Soulframe is strangely addictive

Soulframe Preludes, now at Prelude 15 – I'm Addicted It's hard to describe this game to someone who hasn't played Warframe. If you have, you already know pretty much what to expect. Soulframe is basically a fantasy version of that same style: a third-person action RPG with exploration, repeatable missions, and a grindy loot loop, but focused on slower, weighty melee combat instead of guns. You play as an Envoy protecting a living nature world from invaders, think, Captain Planet, as someone in game said. Run around, save cute animals, destroy the invaders and their pollution machines. Even though it's still early (Prelude 15 right now), it already gives you enough to easily sink 100+ hours into. It feels more like a full game that's missing some stuff than an early test still figuring itself out. That's impressive because what they have is already pretty dang good. The core of the game is pretty simple: You level up Pacts, which are basically different classes you can swap between. They give you active abilities and passive bonuses. You also level up different weapon types, each with their own passive trees you can put points into. There's not a ton of variety yet - around a dozen options split across a few paths - but you can respec freely whenever you want. There's a basic quest to follow, but it's mostly a big continent full of repeatable missions and dungeons. It feels a lot like late-game MMO grinding: you run the same stuff over and over hunting for drops, with some RNG on weapons that gives it Diablo/Borderlands loot vibes. That's pretty much it. You grind for shards and materials to craft and upgrade weapons (they drop fully built now with random Tempers you can refine further). Then you do it again. The devs are updating things fast, so a lot can still change, but this grindy loop feels like it's going to be the heart of the game - basically Warframe without the guns. I thought I'd get bored way quicker. I've never been able to play Warframe for more than a few days at a time, with years inbetween. But I can't seem to stop playing this, wishing there was more content and more challenge to it, but it's doing something right if I can just mindlessly grind it for week straight, and possibly longer.