weapon to every character. This is a stark contrast to other mobile games such as Wuthering Waves or Genshin Impact where each character is locked to one type, so you never have to agonize about not getting the weapon you wanted from a banner.
Well, in the first place, Duet Night Abyss doesn’t have weapon banners, either. You can obtain them pretty much the same way as you do characters, or forge them directly from your home base (mileage may vary). So, if you have enough resources—and time, of course—you can definitely give Psyche a katana despite her signature weapon being a polearm.
On top of that, you can even customize how your weapon behaves in battle. For example, your polearm can change its normal attacks so it shoots out giant phantom spears forward a certain distance every time you do, or you can charge into your enemies before wiping them all out with a massive swing with your greatsword instead of spinning it around like some sort of move from professional wrestling.
You’ll be Grinding for Days to Get Your Options
Unfortunately, the items—or rather, Demon Wedges—that allow you to modify your weapons’ behavior, including their stats, are a massive pain to collect. Similar to many other gacha games, you’ll need to run a dungeon dozens of times while fighting against RNG just to catch a glimpse of the finish line.
Fortunately, however, there’s a silver lining: the Standard Commissions used to farm Demon Wedges, alongside other materials to invest into your characters and weapons, do not require stamina and can be played as much as you want, without limit. In other words, the only limiting factor in your quest for the perfect gear is how much of your social life you’re willing to sacrifice.
Duet Night Abyss also offers ways to get specific Demon Wedges if you’re tired of running the same dungeon a hundred times in a row. You can instead try the more targeted Noctoyager Manual Commissions, or obtain blueprints from Covert or Bounty Commissions to forge them yourself.
Simply put, you have plenty of ways to get what you want in the game—it’s just that all of them take a lot of time and effort. As for whether that’s a good or bad thing, well… it does get much easier later on, at least. And as a Disgaea player, I quite welcome the relaxing grind.
Despite Everything, the Roles are Still Rigid
After reading the paragraph above, you might be thinking that you can build a character however you want. That’s why I’m here to tell you that’s not actually true—at least for the most part.
Sure, you can tweak how a character feels to play, but you’ll rarely be able to use them outside of their intended roles. Hellfire, for example, simply doesn’t function outside of being a tank (or some variation of one), since all of her skills revolve around getting herself surrounded by enemies. Berenica, meanwhile, wouldn’t feel comfortable if you gave her Demon Wedges that increased her healing—y’know, because she can’t.
I get the intention, though. From a designer’s point of view, seeing their black-and-red-clad, sword-wielding assassin suddenly tossing out healing spells might not make the best impression (even if those are becoming popular nowadays). But at the same time, this setup encourages players to collect multiple characters instead of pouring all their resources into just one team.
It’s not really about squeezing more of your money—or time—out of you. Or at least, not directly. It’s more about making each character easy to recognize and intuitive to play, both as and alongside.
Content-Packed and AI-Unfriendly
Getting familiar with what each character can and cannot do is vitally important in late-game content because of the massive difficulty spike that happens later on. Duet Night Abyss has plenty of these right from the start, such as the high-level Bounty Commissions and the Immersive Theatre. Aside from the latter and a few other modes, however, many of its dungeons can be played with other players.
In fact, the game heavily encourages cooperation, even designing the central area and various other parts of the first city as shared hubs that automatically connect you with others within the same channel and locale, kind of like some MMOs. And I’d suggest you take advantage of that, because the AI controlling your summoned partners is pretty darn bad.
Back during the two beta reviews I made for the game, I mentioned in passing how inept the AI was. Now that we’re playing the full release, the problems are still there—it still suffers from tunnel vision, poor resource management, and a total lack of survival instincts. But, as I’ve said before, incompetent AI partners are pretty much the norm for these games, so it doesn’t hurt the overall experience too much.
That said, don’t expect your results to match those of a proper party if you decide to run missions solo. At its core, Duet Night Abyss is designed to be played with a group, with the only real exceptions being the dungeons that explicitly gate you off on your own.
Is Duet Night Abyss Worth It?
Worth the Hours of Grinding
Duet Night Abyss is a rock-solid experience that’ll easily keep you busy for hours, whether you’re running missions with unsuspecting strangers or your ever-suspicious friends. Sure, it’s grindy, and yes, heartbreak is practically part of the routine, but that’s just the nature of games like this. Thankfully, it has enough variety and depth in its content to make that grind worth it, letting you jump between different dungeons and challenges to keep things fresh.
Give Duet Night Abyss a shot. You might find yourself hooked before you even realize it.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
Epic |
App Store |
Google Play |
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| Free-to-Play | |||||||
| Dedicated Client |
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| Free-to-Play | |||||||
Duet Night Abyss FAQ
Who’s the best character to get in Duet Night Abyss?
Honestly? It’s probably Rebeca. Having spammable summons that deal damage in a massive area, alongside a stacking debuff that Rebecca herself can trigger all at once, is amazing. If you prefer tanks, though, Hellfire is your only choice, and healers only have Daphne.
For a more detailed guide, you can check out our Duet Night Abyss tier list
Game8 Reviews
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Duet Night Abyss Product Information
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| Title | Duet Night Abyss |
|---|---|
| Release Date | October 28, 2025 |
| Developer | PAN STUDIO |
| Publisher | HERO GAMES |
| Supported Platforms | PC, Mobile |
| Genre | RPG, Action, Shooter |
| Number of Players | 1-4 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Duet Night Abyss Website |
