Resonance Solstice Review Overview
What is Resonance Solstice?
Resonance Solstice is a real-time trading RPG with train simulator elements and real-time card battles. Set in an alternate universe where chaos is always amidst, players take on the role of a Conductor for the cargo and passenger transporter faction COLUMBA, serving the people of the Bonfire Cities, and strangely get caught up in the middle of a continent-wide conspiracy.
Developed by GAMEDUCHY and published by Ujoy Games Limited, the game was originally released in 2024 for China, Taiwan, and Japan, with a Korean server following in February of 2025. The global version has now made its release on October 30, 2025.
Resonance Solstice features:
⚫︎ Real-Time Trading Mechanics
⚫︎ A Colorful Cast of Characters
⚫︎ 2D Characters and 3D Train Visuals
⚫︎ Voice Acting
⚫︎ Train Simulator
⚫︎ Card-Based Deckbuilding Combat
| Digital Storefronts | ||
|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 Google Play |
 App Store |
| Free-to-play | ||
Resonance Solstice Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Fun Real-Time Trading Interesting Train Simulator Engaging Story A Colorful Cast of Characters |
Longer Than Average Tutorial Audio Lapses Gameplay Bugs and Crashes |
Resonance Solstice Story - 7/10
Resonance Solstice’s narrative is engaging, intriguing enough to keep you motivated—it does feel draggy at some parts though. The protagonist and the cast are all engaging and quirky, and despite some of the game’s heavy themes, the characters manage to inject just the right amount of humor to lighten the atmosphere. However, there are parts where the game ruins the timeline itself when you try to veer away from the main story, especially when certain events start to overlap. It seems to discourage self-exploration, which is ironic in a game that requires you to travel all over the place.
Resonance Solstice Gameplay - 8/10
Resonance Solstice’s bread and butter is its real-time trading system gameplay and train management, where you and your crew travel from station to station, buying goods for low prices and selling them high for profit. Aside from trading and selling, you also take on requests and freight orders for the cities, amping up your crew’s reputation for better rewards. Its deckbuilding combat is decent enough, but it’s not as engaging as the rest of the game itself.
Resonance Solstice Visuals - 6/10
The game features both 2D and 3D visuals, both rendered well and are visually pleasing to the eyes. Additionally, the game’s animated cutscenes sprinkled throughout the game add much to the audio-visual experience, especially when used in certain plot points. However, despite that, the game often crashes at the most inopportune times, whether you’re cruising by on the train or in the middle of a battle run, click input lag during dialogues, and has a number of localization errors and typos scattered throughout the game.
Resonance Solstice Audio - 7/10
Resonance Solstice does get points for having a fully voiced cast for some part of the story, and having a soundtrack with music written and composed by Hiroyuki Sawano. Despite that though, its optimization needs some work—it has some issues here and there where the voice track would overlap with others for no reason at all, creating a jarring experience, as well as mismatched voices. The fully voiced dialogue in the main story also stops fairly early into the story, which is disappointing considering they promoted that they had a star-studded Japanese voice actor cast.
Resonance Solstice Value for Money - 8/10
The game is completely free-to-play and easily accessible, playable on PC and mobile with cross-saves enabled. In terms of microtransactions, they are averagely priced, with decent returns on spending costs, such as the monthly pass and additional paid upgrades that will help you cruise through the continent with more efficiency. In-game economy wise, it’s on par with most gacha games, and it’s fairly easy to accumulate premium currency even without a monthly pass.
Resonance Solstice Overall Score - 72/100
Resonance Solstice is a decent trading and management simulator with trains and deckbuilding card combat, made better by a colorful cast of characters and a pretty engaging story. While it shines most in its real-time trading system and train gameplay, everything all ties together well for a fun gameplay experience. Unfortunately, it’s still marred by several bugs and frequent crashes which can make or break the overall feel.
Resonance Solstice Review: Real-Time Trading and Trains For Dummies (In A Good Way)
Resonance Solstice—when you first hear it, its name brings up images of something fantasy-like and otherworldly, akin to games like Duet Night Abyss, Honkai: Star Rail, Chaos Zero Nightmare, and the like. While it is still otherworldly in a way with it being set in an alternate universe, the last thing I would connect to its elegant title is…trains.
Yes, trains. And what do trains do? Transport goods and people. That is the core of Resonance Solstice—trains, trading, and with combat sprinkled in. You can imagine my surprise when I found out it wasn’t mainly about might and magic in a magical world.
Nevertheless, it piqued my interest, and truthfully…I’m pretty deeply in and embracing myself as The Eternal’s Conductor.
An Alternate Earth
Resonance Solstice is set in an alternate Earth that has been ravaged by a mysterious phenomenon called the "Morphic Moon", a strange object that had the ability to disrupt the planet’s intrinsic morphic field resonance, thus leading to destruction and severe damage throughout the planet when they inevitably clashed. Years later in the aftermath, the remnants of humanity have come together and established fortress-like metropolises called Bonfire Cities to deal with the morphic field pollution that has exacerbated ever since. These massive bastions each have a device called a Reality Stabilizer, set in groups to protect its citizens.
With humanity on its last legs for survival, several factions have taken it upon themselves to restore some sort of balance and order. You, the protagonist (gender selectable at the beginning), are part of the COLUMBA Chamber of Commerce as a Conductor, the captain of a train specializing in freight and passenger transport between the Bonfire Cities. That’s what all you were going to be—a dedicated, law-abiding citizen. That is, until you were roped into a rather suspicious order that changed the trajectory of your life.
And thus, that’s where the story really begins. Without delving too deeply into it, you end up finding yourself caught up in something much bigger than you would’ve ever thought possible, brushing shoulders with bigwigs and powerful people from different factions. For a gearhead who only wanted to live life on their beloved train, this path and being the center of a conspiracy is pretty compelling. It starts off pretty draggy, but once you’re able to actually break out of the initial chapters, it becomes so much more fun with the added freedom.
For all that seriousness though, the story also features a lot of cute and lighthearted interactions and humorous moments in between, especially between the main crew of the Conductor, Livia, Fran, and Eliot. After all, despite being part of a pretty dangerous career, their personalities don’t seem to be dimmed down. The protagonist themselves is weird, and I find that endearing with how seamless they all work together. And for those who like a little hint of some romance and crushing in their games…well, I suggest you pay attention to characters like Livia and Shizuru. Cute really, but I didn’t expect they’d be reacting to it that often.
Cash, Trains, and Cards
Resonance Solstice makes use of several gameplay systems, the most prominent one being its real-time trading mechanics. Players travel between cities and locations on the continent on their trusty train, The Eternal, buying products for low and selling them high in other stations. Market prices change in real-time or as dictated by the server trading behaviors. Each city or station has its own specialty product, which can be sold to farther destinations for higher profit.
It’s not overly complex, and while it may lack deeper mechanics, it’s engaging in itself that even those who aren’t as attuned to trading games and stock market titles may find this enjoyable to play (because I surely did—seeing my profit that many numbers is an amazing feeling). Buy low, sell high, and travel the continent to hawk your wares. It’s easy enough to understand and it’s not overwhelming of a concept at all.
And what makes it even more fun is that you actually watch the train move from place to place! When you select a destination to go to, you’ll be sent into an interface that renders your entire environment and train in 3D. In this UI, you can either sit around and watch your train roll along the tracks (which is actually more entertaining than it sounds, especially coupled with the nice soundtrack that plays), or do other interactive activities like picking up lost cargo to sell, or battle those pesky Chaos monsters for some loot.
It’s a large part of the gameplay as well since you can’t skip over from city to city (and where’s the fun in that in a train game), so they also put effort into the train simulator elements. When parked in a station, you can upgrade several aspects of your train like power levels and more, change and add carriages, and even decorate both the interior and exterior of the vehicle. Many, if not all, cities have a furniture store where you can purchase more objects and items to spruce up your ride.
Lastly is its deckbuilding, real-time card-based battles. Of course, in a world riddled with abominable monsters, there’s only one way to deal with them—deadly combat. You command a crew of up to five characters, each with their own abilities, positioning (Front, Mid, or Back), and combat roles. They automatically attack as you place down attack and support cards that have a certain Cost to play, and you must play them strategically to ensure the best outcome.
It’s nothing groundbreaking, and personally not as engaging as the travelling and the trading mechanics. Nevertheless, it has its own charm
Gacha That Won’t Break The Bank
Ever since my previous stint with Stella Sora, I’ve been more aware of the gacha mechanics whenever I start playing a new game with gacha in it. And it’s safe to say that Resonance Solstice is pretty decent with its offerings and economy.
For starters, 160 Chaos Stone (Resonance Solstice’s premium currency) per pull is pretty standard stuff that echoes most other titles of its genre. Base rate is 1% for the featured character, guarantee is at 80, with soft pity beginning at 70, increasing chances by 10% for each subsequent pull after that.
What I personally find interesting about its system though, is that both limited banners and standard banners share the same pool of pull currency, called Laplace Protocols. With that said, limited banners AND the standard banners also share the same pity system. Every other game I’ve played always made limited pull currency and standard currency different, so this is actually quite surprising to me.
Speaking of Laplace Protocols, the game actually feels rather generous with giving them away for a price—even without swiping that credit card. You are given the opportunity to purchase 10 Laplace Protocols monthly from the shop using BCRL Coins (the in-game currency used to trade and sell items, ones that you can get by the millions if you trade efficiently), and there’s even an added bonus—there’s also 3 Laplace Protocols on sale that refreshes weekly. So in a month, you’re already blessed with 22 pulls just from playing the game as intended. For someone used to scraping by and pulling out cash to get characters I want, more pulls is always good—that in itself is a win in my book.
In terms of other purchasable content, most of its other packs in the shop are cosmetics (outfits for your characters to use in battle and also to grace your home screen), upgrade materials and extra currency packs, and quality-of-life improvements for your train.
They all seem decently priced for what they offer, although that $50 extra super strong drill can make some jaws drop—though it does add to your train by a lot (guaranteed loot when ramming against enemies, better durability for stronger monsters, etc.) especially if you’re the type to exhaust your Conductor by going all over the map.
Long Tutorial Phase with an Odd Settings Lock
What was frustrating was that the game wouldn't let me change my graphics settings from the get go, and forces you to complete a tutorial or prologue phase that is at least an hour long. It's annoying because it launched my game in a windowed mode far too big for my monitor, resulting in an odd screen. It took me out of the immersion and the experience for a bit because the darn window is just...chopped and doesn't look nice.
That is such a strange and frankly stupid thing to restrict early on. It's not even directly gameplay related—I just wanted to play the game on full screen, without it looking chopped. Why do I need to be in a darned station before I can do anything? Alternatively, there’s the ever-handy Alt+Enter command, yes, but to not be able to do it natively in game is really an odd limitation to put. This is not only for the tutorial either, but the game won’t let you edit graphics settings if you’re not in a station. Seeing as it crashes randomly (the Steam version, at least), it just screams unoptimized.
And while we’re on the topic, the tutorial phase was rather long, so much so that it felt like an information overload with how much stuff was going on. It’s understandable, given that there’s quite a bit of gameplay elements that need some explaining, but I just wanted to explore and get a feel of everything before diving back into the main story.
A Few Audio Lapses
A bit of lapses here and there-- during a particular cutscene featuring the Conductor (your player character), they were shown to have a high-pitched voice that clearly belonged to a woman despite me choosing the male protagonist at the very beginning. That's on top of both genders having their own voices as referenced by the voice lines that play when you're selecting them. And this is presumably with the protagonist being canonically male according to the game’s fully animated and voiced shorts (which is freely available to watch on their YouTube channel, or can even be viewed while loading the game)...so that was a real confusing moment.
Minor detail, perhaps, but if the game can't even recognize your own choice of protagonist...that's a little off putting. I like being immersed in my games, and things like this can momentarily break the experience.
Apparently, it’s also been reported on social media that it happens vice versa for players who chose the female Conductor instead and hearing a male voice.
Is Resonance Solstice Worth It?
If You Need A New Game To Play and You Like Trains and Money, Yes
Resonance Solstice is a decent game for what it’s worth. It’s free-to-play and while the beginning can be long and draggy, once you get past that, it’s worth the time and effort you put into it. The real-time trading mechanics are arguably the most enjoyable part, alongside the train simulation, and even if it’s nothing special, the card-based combat is decent enough to not be boring.
It might not be appealing at first, and frankly is still marred by terrible bugs and errors as well as the frequent crashing, but in its core, Resonance Solstice is enjoyable and taps into a genre that doesn’t usually see cute anime girls (and some boys) in it. That in itself makes it stand out.
| Digital Storefronts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Steam |
Google Play |
App Store |
| Free-to-play | ||
Resonance Solstice FAQ
What platforms is Resonance Solstice on?
Resonance Solstice can be played on Steam, Android, and iOS.
Are there other Resonance Solstice servers?
Yes, there are four other servers for Resonance Solstice, namely in Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. The global server is the most recent addition.
Game8 Reviews
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Resonance Solstice Product Information
 |
|
| Title | Resonance Solstice |
|---|---|
| Release Date | October 30, 2025 |
| Developer | GAMEDUCHY |
| Publisher | Ujoy Games Limited |
| Supported Platforms | Steam, Android, iOS |
| Genre | Adventure, RPG, Simulation, Strategy, Free To Play |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Resonance Solstice Official Website |
