Fraser Brown, Online Editor
Last week: I found a good excuse to wheel out our beloved Big Geralt image in my RPG column.
This week: Crimson Desert has taken over my life. No, please, don’t send help. I’m having a lovely time.
A strange narrative regarding Crimson Desert started to sprout up after the reviews for Pearl Abyss’s peculiar RPG first appeared—that it was somehow a disappointment. The very respectable 78 Metacritic score was held up as evidence of this, implying that a game is only great if it garners universal acclaim.
After Seoul Economic Daily’s story on the share price broke, that quickly became the story. The Korean business site framed it as a response to “disappointing preview reviews”, or as we’d call them, “reviews”. When Insider Gaming picked up the story, it said “Crimson Desert might be all style and no substance”. Eurogamer, meanwhile, claimed that “enthusiasm may have waned” (it hadn’t), and that reviews were “sitting at a very middling average” (they weren’t).
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It was painful to watch, because it’s obviously such bullshit. The share price and its Mixed review status on Steam were being treated as immutable, when these things always fluctuate. Investors are notoriously fearful creatures, and early user reviews are typically knee-jerk reactions.
And we’re talking about a massive, eccentric game with wild ambitions; it was always going to be at least a little bit divisive at launch. But it’s also been entirely dominating the videogame discourse since the first reviews went up. This game is utterly fascinating. There was no way it wasn’t going to do well.
Only a few days after all the doomsaying, Crimson Desert is now sitting at Very Positive on Steam, and Pearl Abyss announced that it’s already shifted 3 million copies. And what a big surprise: Pearl Abyss’s shares have climbed up 26% since that announcement.
It’s been incredibly well received, then. That’s the story. And this shouldn’t be a surprise—especially for PC gamers. We love an obtuse weirdo over here, and we always have. Planescape: Torment, Morrowind, Kingdom Come: Deliverance—we want RPGs with spikey edges and oversized ambitions. And that’s Crimson Desert.
Videogames are always chasing trends. This is why we can’t currently escape roguelike deckbuilders and extraction shooters. This threatens to make the industry a beige, homogenised bore. But at the same time, it’s dangerous to buck the big trends. Developing a videogame is a monumental risk, so why take a chance on something weird?
This is why it’s such a delight when something like Crimson Desert comes along. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not a singularly unique game. It is, after all, an open-world RPG—one of the most saturated genres around. But like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it’s an open-world RPG that feels like it was made by humans rather than a committee of robots. Even when it’s following safe trends, it does so in a way that is surprising, and sometimes even abrasive.
Even when it’s following safe trends, it does so in a way that is surprising, and sometimes even abrasive.
Crimson Desert is full of Big Ideas, and many of them, on paper, seem like follies. We need more follies, honestly. They’re much more exciting than the well-trodden path. But it even charts its own course when it comes to the small things, like how you interact with the world. I can talk to people and interact with objects by going up to them and just hitting X on my controller. But I can also point at them with LB, and then hit X, which sometimes gives me new interactions, but also lets me do the thing I was previously doing with just one button.
This seems pointlessly overcomplicated. And most of the time it is. But it also lets me be more precise about what I’m interacting with. More than that, though, it lets me see the strange-brained humans behind the game. Someone made this bizarre decision, and stuck with it throughout development. And, God help me, I’m really starting to vibe with the system.
A largely identical mechanic allows you to make precision jumps, too, which at first seems like more pointlessly granular control, right up until the point where you have to do some light platforming and realise you’ve not whiffed a jump even once. It’s awesome.
Oh yeah, and before long you’ll gain the ability to become a bird-man, allowing you to glide all over the place. This is a reward for completing some puzzles on a series of sky islands. Why are you on these sky islands when you’ve only just started getting to grips with the very basics of this game and its world? Who knows!?
So little about this game makes sense at face value. Nearly every main quest just directs you to a random location without a single bit of context. Then you do a thing. Maybe it’s cool. Like turning into a bird. Or maybe you just clean a chimney for a very lazy man who’s arguing with his wife. Why is any of this happening? I could not tell you. But I am as fascinated as I am baffled.
Crimson Desert is the personification of my ADHD. It careens all over the place, unable to focus for even a second, until it hyper-fixates on something seemingly random.
Crimson Desert is the personification of my ADHD.
Here’s a standard day in my life as Kliff: I’m chasing a thief, doing someone else’s housework, taming a horse, flying like a bird, killing bandits, getting into an archery competition—all in dizzyingly quick succession—and then I’ll spend 20 minutes just trying to befriend an animal. It’s like a much more exciting version of my own life, and it’s such a thrill to be dragged along for the ride. I never know what I’m going to do next. Or why I’m doing it.
It’s so rare for a game of this scope, with this much investment, to be a freak. It’s such a huge gamble. We expect our blockbuster games to be smooth, frictionless power fantasies. We expect intuitive design with dense tutorialisation. And, to be clear, this is fine! This is our hobby (even if some of us have made a career out of it), so it shouldn’t feel like work. But I’m absolutely delighted that Crimson Desert is just taking a punt on so many different ideas. They haven’t all worked out, but they’re always interesting.
This is why I’m slightly worried about all the tweaks and fixes Pearl Abyss has promised. Proper camp storage and fast travel points that actually make sense are great additions. But I desperately hope the studio doesn’t sand off all the funky edges. Especially since people, by and large, seem to be having a great time! The odd QoL tweak is fine, but let’s not mess with the formula too much.
Anyway! I left Kliff carrying a naughty little criminal, so I’d better hand him in, get my money and see what the game has in store for me next. Who am I kidding? I saw a cute puppy earlier, so I’m absolutely gonna be spending the rest of the afternoon ritually petting him until he becomes mine.
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