The gacha RPG space is getting more crowded by the month, but Silver Palace managed to grab attention when its 2nd Beta phase opened up. Part of that comes down to its visuals, sure, but what actually makes it stand out is its willingness to skip some of the tired tropes the genre keeps leaning on. We spent time going through the beta to see how the story, exploration, combat, and gacha system hold up, and here’s what we found.

Story and World

Right away, Silver Palace avoids the usual amnesia trope that gacha protagonists tend to have. The main characters remember exactly who they are and act as sharp as you’d expect from that. Players take on the role of a sibling duo, Hugin and Munin, and whichever one you pick as your MC, the other still exists in the story and plays an active part in it. During the Prologue, both siblings interact together and you even get to control each of them for a bit, before the story gives a clear reason why only one becomes playable going forward.

The mystery plot is handled with a light touch when it comes to exposition, letting players piece things together instead of being told everything outright. The dialogue choices don’t branch much, but the investigation sections are a highlight, since you actually have to examine items to find clues instead of just pressing a single interact button. There’s also a Mind Palace mechanic, similar to what you’d see in detective fiction, where you mentally reconstruct a crime scene and work through it step by step.

Voice acting in English is solid, with a good mix of accents that fit the setting. The MC is fully voiced too, though the lip sync on characters looks stiff, and non-playable characters or those not tied closely to the plot don’t get lip movement at all. A skip feature and story summary are available from the start, which helps if you want to move through story beats faster.

Prologue Story (Spoiler Warning)

If you’d rather go in blind, skip this part. The Prologue takes place at a lavish party where the Queen is honoring Hugin and Munin for solving a string of difficult cases. The event turns dangerous when the venue turns out to be rigged for an assassination attempt. To keep the guests from panicking, the siblings split up, with your chosen MC staying in the spotlight to accept the award while the other sibling works behind the scenes to find and disable the device.

The assassination attempt gets stopped and the person responsible is caught, but that’s only the start of the trouble. The airship’s Core Reactor reacts to a strange silver liquid, the same substance that had been controlling the culprit, and this spawns two powerful monsters while turning nearby people into mindless attackers. The Queen doesn’t survive the chaos. After the siblings manage to evacuate guests and take down the monster from the reactor, things get worse. A mysterious figure grabs your sibling’s dropped gun and shoots at you from a blind spot. Your sibling jumps in to protect you, gets shot in the head, and dies right there.

The ship explodes soon after, and the surviving sibling ends up blamed for everything by the public and the media. Years pass while you’re on the run, and eventually you return as new clues start to surface, setting up the hunt for whoever was really behind it all. As far as gacha game openings go, this is a strong and dramatic one.

Visuals, Exploration, and Performance

Visually, Silver Palace’s open world looks impressive. Buildings are detailed, characters look sharp, and small touches like water droplets forming on characters during rain add to the presentation. That said, the city currently feels a little empty, since there are no vehicles on the streets aside from a tram, and pedestrian density is fairly low.

Exploration uses a somewhat limited verticality system. You can’t freely climb buildings and instead need to look for stairs or grapple points to get up high, or use grapple points to move between rooftops. One of the more enjoyable parts of exploring is the mount system, which lets you fly or drift along the ground. Running and flying stamina are kept separate, so switching between the two feels smooth without waiting around for stamina to refill. Puzzles scattered around the world are still fairly simple for now, mostly involving moving objects from one point to another or using telekinesis to move balls into place. Even so, exploring feels rewarding thanks to hidden puzzles, chests, and floating rewards you can grab while riding your mount, even if some areas of the city look a bit too similar to each other.

Performance is a bigger concern at this stage. There’s noticeable lag and stuttering in certain areas, suggesting the game’s engine needs strong hardware to run smoothly despite having low minimum requirements. Testing was done on a PC with an Intel Core i5 13500, 32GB of RAM, and an RTX 4070 Super. On the Prioritize Graphics preset, the game looks great, but frame rates can dip below 60 even with DLSS Balance turned on. Switching to the Balance preset still results in noticeable drops and stutters, and that’s without ray tracing enabled. Menus and gacha animations can also feel a bit laggy and unresponsive outside of actual gameplay.

Combat and Progression

Combat is built around four character parties and feels weighty and deliberate. Each character brings their own skills and gimmicks, backed by an Intro Skill system that lets you build a charge up to three times, giving you the option to freely swap characters while the bar lasts or hold onto it to plan your rotation.

Beyond just dealing damage, combat relies on staggering enemies through parries against yellow attacks and dodges against red ones. The parry window is fairly generous, which makes it approachable to learn, and successfully parrying also chips away at enemy health, speeding up fights. Once an enemy’s stagger bar fills up, you can trigger a Finisher move, with different animations depending on the boss and character used. Players who want a more relaxed experience can use Casual Mode, which lets you hold down a single button to have your character auto-combo.

Progression follows patterns familiar to modern 3D action gacha games. Characters level up, can be limit broken, and have skills that can be upgraded. Motives act as weapons with their own effects and stats, and there’s additional gear called Epiphanies and Implements, five pieces total, that provide set bonuses tied to random stats. For farming stages, there’s an option to spend double stamina for double rewards, which speeds up the grind.

Characters and Gacha System

The gacha system offers a notable improvement over many competitors by guaranteeing the featured character by the 100th pull, without a 50/50 chance involved. On paper, this makes collecting characters easier compared to systems that require sparking through multiple pulls just to guarantee one copy.

That said, there doesn’t seem to be a soft pity system in place. Five star characters tend to drop right at the 100 pull guarantee rather than earlier, with the earliest pull during testing landing 10 pulls before guarantee, and that was described as rare. Getting duplicate four star characters within a single 10 pull is also uncommon, with four star guarantees often landing on just one character or weapon rather than multiples. Because of this, it’s hard to say yet how the in game economy will feel once the game fully launches, and the impact of the duplicate system on character performance is still unclear.

Character personality is where the game shines the most. Combat feels distinct between characters, but so do the smaller details, like unique menu animations that show off personality every time you switch between characters. There are also bonding interactions unlocked through gifting, which add extra flavor and exclusive content for favorite characters. Players can also assign characters to an office building where they can be visited and interacted with outside of combat.

Impressions So Far

Overall, the 2nd Beta shows a lot of promise. The story takes bold narrative risks, combat demands actual skill while still feeling satisfying, and exploration benefits from mount mechanics that let players fly and drift across the map. The gacha system’s guaranteed pull at 100 is also a strong selling point compared to other games in the genre.

There’s still work ahead for the development team, particularly around engine optimization for smoother performance and making the open world feel more populated and alive. The in game economy and how easy or difficult it will be to obtain characters is also something worth watching once the game fully releases, especially given the lack of a soft pity system. Since this is only the 2nd Beta, changes are likely before the 3rd Beta or the final release, but based on what’s been shown so far, Silver Palace has a strong foundation and is shaping up to be a title worth keeping an eye on in the gacha action RPG space.