Crimson Desert: The Definitive Review
Delighted review, more like
In the grand sweep of videogaming history, there are a select group of games that enjoy a certain distinction. They’re the ones that embody the spirit of the age without necessarily being the greatest exemplar of it. They’re more often the vanguard of cultural or technological trends that come to define a particular vogue or cultural moment. I genuinely think Crimson Desert is one of those games, pioneering a new era almost by accident, and I think we’ll only truly understand its significance fifteen years from now. But then, its utterly befuddling design, presentation and denouement feels like a series of accidents that accidentally became amazing, as if it inadvertently crossed some event horizon where fun componentry miraculously self-assembles into one of best open-world games of the century. In essence, it’s vibes-based excellence that causes delight and joy to miraculously emerge from its component parts and for a confirmed ludosupremacist like me, it means Crimson Desert is the game I never knew I was waiting for.
What makes Crimson Desert feel like an embodiment of the age is its fundamentally contradictory nature. Its mixture of ambition and appropriation is maddening on the one hand, delightful on the other. It’s a game that shamelessly lays out its influences, and in doing so shows how it directly copies them - but crucially, it does so because it’s fun. Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom are immediate and obvious, then suddenly you’re thrust into Cyberpunk 2077’s Braindances without any warning whatsoever. Other sections recall the tutorial bits of Control and the void space of Dishonored. There’s a sense of directly sampling videogame culture of the last 20 years and re-arranging them in a grandiose facsimile of Sicily. I can’t escape the bone-white ruins in the hyper-green countryside evoking deep memories of Oblivion, or the weapon combos feeling like they’re pure Platinum Games or Musou lifts. The sheer vibe of the thing is almost the point; that to enjoy it to the fullest, surrender must be total. You acquiesce to the vibe-based thinking that seems to underpin its general structure and find a wanderer’s delight. In its opening hours, it’s a game of idle discovery, of uncovering multitudes of under-explained micro-features that would be ruined if they had an exhaustive tutorial for them. Their existence works almost like ludological pokemon, randomly appearing in the wild to challenge you as to which button sequence you must now add to the list of sequences you’re already failing to adequately memorise. That is the befuddling yet delightful path that Crimson Desert lays before you and being part of the social media ARG to figure out what the fuck all these systems do has been surprisingly entertaining.
The thing that amuses me the most about Crimson Desert is the reaction to it. Again, seemingly by accident, it directly spears the complacency and laziness of the stereotypical AAA gamerbro. Bereft of a strongly-corridored narrative, they’re left having to resort to the horror of using their imagination to decide what to do. And when they want to do it they find, appallingly, that the beloved context-sensitive ‘press X for everything’ button doesn’t work, and are instead faced with control combinations that haven’t been seen for over 20 years.1 There’s a complexity of interface that matches the complexity of the systome, and that matches the visual complexity of the environment. It was fascinating to watch this play out across TikTok and Reddit, as players discovered that this is a sandbox-first game, where exploration and acquisition has primacy over any character or plot arc. In the modern AAA context, this is practically iconoclastic, if not seditiously subversive. As such, it fuels the kind of divisiveness that separates out the gamer factions into those fools who really should be reading more books from those who should be playing more games. I like to think Crimson Desert throws down a gauntlet of sorts for the open-worlder, and raises a particular bar that hasn’t been challenged since the likes of Skyrim or Fallout 4. With GTA VI looking to carry on the same 20-year-old interactive design of its predecessors, the arrival of a gameplay-first, greatest-hits open-worlder feels markedly important.
Of course for me, Crimson Desert is a real gift from the heavens. A vast place full to the brim with stuff and things and activities. The dress-up alone is dizzying in scope, and that’s before I consider an army of pets and customising my house. Going in fully aware that jankiness is a core feature, it was only a couple of hours before the vibes-based vibes had me utterly convinced of the game’s greatness. It’s powerfully seductive in that sense, and has a unique charisma that comes from the complexity of that systome; there’s so much to find, so much to learn, so much to explore. For me, it’s incredibly heartening and the evolution of user scoring ratifies my unreasonable credo that main stories are shit and worldsim complexity is everything. Crimson Desert accidentally proves my point for me. When it works, the games that a systems-and-exploration-centred philosophy creates are deeply and richly rewarding because of what narratives they allow you to create, and not because of what narrative they tell you. In essence, the greatest story they can tell is your own personal one of discovery and development, which can be a far richer tale than any authored yarn. And of all the modern vogues it deploys, perhaps the most pastorally valuable is its walking-sim sense of place. The opening region is absolutely lovely - I went off for an hour looking for rosemary plants and had the most delightful bucolic dander since Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. Only instead of well-disguised corridors masquerading as English countryside, Crimson Desert lays out an entire land. Foreboding peaks in the distance make all the difference when you know you could walk there if you wanted, only with the wisdom to know that you need a good 20 hours of experience and acquisition to have fun when you get there. It’s in those conventions, which Crimson Desert is happy to uphold, that I find the security to know I can plot out my own little arcs of business. And this is where that transcendent joy is to be found. I’ll do some exploring to find more fast travel bits, maybe do a mission or two, think about going to a new town to see if I can find some new weapons or clothes, try and win over some more cats etc etc etc. Being so nicely decoupled from any sense of narrative urgency happily promotes the sense of leisure to be had - the game really is ideal in that respect. Especially with the idea that it’s fucking enormous, so there’s an awful lot of player-directed activity on the menu. Fuck. Yes.
Crimson Desert’s status as a near-figurehead for an as-yet undetermined phase of videogame culture might sound incredibly nebulous thanks to my lack of articulation, but I can’t shake the feeling of Asian developers and global AAA debuts being something of a theme for the current generation. Sitting alongside the creative stasis of Western AAA, the arrivals of Black Myth: Wukong, Stellar Blade and more pointedly, Palworld shows a contradictory compliance with and defiance against the AAA status quo. They obey particular entry requirements, but then go beyond the boundaries of acceptability or quality or sensibility and as such, mark themselves out as different by some indefinable metric. I really don’t want to claim it’s a simple difference of cultural background, for there’s something in the fundamental madness at the heart of Crimson Desert that seems to chime with the deeper spirit of the age in general. It feels like an AI hallucination at times, and the game’s ability to utterly confound and confuse you with weird information or oblique controls only serves to make it feel alien, as much due to its non-compliance with the frictionless AAA standards for such things. It also feels incredibly vibes-based, in the sense that the vast cohort of humans that worked on it came to act as some kind of gestalt wet-ware LLM, and just as we recoil in horror at genAI video of some imagined fantasy open-worlder, we can also be utterly transfixed and beguiled by it. Crimson Desert can genuinely feel like that for real; that its entire shape and form was spewed out by AI in a 30-sec Reel and humans simply reconstructed an entire game from it. But this is the oddness and madness that fuels the whole thing, what makes it so deliciously exciting. There is a whistleblower post claiming that the game is shit because of Pearl Abyss’s internal culture, only the whistleblowing doesn’t ring true at all - the game is fucking amazing. I’d love to think that’s by accident, as it would suggest a guiding hand of the online culture zeitgeist just spirited the magic out of AAA games and social media trends. A kind of Gibsonian Wintermute going self-aware and leaving Crimson Desert as the sole piece of evidence for that happening, as it really does feel substantially different from those other Asian titles. Wukong and Stellar Blade were firmly traditionalist, but Palworld was decidedly iconoclastic, being both a celebration and a perversion of the Pokemon template.2 And of course, Palworld had its own gen-AI palaver, much as Crimson Desert has (for the crime of having an AI-generated painting in it or something?). We should take that as the clarion call for the new flesh that Crimson Desert exemplifies - it ain’t even modern if ain’t had an AI scandal. This is the hallmark of the new modernity, and I kinda embrace the mess of it, the chaos underneath. There’s a bubbling vivacity here that feels so much more valuable and interesting than a by-the-numbers committee AAA. And I just love that it always feels accidental.
As a nice footnote, it’s worth mentioning that Crimson Desert is currently the final disc-based release I bought on day one. I’m absolutely proud of that fact, as it feels almost ridiculous to say it, but nonetheless in the short time I’ve been playing, I feel like I’ve had value for money. Having done so much Game Passing over the last four years or so, to come in with a game that feels so startlingly modern by buying it in the most traditional way is yet another contradiction that upends any sense of dull equilibrium around Crimson Desert. In a grander view, it feels like the 30-year tradition of the MMO being crystalised back into single player with a triumphant array of content and systems re-tooled for solo, and perhaps its air of freshness is down to my lack of MMO play. But to compare it to another new release, Bungie’s Marathon, we find that after a week, Crimson Desert looks to have double the sales. Marathon’s beautifully bold visual style and infographic design sings to me like the fawning Designers Republic fanboy I really am, but its multiplayer focus kills any enthusiasm dead. And that’s the tragedy of Marathon as the service game’s potential terminus; gimme a service game for single player and I might put years into that shit too. Crimson Desert works as an illustration of sorts for how that might look after a couple of years. Those piles of systems feel like an MMO after a shitload of content updates, with the crowded control methods betraying how they had to be crowbarred into a gamepad setup. But at the same time, it suggests what could be possible. The world is the star here, and you can always add characters to the world if you’re not hell-bent on changing it forever with some terribly impactful and important story. Instead, consider my creaky desires for Cyberpunk - to be a container of biographies, not narratives. No AAA game has come closer to fulfilling that dream than Crimson Desert, for it would seem so easy to make new playable characters and drop them, literally from the heavens, into its world of bonkers-grade environment and systems. And what a world it is! I sincerely hope the content updates don’t spoil the magic by shackling the player back into main-story orthodoxy, as suggested by comments from a shareholder call. I hope the game is simply too wild to be constrained by such a thing, but if that does ever happen, at least we had that time where Crimson Desert felt as wild and as free as the world it gave you.
[21]
Look, if it was acceptable to use every single button to put a suppressor on a pistol in MGS3, then it’s acceptable for to use every single button to move a block in Crimson Desert.