How to Unlock Characters in Duet Night Abyss

The highly anticipated Duet Night Abyss developed by Pan Studios and published by Hero Games, is officially out, giving players the opportunity to jump into the action first-hand. With 19 characters to unlock, there's a big roster to look forward to, and you might be wanting to pick up your favourite ones right away, though it's not exactly clear how to get all of these individually.

There are actually four unlocking methods (excluding paid) for the characters, with each one having different requirements. Here's everything you need to know about unlocking characters!

Story Progression

First, let's talk about the ones you'll be getting without any effort. Through advancing the story, there are a few characters that you can get, and this should give you a reasonable team and a large roster of gameplay elements to partake in.

Seven of the characters are awarded through gameplay:

• Berenica
• Rebecca
• Outsider
• Daphne
• Margie
• Truffle and Filbert
• Lisbell

However, getting these characters is only the beginning of your adventure — with the rate-up system called Intron, you'll want to go out of your way to farm their ascension materials and more shards (called Thought: Character throughout the article) to further unlock their potential. So just because you get six out of the 19 characters through story progression doesn't mean you won't have more to unlock with them at a later date!

Secret Letter Clues

The way you'll get a majority of the characters and weapons in the game — especially the more Duet Night Abyss progresses — will be through the Secret Letter Clues. You can acquire these items through gameplay by completing permanent events (stories, achievements), finishing Daily Quests, and completing Daily Commissions, and then you can trade these for a selection of characters.

You can purchase character-specific Secret Letters for 10 Secret Letter Clues in the Shop in the Covert Commissions section, where there are (at launch) nine characters to pick from:

• Berenica
• Rebecca
• Lynn
• Margie
• Randy
• Sibylle
• Outsider
• Daphne
• Lady Nifle

Each Secret Letter can be used in the Covert Commissions, where you'll be able to select which character you farm for. There are three reward tiers you can get after completion:

Bronze:

• Secret Letter Clue
• Weapon Manual II
• Combat Melody II

Silver:

• Essence Gelatin
• Thought: Character x2 (where Character is the Secret Letter you used)

Gold

• Thought: Character x10

There is a 10% chance to get the Gold tier rewards, and completing each Covert Commission drops three items — so you could get unlucky and pull three Bronze rewards, essentially nullifying your Secret Letter: Character. 

You need 30 Thought: Character items to unlock any character for the first time, so with Silver drops, it should take 15 Covert Commissions (or 150 Secret Letter Clues), whereas Gold requires only three Covert Commissions (or 30 Secret Letter Clues).

Nocturnal Echoes

Nocturnal Echoes are refights of some of the major bosses in the narrative; to unlock these, you'll need to have progressed enough, but it's a bit more complex than the Secret Letter Clue farming. Every boss has six reward tiers correlating to their scaling level (Lv. 30 through Lv. 80), so you need to fight the specific difficulty to get the character (with most other rewards being weapons).

Lv. 50 is the one that has the chance to drop Secret Letter: Character variations. Each encounter can drop 3–5 Secret Letter: Character items, and you can complete every Nocturnal Echoes five times per week. So you can get anywhere from 15–25 Secret Letter: Character items weekly, which should be enough to get a substantial amount of Thought: Character, but you still need to partake in Covert Missions, so the grind is a bit longer on these.

It's worth noting that Lv. 50 boss encounters are tough — not that they're hard (they can go up to Lv. 80, so they'll be a breeze later), but you do need to dedicate some time to Ascending at least one character to be able to face them. It took me several minutes (something over 10) to fight Lv. 40 Sibylle with Truffle and Filbert, but that took a lot of jumping around to have my Shield regenerate, and a painstakingly slow battle.

The characters acquireable through the Nocturnal Echoes currently are:

• Phantasio
• Lisbell
• Tabethe
• Yale
• Hellfire
• Rhythm
• Truffle and Filbert

Do bear in mind that some of these correlate with the ones acquireable through story progression, as that is the way to farm their Intron.

Immersive Theatre

The Immersive Theatre is the way that you unlock the latest character to drop, and it's also the hardest of the bunch. It takes quite a while to be able to partake in it, as you'll have to be a bit into Chapter 2, and once you do, you'll need a team stronger than that of the Nocturnal Echoes.

These locations have you defeating a set number of enemies (which goes up from dozens to hundreds) within a minute and 30 seconds. The trick is that the Immersive Theatre is more than just a dungeon, as it's set in different Acts with enemy levels scaling up and a final boss at the end (not quite a Nocturnal Echo).

These Acts are also split into two teams of three characters. So you need six characters at a high level (preferably with a bit of Ascension to reliably clear it) and weapons, too. You have your loadout of melee and ranged weapons to take into battle, with your AI companions needing one melee and one ranged, for a total of four melee and ranged weapons needed at a high level to complete these.

You can, then, farm the latest character (at launch, Psyche, and later Fina) with their weapon and a large amount of Secret Letter Clues by clearing these. The Immersive Theatre is more time-gated and does drip-feed content a bit more than others, but once a character leaves it (28 days after their launch), a new one will take their place, and the old character will enter a permanent grind cycle.

The characters that used to be part of the Immersive Theatre will become Nocturnal Echoes characters after their 28 days are up.