2026 is set to be quite a year for Souls-likes, with sequels to Nioh, Lords of the Fallen, Mortal Shell, and Code Vein looming over the horizon, but what about an up-and-coming original IP? Well, that’s where Kristala comes in, a feline Souls-like with a heavy focus on magic set in a dark fantasy world.
Kristala puts us in the shoes of a cunning feline tasked with proving themselves worthy of becoming a Raksaka, a fierce warrior devoted to preserving and utilizing magic from the six blessed kristals. Following a very successful Kickstarter campaign, Kristala entered Early Access in June of 2024, receiving monthly content updates and now gearing towards a 1.0 release in early 2026 with its third chapter. Astral Clocktower’s trajectory so far has been quite inspiring, stepping up to provide us with some slick Khajiit gameplay while Bethesda takes its sweet time to release TES VI.
On the Prowl
When starting up, we create our own Raksaka catsona by picking between six different classes, all featuring different degrees of commitment to either magic or melee combat, as well as our clan and starter spell. Kristala definitely has the right idea towards magic in a Souls-like, allowing you to spend mana through either weapon skills or spells, making it a resource that is useful for both fighters and casters. Mana can also be replenished by attacking, dodging, or parrying, depending on your skill tree choices, which gives casters the ability to play defensively in order to regain their resources instead of having to default back to melee combat as soon as they run out of mana.
Despite only having three weapon types available, Kristala nails the weight and feeling of its melee combat, giving each weapon solid movesets and skills that feel great to use. As is usual for modern Souls-likes, the game takes a page out of Sekiro’s book by featuring a posture system and perfect block, allowing for carefully timed deflections that damage your enemy’s posture, leaving them open to a critical hit. Kristala’s vertically open level design also gives way to a viscerally satisfying stealth system, allowing you to sneak up on weaker enemies and take them out instantly either from behind or above, creating more freedom in the ways you can approach larger enemy groups.
Kristala’s combat pacing so far has been quite interesting, as the game doesn’t throw you into the fire as fast as some of the titles it takes inspiration from, but does eventually ramp up into faster encounters against humanoid enemies. The first few bosses and enemies are reasonably forgiving and slow, only requiring you to be mindful of your spacing and ability to dodge, but there are some very real walls later on, like the spider boss Rhylotha, which proposes that you either learn how to parry or suffer many horribly poisonous deaths.
The Headaches of Early Access
During its year and a half in Early Access, Kristala has received monthly updates that make up its two chapters, which feature about 8-10 hours of gameplay in total, depending on your interest in side quests and ability to adapt to what the game throws at you. The first chapter is a very fun experience, hosting somewhat open areas that are satisfying to platform in and have an overall nice flow to their exploration, something that unfortunately starts to wane as we approach its second chapter, which is unfortunately plagued by more convoluted level designs that engage in some real time-wasting behavior.
Now, it’s not exactly uncommon for a Souls-like to feature spotty level design here and there, but Kristala doubly suffers from this decay in level design because it heavily relies on platforming, as the player is expected to climb, vault, and wall jump their way around obstacles. The first region, Dalamase, while not perfect, is at the very least functional, which cannot be said about Myr, where crippling collision issues that teleport you halfway across the map become very common. The game is especially bad about landing you in the proper place after some animations end, with the vertical wall rarely connecting properly to where you are supposed to go. The game also fails to take into account that sometimes you might want to move through some of these platforming sections backwards for the sake of exploration, wildly overshooting where you’ll land after a pole swing because it’s only meant as a one-way tool to travel in the other direction.
Being fully honest, Kristala is a little too janky for a game that’s supposedly fully releasing in a couple of months, suffering from stutters, crashes, softlocks, poor enemy collision and AI, lack of weapon variety, and too many platforming bugs to count. Astral Clocktower’s plan to label Kristala’s third chapter as a 1.0 release is a hurried way to leave early access and jump into consoles, especially when you consider the game is supposed to have seven chapters in total, which, unless the studio doubles in size overnight, will come out at the same rate that past content has been added to the game, meaning Kristala will be out of early access in name only.
Labels and Comparisons
Kristala describes itself as a dark fantasy ARPG, and while it fits the bill through its portrayal of necromantic magic and scary bipedal fish, it fails to do anything visually or tonally interesting with the label, instead featuring very safe and generic enemy designs through zombies, spores, and large spiders, also hosting environments that, while somber, don’t have anything interesting to look at. It’s understandable that perhaps Kristala is not trying to be as metal as Dark Souls 3 with its parasite hollows or Lords of the Fallen’s reboot with bloody knight Pieta, but so far, the game is nowhere near dark enough to warrant using dark fantasy as its main descriptor.
One interesting design choice is that both regions so far feature a populated city as their main hub area, which is very unusual considering how most Souls-likes take place in either post-apocalyptic or decayed worlds where people who don’t want to kill you are very scarce. Perhaps this serves as setup for a heavier story beat in the future where we’ll visit a region that is not doing so well and might encounter a town that is either deserted or has been corrupted, turning its citizens against us, although only time will tell if Kristala will deliver on a darker premise as we progress.
Final Verdict
Kristala is a title that I can’t help but be mixed on, as on one hand, it features a combat system that is arguably much more competent than what we’ve seen in other Souls-likes, but on the other, it is a largely unfinished experience trying to escape Early Access way too soon. This is a game where your character T-poses into existence every time you fast travel and freezes every time you look at it wrong, and the fact that a 1.0 release is scheduled for Q1 2026 does not inspire much confidence, as its second chapter has been out for roughly a year but feels a month old on a technical level. I believe the good faith that players are willing to offer Astral Clocktower might disappear depending on the technical state in which chapter 3 releases.
That said, the bones for an engaging Souls-like experience are definitely present here, as Kristala’s combat finds ways to mix both classic and modern trends that the genre has been known for with mastery. The overall technical state of the game, alongside how rushed its second half feels, is a whole other story, however, leaving much to be desired and making for an overall forgettable and unpolished Souls experience.
