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Crimson Desert has been loitering in the action-adventure quasi-RPG conversation for years now, quietly bulking up like it’s training for a decathlon. Pearl Abyss, previously known for the systems soup called Black Desert Online, isn’t playing it safe here. Their redder, utterly offline desert isn’t a refinement. It’s a flex.
From the four hours I played, Crimson Desert feels like a studio that looked at the genre, inhaled deeply, and said, “Yep. All of it.”
Early Dragon Age’s grit. Breath of the Wild’s traversal curiosity. Fable’s earnest morality. A whiff of Black Myth: Wukong wire-fu. It shouldn’t gel. It absolutely should not gel.
Somehow, it mostly does.
What I was most curious about going in was tone and mechanical cohesion. Borrowing ideas is one thing. Making them behave inside the same sandbox is another. And that tension defines almost everything I experienced.
The gorgeous land of Pywel opens gently. My pre-built protagonist, Kliff, is locked into morally upstanding territory. No dialogue wheel chaos. No villain arc speedrun. He’s like a Gerard Butler Leonidas understudy with the heart of a scout leader.
I helped Gandalf-cosplaying, Cabbage Patch-adjacent children retrieve lost lambs. I rescued roof-stranded cats. Incidentally, Felix can’t be shot down with your bow. I tried. For science. And abject bastardry.
Family-friendly questing skips along for a while, feeling stable as a Fable. Then, nek minute, somebody calls someone else a cranky ginger twat, and the claret starts flying as I’m eviscerating yobbish hordes dropping F-bombs and the odd C-nuke.
It’s like somebody tripped and spilled some Witcher 3 in my Animal Crossing.
The tonal whiplash should snap vertebrae. Instead, it becomes the hook. Kliff is a murderous master at arms but also a master at alms. Pickpocketing is locked behind acquiring a criminal mask, because apparently morality runs on dress codes now.
The vibe swings. Hard. And I kind of love that it commits.
Early combat is grounded. Sword. Shield. Eye contact. But when my demo hosts offered a mid-game save, Kliff’s empty perk tree was suddenly a full sequoia and the immutable laws of physics were reduced to rough guidelines.
I went from Spartan-kicking blokes off ledges to performing Liu Kang tribute acts from half a paddock away. Twenty-metre flying kicks, my friend. The ragdoll physics are consistently hilarious, until you’re the one being juggled.
Boss encounters are theatrical and mildly sadistic. Water geysers erupt beneath you like Poseidon’s personal vendetta. Meteors strikes slam down from above and pinball you into next week. If you lack stamina to deploy your glide mechanic mid-air, you’re going to become a blob of strawberry jam. Reload. Try again, flyboy.
It’s punishing, but not Soulsborne punishing. Enemies do not queue. Four swords will happily synchronise their assault on your melon without so much as a courtesy blink. No flashing parry prompt. No “your turn” energy. It’s speed dating with shivs, and everyone’s overcommitting.
Combos, weirdly, are generous. Hold R1, and you’ll unleash a tidy light string. Hold R2, and Kliff serves an eight-piece with fries. You can still tappa-tappa mix your inputs if you crave rhythm, but the hold-to-win option feels slightly unhinged.
The bones of the combat are strong. The edges are not fully sanded.
Here’s where things get spicy. Crimson Desert wants you juggling its systems. Always juggling.
Lock-on shares L1 with parry. Outside combat, L1 modifies face buttons for secondary actions. Holding it near surfaces and square triggers a surprisingly competent auto-platform leap that makes manual sprint and jump feel like they’re being performed in gumboots.
You can absolutely trip over your own inputs.
I eventually abandoned lock-on and relied on analogue steering, which worked better than expected. But the control scheme feels like it swallowed one extra system and is pretending it’s fine.
The same goes for environmental interactions. Reading past memories requires donning a Martian-looking fishbowl helmet and achieving near-mystical alignment of reticle, positioning and contextual prompt. Too often I found myself flicking my eyes between the reticle and a tiny tooltip in the bottom right corner, waiting for the Great Conjunction to permit interaction.
This is not a skill issue. I’ve clocked every major game that’s mattered in the last 40 years. The friction is real.
And sometimes it’s lethal. When the chips are down and you’re trying to beat a retreat, you might cop it in the pancreas because you made Kliff pick a peony and not ride your pony.
Stealth exists. In theory. Enemy AI is competent in close quarters but suspiciously hawk-eyed at range. I Solid Snake’d almost nobody despite visible vision cones. Guards seem to possess peripheral awareness granted by a minor deity.
Archery, on the other hand, is a satisfying way to give larger mobs the shaft. There’s a three-second delay switching from steel to bow, so commit early. L2 handles both aim and release, which feels odd at first but becomes second nature.
On foot, it’s largely free aim. On horseback, it turns into borderline legalised cheating with generous autolock.
Speaking of horseback, swinging wildly downward with your sword is technically possible. Like most games that attempt this, it feels like trying to chop vegetables during an earthquake.
Ambitious. Messy. Occasionally glorious.
Traversal is where Crimson Desert shows off. Stamina bar permitting, Kliff can glide across terrain, grapple with an energy hook, and effectively perform Peter parkour webswings above guard outposts. You can then super-somersault down through it like Sonic the Hedgehog jacked up on Mountain Dew.
Another (literal) high point had me skydiving from floating temples suspended in the stratosphere. Sixteen full seconds of freefall. I tested near-orbit faceplanting, of course, because I’m a down-to-earth critic who puts the groundwork in to keep you informed.
Touchdown was less gory than expected. Solid hit, though. If the BlackSpace Engine had punched me through the map floor on impact, I would’ve nodded and reported it as a feature.
The small flourishes are chef’s kiss stuff. Wanted posters are individual sheets with full paper physics when inspected. You can blind a foe with sword glint before sprinting and clotheslining them like you’re auditioning for WrestleMania.
And yes, I once Spartan kicked a bandit so hard in the chest he physically exited his boots as he departed this plane of existence. How have I never done this in a game before? New favourite thing.
For a game bristling with radial menus and regional temperature readouts, it’s oddly missing a few comforts.
The HUD bristles with regional temperature readouts and radial menus, yet custom map markers feel undercooked. There’s no fantasy GPS trail equivalent. No option for your teleporting magic horse to auto-ride roads to town. You’ll likely end up beelining across difficult terrain using glide anyway. Kliff cares not for cliff.
These are small gripes individually. Collectively, they reinforce the sense of a game trying to do everything at once and not always prioritising what players expect as standard.
The build I played ran remarkably well. Frame rate felt stable. No major hitches. Town density and draw distances are consistently gawp-worthy. The urge to horizon perve is strong.
Character models are slightly less cutting-edge than the environments. There’s something around the eyes that feels a touch mannequin. I certainly wouldn’t call him ugly. Kliff’s stony-faced.
Still, moment to moment, it’s premium eye candy. Large-scale physics chaos and vertical traversal sequences flex the engine in ways that feel expensive.
When my session ended, I walked away more intrigued than worried. Yes, Crimson Desert is mechanically overstuffed. Yes, the control scheme needs streamlining. But nothing I played felt beyond repair. This feels like oil-and-polish territory, not structural demolition.
Another wildcard is tone. This could become a tonal Frankenstein that somehow works. Or a fascinating car crash of conflicting identities. Either way, I’m here for it.
Pearl Abyss is running a kitchen sink strategy that risks becoming a full bathtub by endgame. Either the mechanics get elegantly corralled by launch, or ambition might trigger an Icarian plummet not unlike my test to see how Kliff goes as a man-meteor.
Either way, I can confirm that Crimson Desert will be one of the most important releases of 2026. Not to be ignored. Anything but run-of-the-mill. And I’m fixing to take a leap of faith on it.