{"id":1858615,"date":"2026-04-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1858615"},"modified":"2026-04-01T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T21:00:00","slug":"crimson-desert-review-many-hours-later-were-unconvinced-by-this-fascinating-mess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1858615","title":{"rendered":"Crimson Desert review: many hours later, we\u2019re unconvinced by this fascinating mess"},"content":{"rendered":"
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No, not there.\u00a0There<\/em>. You need to be standing in a very precise spot for\u00a0Crimson Desert<\/em>\u2019s UI to show you the button prompt to pick up a water container. And you need to pick up the water container, because the house is on fire. It caught fire because\u2026 actually, the game isn\u2019t big on finer details like that. All you need to know is that there\u2019s a local healer in there and you need to get him out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So you do. You use one of your abyssal abilities first, one of numerous supernatural and elemental-based feats available to you, in this instance the ability to pick up a massive tree trunk by telekinesis and move it away from the doorway it\u2019s blocking. You might be tempted to go in and look for the healer at this point, but this would be wrong. As we all know, fire makes people invisible so this won\u2019t work. You need to chuck several handily placed jugs of water into the inferno first, until they\u2019re revealed, laying in the foetal position, stationary but apparently unharmed despite having been buried underneath some fire moments ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You run in and grab the healer, carry them to safety, and then\u2026 and then that\u2019s that. Everyone who\u2019s been watching the spectacle walks off in silence, you never hear from or see the healer again, and another quest is unceremoniously added to your journal, its origins a total mystery just like the \u2018save the healer from a burning building\u2019 one you\u2019re fairly sure you just completed but can\u2019t tell definitively.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Repeat that gameplay loop for ten hours, and you\u2019ve got the onboarding experience offered up by\u00a0Crimson Desert<\/em>, one of the most anticipated and ambitious games of the year, and without doubt one of the unwieldiest. It looks like The\u00a0Witcher 4<\/em> come early. It has more gameplay systems than even a\u00a0Metal Gear Solid<\/em> would dare to throw into one game. It has significant potential. But having significant potential still leaves plenty of room for \u2018isn\u2019t very fun to play\u2019, so let\u2019s get into why Pearl Abyss took a swing and a miss here.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The biggest problem is in your hands. The controls are laid out with all the finesse of a noughties Peugeot interior, making basic interactions feel stressful and more complex combos and abilities feel like a memory test you didn\u2019t revise for. It\u2019s most reminiscent of\u00a0GTA<\/em>\u2019s control layout, but since there are MMO-like layers of interactions here, it simply doesn\u2019t feel intuitive to put your brain into Trevor Phillips mode while you\u2019re attempting to access your horse\u2019s inventory or force-punch some copper ore out of a mountain while climbing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just that the mappings are awkward. It\u2019s that the very best thing about this game is discovering things you didn\u2019t know you could do, and the way systems layer on top of each other. You need total fluency in the controls in order to enjoy those things, and it takes well over ten hours to achieve that fluency. That\u2019s, er, a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While we\u2019re down here in the dank well of bad game design, let\u2019s consider\u00a0Crimson Desert<\/em>\u2019s story before we cover other, much more successful, component parts. You are a resurrected warrior, a member of a tribe called the Greymanes who are at war with the Black Bears. Having been slain in the prologue, which by introducing characters with personalities and dialogue, tricks you into thinking those things will also feature heavily in the rest of the game, you find yourself brought back to life in a strange, abstract realm called the Abyss (which is actually high above the familiar world rather than below it, as abysses usually are) and learn that you now have abyssal powers. A nice lady in a hat encourages you to be nice to the people in the world below, and sends you on your way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"Crimson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

And that, with barely anything edited for brevity, is your context for setting out on this 200+ hour adventure. Any questions? No? Great, off you go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing conceptually wrong with building an open world game that isn\u2019t about narrative.\u00a0Breath of the Wild<\/em> is hardly a page-turner, and you could write its memorable dialogue exchanges down on a postage stamp. But it commits to this design decision, purposely stripping back the storytelling to get you to focus on its gameplay systems and in all the silence, you find yourself writing your own story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Crimson Desert<\/em> doesn\u2019t commit to stripping away the story, but nor does it commit to telling one. The result is a disjointed, confusing, and often bizarre narrative in which people you hardly know are constantly telling you to go and do things for reasons that remain unclear long after you do them. Protagonist Kliff is neither the kind of blank slate hero that\u00a0Skyrim<\/em> and co use to allow you to superimpose yourself into the adventure, nor a sharply drawn lead with clear passions and flaws that an epic RPG with a voiced hero needs.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There\u2019s good stuff in here, mind you. It feels like rooting through a dusty old loft to find it, but it\u2019s in here. As the game evolves you\u2019re increasingly drawn into the management of your clan the Greymanes, and asserting their place in a vast world map of 100-odd other tribes is a compelling activity. You learn along the way interesting and unexpected ways to use and combine your abilities, like cooking food by simply pulling it onto the ground from your inventory and setting fire to it. Or levelling up your horse by patting it, until you unlock the ability to drift round corners with it like an RX-8 that neighs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The combat, which can usually be slashed through on autopilot by hitting the light and heavy attack buttons endlessly, nonetheless has loads of scope for combos and playful touches. You can pick unaware enemies up and throw them at each other, for example, which is a far better way to start a fight than drawing your sword.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the world map, incomprehensibly vast, features a rich collection of visual wonders. It\u2019s hard not to wish it was grounded in more lore, that there was some history to the regions you explore and distinct cultures to the people who inhabit them, but on a purely visual level the variation and detail are stunning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Whether the good is worth enduring the bad is a question we couldn\u2019t answer definitively during the opening hours, and feel no closer to drawing a line under it now more than a week of solid play later. It\u2019s robust enough to withstand determined, single-minded exploration without ever becoming stale or repetitive, with a main questline that\u2019s about 80 hours long alone. But it\u2019s not robust enough to ever really tell you what sort of experience it wants you to be having. Is this a singleplayer MMO? An open world RPG with MMO elements? Is it\u00a0Breath of the Wild<\/em>, or\u00a0Dark Souls<\/em>, or\u00a0The Witcher<\/em>? It seems to be trying to be all three at once, without half of the finesse that any one of them has.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also been\u00a0caught using AI assets<\/a> in artwork throughout the game, which developer Pearl Abyss says were always intended to be placeholder images and their inclusion in the final release is simply an oversight. Unfortunately, the whole experience has a whiff of the glitchy generative AI response. It seems to be an exercise for shareholders, not gamers. It has numerous features that it can brag about convincingly, but which reveal themselves to be poorly designed when you scrutinise them. It\u2019s ticking all the boxes gamers like: open world exploration, emergent gameplay, sandbox-style tools, countless hours of play. But those component parts never quite form a convincing whole. It remains a fascinating, compelling, confounding and confusing world of contrasts. Critiques of it that fall on both sides are right. There\u2019s ammunition here to make the case it\u2019s brilliant, and also plenty to make the case it\u2019s unplayable. For our part, all we can say is that we\u2019re probably done playing it now.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, not there.\u00a0There. You need to be standing in a very precise spot for\u00a0Crimson Desert\u2019s UI to show you the button prompt to pick up a water container. And you need to pick up the water container, because the house is on fire. It caught fire because\u2026 actually, the game isn\u2019t big on finer details […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-1858615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1858615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1858615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1858615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1858615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}