Gaming: After 6 Hours, Crimson Desert Is One Of The Most Overwhelming,...

Pearl Abyss is engaging in a biblical act of design hubris, and it's somehow working out.

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This week I've been: Getting stuck in to World of Warcraft: Midnight.

Last week I was: Playing Crimson Desert, my opinions on which you'll be reading here.

Crimson Desert is one of the most overstimulating games I've ever played, and I'm going to make it my mission for the rest of this article to convince you that this is, despite everything, a compliment of the highest order.

In case you're unfamiliar, Crimson Desert is the first proper attempt at a singleplayer game by Black Desert Online developers Pearl Abyss. It's an action romp with some light RPG elements—think on the level of the recent Legend of Zelda games, plus a skill tree.

It follows Kliff, a former Greymane, as he seeks out his past battle-brothers and gets pulled into what I can only assume, based on the exposition I've been privy to, a reality-threatening plot.

I've recently played about six hours of the game, however, and I can tell you for a fact that the above description doesn't do it justice. Crimson Desert is a delightfully absurd high-fantasy rampage with absolutely zero restraint. It is unrepentantly dedicated to the rule of cool. It is on something.

Which is all the more whiplash-inducing given how the game starts out—with a Game of Thrones-esque mourning of a fallen Greymane battle brother that gets scuppered by the Black Bears, who have it out for Kliff's more honourable mercenary company.

The game sustains this tone for about 40 minutes before a mysterious beggar vanishes in a cloud of light, leads you to a floating technological sky fortress, gives you a cloak of feathers and a grappling hook and tells you that reality hangs in the balance. I then proceeded to find a person's magic helmet that could read ambient memories and learnt how to lift trees with my mind via the help of feylike children.

Source: PC Gamer