Soulframe debuts new gameplay at Tennocon - and we'll be playing it this year

While its stablemate Warframe goes full grunge with its 1999 expansion, Soulframe marks a departure from Digital Extremes' prior work by taking us to an almost medieval wilderness.

Last year, the team showed off its slower, more deliberate combat, interesting RPG mechanics and procedural dungeons, and at TennoCon 2024 we got our first devstream with a live playthrough.

Tennocon gives deeper look at Soulframe

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Players step into the greaves of Envoys, disgraced soldiers with a deep connection to their ancestry. And, in keeping with the theming of family ties, Soulframe’s character creator shows your protagonist being held by their mother. Character creation is tied to a narrator who describes your mother’s features, before you’re sent away for your own safety.

The gameplay demo picks up some time later with our hero dropping into the Nightfold. At any point in the game, players can switch to this spectral plane, complete with a slick animation as your character falls backwards and rises from the fog. Here, you can commune with your ancestors, change weapons, craft gear, and more.

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Each of your ancestors will need to be recruited, and doing so will add them to the Nightfold where you can visit them to learn more about them or utilise their new progression paths. Players can also switch between Pacts, and in-game classes, to move between assassin, tank, and other roles.

In the short demo, we saw the Envoy slip into invisibility to attack a group of enemies, before freeing a captured rat and following it to meet Verminia, a Witch ancestor.

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Along the way, a new enemy called Nimrod attacks, arriving in a flash of thunder and with a booming war cry, before fleeing and reappearing. A press release says Nimrod will return, so players will need to “keep an eye on the sky”.

In recruiting Verminia, players are able to have her join the Nightfold where she can help with gear crafting and customisation. She also teases a new enemy, an armoured bear called Bromius, which has a sort of swampy feel that feels close to a sort of bayou horror.

You can play it soon

“The closed testing we’ve been doing with our community has been so impactful; we’ve learned a ton, and we continue to listen and learn each day,” said Soulframe Creative Director, Geoff Crookes as part of a press release.

“We’re hoping to open this up to a lot more players this fall. Everything is still rough around the edges, but that’s part of our style - the feedback is important to us, and we really do iterate on it regularly.”

Players can claim their Envoy title and register for access to the Preludes closed beta tests at the Soulframe website. Given we also saw procedurally generated dungeons last year, Soulframe is shaping up to be pretty ambitious - and I can’t wait to hear more.