The Esoteric Soulframe Wants to See How Weird a Successful Free-to-Play Game Can Get

By Grace Benfell | August 7, 2025 | 11:00am

Video Games Features Soulframe

The Esoteric Soulframe Wants to See How Weird a Successful Free-to-Play Game Can Get

How weird can a free-to-play game get? Perhaps this is a moot question, when a game about training and racing anime horse girls is a legitimate hit. However, the general impulse of live service is toward a fundamental common denominator. Games like Mecha Break tend toward generic sci-fi aesthetics. Mobile games lean bland and cutesy. Even Uma Musume: Pretty Derby, which is pretty weird, is perfectly recognizable as a modern day sports anime. In some sense, Soulframe is no different. It’s another free-to-play fantasy game modeled after Breath of the Wild. Snore! Yet Soulframe is strange in a way that is hard to reduce to quirk. It has an aesthetic that draws on ancient epic and “weird” fantasy fiction as much as the MMO hits of the last decade.

This could be seen as predictable. Developer Digital Extremes’ prior game Warframe is still the ultimate purveyor of free-to-play weirdness. Its financial model is familiar: you can buy new “warframes” (think weaponized suits i.e. Iron Man) and upgrade them with a variety of materials and currencies. Content drops have defined self-player missions, buffeted by co-op “raids” and material grinding. But the warframes themselves are eldritch, sometimes horrific machines. Its narrative is disorienting, even dis-empowering. Its world-building is dense and jargon-heavy, but in a way that feels more foreign than other sci-fi games in its weight class. Destiny has plenty of strangeness, but it does go to some pains to explain itself. The bewildering parts of its canon are tucked in side material and item descriptions. In contrast, Warframe deploys in-world jargon and slang in equal measure and expect you to keep up with it. It forces you to interpret it as you play.

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Soulframe is much the same, in both its boilerplate qualities and its surrealism. You’ll customize your character’s hair, eye, and skin color by selecting portions of a spoken-word poem. After a cryptic cutscene, you’re thrown into the world with no clear objective, just the ability to summon a bird to guide your path. Soulframe’s world is verdant, rolling hills and twisted tree trunks. But curved monuments and gigantic ships–more than a little reminiscent of HR Giger’s Dune concept art–muddy rivers and call down lightning. Discovering new areas will prompt a display of their name, but in a unearthly script which resembles no human language. Soulframe is designed around a kind of disorientation. For every way it feels familiar, there is also a way it undercuts that familiarity.

Soulframe

Still, you’ll understand more of it the more time you spend in its world. Despite its lack of explicit goals, you can follow your bird companion to get introduced to each of the game’s major mechanics in steady succession. The relatively icon-free maps of Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild are obvious inspirations, and like both of those games Soulframe eventually unfolds into legibility. You will grow in power and strength. You will reveal more of the map. You will clear out bandit camps, destroy enemy infrastructure, level up, get new spells and loot. What was once strange and labyrinthine will be filled in through wiki entries and walkthroughs. Between any moments of legitimate aesthetic bewilderment is the regular open-world rhythm.

But basic video game power fantasy cannot unravel Soulframe’s strangeness. Those bandits? They are metal-draped soldiers who speak like characters in Canterbury Tales. You’ll unlock new skills and craft loot, but to do that you’ll need to integrate “ancestors” into your dream palace, a water landscape which resembles Arnold Böcklin’s paintings “The Isle of the Dead.” To be fair, Elden Ring also has poetic, old-timey fantasy language. It also drops weirdo proper nouns that force you to make interpretive choices and keeps oodles of its world-building behind item descriptions and side quests. But Soulframe is 50% more Beowulf by volume. Multiple characters speak in rhyming couplets. Its language doesn’t feel just fantastic, but archaic. When From Software’s work can be dense and spare, Soulframe is lush and floral. In its language and its imagination, it feels akin to science fantasy like The Book of the New Sun.

When you read the words science fantasy, Star Wars is probably what immediately comes to mind, a fantasy story surrounded with the accoutrement of a space opera. But Book of the New Sun is distinctly weirder. It’s set in a far future world that is both speculative and fantastic, where torture cults make decrepit rocket ships their home and where burial lakes hide thousands of the immortal dead. It is that lineage on which Soulframe draws. It is unclear just how old Soulframe’s world is. Are the Ode, the aforementioned soldiers and polluters, local or cosmic colonizers? When one of the Ode calls you family in an early cutscene, what does that mean? These mysteries probably will have some answers, but they also hang in the air like mountains seen from far away.

It feels tricky to recommend Soulframe. It is now in its “prelude” stage, just a poetic, branding-forward way of saying “early access.” Even in this early period, you can see the ways its financial machine will work, how it will leverage its endless currencies and loot to extract money from you. If you are looking for a true alleviation from the AAA blues, you won’t find it here. Yet, if you want to see what kind of swings a studio can take, even with big budgets and genre conventions, you’ll be hard pressed to find something as unique as Soulframe.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.