Developer: Pearl Abyss
Genre: Action RPG
Platforms: PC (tested), Xbox Series (X/S), PlayStation 5
Time to finish: Unknown
Note: As of writing, this game is currently being played through, these are early opinions of the game and will update if my experience somehow changes
As of writing, I’ve been spending time with Crimson Desert this weekend. This game has been somewhat pushed upon me by chance coming with a new AMD graphics card that I bought the week previously and I had barely knew about the game before it launched.
Crimson Desert is a fantasy game by South Korean developer Pearl Abyss as it turns out, it is an open world game with hack and slash combat mechanics and magical abilities.
Against better judgement with my currently extended round of open world fatigue, I sat up until 10PM UK time to see the game launch and see what I’ll make of it.
With game booted and with few issues currently within Proton I launched into the game using medium settings, greeted by an enormously detailed world with many corners seemingly to explore.
The following few days I have spent around four hours currently as of now following the main story and finding humour in the amount of animals I can pick up for no apparent reason within the world. Finding this among the best things to do in the game
From the outset, the game begins with the opening introduction of the faction the protagonist is part of, a fight to the death with another faction. After certain events you wake up in another place and are given free reign to explore the world map as you see fit. I’ve mostly stuck to the main story as its a good way to get to tutorials quickly and allow a gentle introduction.
The introduction scene feels almost immediately cliché and overdone in 2026 and from then on I feel it is only getting worse. The game looks beautiful and interesting but these appearances are so far only ankle deep in terms of depth.
The writing seems like among the worst I’ve seen in a game and tries almost too hard to fill in story details about the world and such from the outlet. You seem to recognise every trope at the moment it comes up and none of them are even executed particularly interestingly.
Nothing makes you feel particularly enamoured or attached to the world, it feels like they made a fantasy, middle ages themed world but forgot to add any detail or distinction to it. A good open world makes you want to explore and find all the little details and side quests but here I’m struggling to finish even part of the main story. The addition of an extremely difficult boss early on in the game is an unwelcome surprise and felt like a worse variant of a major boss fight in a game that came out 22 years earlier.
After this boss fight it seems things may pick up as you get introduced to your first major alternative player character, however I would wager an introduction to her first quest quickly becomes tedious and unnecessarily difficult as a result of game design choices made up to this part. The worst thing is this character seems infinitely more interesting than the protagonist however this isn’t like playing as an alternative character in the Sonic series, she can only be used for certain quests and the main protagonist has to be present for every main story quest. Just when you think things might be turning, the game finds a way to be more annoying and shoot itself in the foot.
The game constantly reminds itself of its gameness to a fault, this comes after a recent playthrough of Fable 3, something like reminded you of “You are playing a video game” at almost every turn.
This game is frustratingly middle of the road, it will not age well in my opinion and will largely become a forgotten game within 6 months of release, the games beauty will not save it. I will only keep it installed to reserve space for Fable later on in Autumn 2026.
I would recommend staying away from Crimson Desert, its grinding my gears to a silly degree, I’m only keeping up with it because its a free game for me. This game has the potential to give many players open world fatigue I feel and it is something I still struggle to recover from.
Accusations over the weekend too have painted a bad picture since launch, Gamers Nexus reporting that the game has poor performance alongside other reports of blocking Intel GPUs from running the game (Now fixed thankfully) and the usage of generative AI assets in the game that are of frankly embarrassing quality and were supposedly accidental in inclusion (though I find this hard to believe). Reports of turmoil within the developer during the making of the game also paints a rather bleak picture as to why the final game is rough and trying to do too much with a mention of Zelda open world games being why sections in the sky exist with no real reason to do so.
The game is tiring to play, rough around the edges and feeling somewhat unpolished in many areas. The lack of any serious mouse and keyboard controls also heavily dent the experience for PC players.
It is only a matter of time before the game reaches a brick wall where I cannot go any further because it is literally too tedious or painful to do so. I beg of people to go enjoy literally anything else. I’m so exhausted of it all.
Published 23rd March 2026