Crimson Desert Is a Jarring, Overwhelming Must-Play Experience

Crimson Desert is a game of contrasts. Its open world is both captivating and baffling. The narrative meanders between gripping brutality and the mundane. Its systems are, eventually, engaging but have a tendency to overwhelm. The game lacks cohesion. Yet despite that, Pearl Abyss has managed to infuse this experience with enough magnetism, originality, and ambition that it’s easy to overlook the shortcomings and simply lose yourself in the world of Pywel.

Players will embody the role of Kliff, at least initially, a member of a group called the Greymanes which prides itself on protecting Pywel. Crimson Desert opens with the Greymanes being almost totally wiped out by the rival Black Bears in a gruesome and bloody battle, separating Kliff from his companions, Oongka, Yann, and Naira. Brought back from the brink of death by a mysterious force, Kliff sets out to find his comrades, rebuild the Greymanes, and confront the Black Bears’ leader Myurdin.

I’ve Never Seen So Many Menu Screens

Crimson Desert is undoubtedly an overwhelming game from the get-go in just about every area imaginable. You’re rapidly thrown into battle with very little guidance beyond the odd pop-up talking you through basic moves. Heck, I wasn’t even sure how to change weapons, heal, nor monitor any of my stats on the UI, so I did what anyone would do. I opened up the game’s menu to check out the controls. Big mistake. Crimson Desert features a whopping eight menu screens that’ll perhaps leave you feeling more overwhelmed than if you’d opted just to wing it in the first place.

To use a common phrase, Crimson Desert offers what you might call a steep learning curve. You will likely spam buttons and get lucky in combat before you ever feel like you have a comprehensive grasp of what’s happening. The same can be said for the game’s mysterious ‘abyss’ elements, where Kliff can make use of symbiote-esque powers to puzzle solve or traverse a strange, fractured settlement in the sky. It was a while before I even attempted to make sense of the inventory or skill tree system.

Crimson Desert’s Steep Learning Curve Won’t Be For Everyone

This isn’t to say that every element of Crimson Desert is complicated, because it’s not, but Pearl Abyss certainly won’t hold your hand and explain everything to you. You can navigate through umpteen menus to find some help and explainers, or you can just persevere and figure it out as time progresses. I’ll always sigh when someone describes a game as “getting good after 10 hours”, or something to that effect. It’s not entirely untrue of Crimson Desert though. As beguiling as the opening hours are as you step into this massive world, the sheer information overload is a slog that undoubtedly won’t be for everyone.

That’s especially true of combat which offers no difficulty adjustments and is, in my opinion, pretty tough – especially when you get as far as taking on some of the bosses in the open-world. This may not be a soulslike – you’ll spawn pretty much where you were upon death – but fans of that genre are certainly going to be well fed by some encounters. Crimson Desert appears to have your standard run-of-the-mill medieval combat on the surface, but it doesn’t. Yes, you have a sword and a bow, but you don’t wield them as you might expect. Instead, Crimson Desert makes use of combos, adding an element of strategy into the mix and requiring dexterity from the player.

Combat Is Tougher Than I Expected – And No, You Can’t Change The Difficulty

Combat can be tricky to navigate at first, especially as Kliff could only dodge, as opposed to block or parry. Worry not, some well-placed skill upgrades will fix that eventually. It did mean that I’d initially roll about recklessly, landing the odd blow when I could, hoping that fate would allow things to go my way. I felt passive, despite developing hand cramps from button spamming so aggressively. I say all this though not to paint myself as an awful gamer, but to reassure you that if you pick up this game and feel the same way, this feeling does dissipate.

Mastery develops with time, and I noticed a shift as I went from straying away from open-world combat encounters to actually wanting to give them a go. There are some combat encounters in Crimson Desert that are a tad too formidable for my tastes, but I won’t discredit the game for that. I will advise those of you who don’t yearn for an entirely punishing experience though not to go full speed ahead on progressing through the main story. You may think that’s the best way to learn and level up but actually, you’re better off exploring, learning, and levelling up Kliff so you’re in a stronger position when you do tackle those main quests.

The Narrative Can Give You Whiplash With Its Changes In Tone

The story does, as I said, have a tendency to meander. There are so many spoilers for which I’m sworn to secrecy that I’ll use the opening chapters as an example. After the Greymanes are totally decimated by the Black Bears in a brutal, blood-soaked battle that wouldn’t look out of place in Game of Thrones, Crimson Desert completely changes in tone for the next couple of hours. You’ll clean a chimney, rescue a cat, and locate stolen cattle as you slowly familiarise yourself with the region of Hernand.

And then there’s everything regarding The Abyss. It’s The Abyss that brings Kliff back to life in that opening. Before long, he encounters a child who takes him to a magical bridge in the sky, tasks him with platforming across it before he succeeds in doing so, solves a puzzle using a new tendril power, and unlocks the ability to fly. There is a recurring element of thinking, “What is this game?” Certainly, Crimson Desert picks up pace as you progress through the main campaign, but it doesn’t ever totally shake off its ability to go off on a tangent, even if certain elements do become more sensical eventually.

Of course, the urge to explore feeds into that. It’s very, very easy to get distracted in Crimson Desert, so I’d argue the narrative doesn’t always need to meander in the way it does, given that the player is probably doing that for some respite anyway. Anytime Kliff did make significant progress though in his plight, I was always engrossed – particularly as Crimson Desert is packed with great voice performances.

The Open-World Is Perhaps The Most Stunning I’ve Seen

Easily, Crimson Desert’s greatest strength is its open-world. I know you’ve all seen its many facets ahead of launch in various gameplay reveals. Players will travel through forests, deserts, jungles, and more. There are dragons, jet packs, and mythical forest beings. You can fling yourself off a tree, conquer enemy settlements, build and decorate a base, stumble across a circus … You name it. Despite arguably boasting the most bonkers collection of features I’ve ever seen in a video game, the open-world has a wow factor.

The second I opened the game’s map, I did an audible “oh my god”. It really is bigger than you can comprehend. Early in the game, you’ll be able to view it from a structure placed high in the sky and it’s a moment that fills you both with awe and fear. I think Crimson Desert is one of those games where you have to cast any sort of ‘completionist’ attitude to one side. You might get there one day, but its open-world suited me best when I just let myself be taken in by the experience without putting pressure on achieving anything in particular.

Too Many Ideas? Maybe, But The World Is a Delight To Play In

Of course, you’ll have to travel far to see all that Crimson Desert’s world has to offer – and I know I certainly haven’t done that. I simply haven’t had enough time with the game considering its scale. I think Pearl Abyss has done a great job, though, of ensuring that the wow factor is built in from the start. Very early on, Kliff follows someone on horseback crossing over a bridge. You see a huge canyon and waterfall that really did take my breath away. There are some unbeatable vistas in this game that I’m not convinced are matched by anything else out there.

The world doesn’t just rely on bonkers random events for immersion. If you knock into an NPC, they’ll react. You can launch them off and steal their carriage. Even just riding a horse into a wooden fence will cause it to break. Yes, Crimson Desert is a game of large scale, but it doesn’t forget that the little things are important too. In every settlement I visited, for example, I made an effort to try doors to see if they were enterable and while, of course, not every door in Crimson Desert is, I was always caught off guard by how many were.

This does feed into the overwhelm. You can pick up a ton of stuff in the open-world which isn’t ideal for a game with very limited storage. Inventory is a key example of an area that I’d argue was a tad overcomplicated. You don’t get a lot of inventory despite the game and world offering you so much. What the game won’t tell you is that you can extend your inventory by completing certain side quests and assisting NPCs, plus you can freely disregard quest items once you’ve used them, which I would not have done had I not been told it was safe to do so by developers.

Your Hardware May Struggle To Get The Best Results

One downside to Crimson Desert that I can’t overlook is performance. Pearl Abyss has done an impressive job when it comes to optimisation. I didn’t struggle with lag, nor did I really encounter any bugs outside of Kliff’s hair disappearing after one in-game death. The game didn’t look quite as, let’s say, glossy as I hoped. I played the Steam version of the game on a ROG Xbox Ally X with the game recommending I set textures and graphics options as ‘low’. In doing so, I managed to get Crimson Desert running at between 30 and 40fps.

The ROG Xbox Ally X is, of course, not a full-blown high-end PC, but it is a pricey piece of PC hardware. Crimson Desert ran … fine. It didn’t look as graphically beautiful as you’ve likely seen online but I could play it. I raise this as there will be plenty of people who also aren’t attempting to play this on top-of-the-range hardware. Just be aware that you may end up having the same kind of experience with some hefty loading times. We’re talking five minutes from ‘continue’ on the start menu to being playable.

Crimson Desert is by no means a perfect game. It’s an amalgamation of perhaps slightly too many ideas, and that makes for a weirdly paced experience that demands a lot of the player without offering much in the way of help. And yet, it left me in awe more times than anything else I’ve played in recent memory with its dazzling open-world. Crimson Desert may not be the best game you’ll ever play, but it’ll certainly be up there as perhaps the most memorable.

Pros: One of the most interactive open worlds out there, packed with surprises, some interesting boss fights

Cons: Demanding of hardware, can be overwhelming, lack of cohesion

For fans of: The Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

8/10: Excellent

Crimson Desert launches on 19 March on PC (version tested via Xbox ROG Ally X), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.