Review: Crimson Desert - An Imperfect Miracle

If someone were to call Crimson Desert a cross between The Witcher and Red Dead Redemption, they wouldn't be wrong. But the new RPG from Pearl Abyss, out now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC, is more than that. It carries the MMORPG DNA of Black Desert Online, the studio's flagship title, while mixing in elements from a handful of other acclaimed games.

In practice, it feels like a collection of references stitched together. The vast open world with resource management and camps from Red Dead Redemption 2. A clunky attempt at the quest structure of The Witcher 3, the real-time combat with varied moves, fighting styles, and parries is reminiscent of Ghost of Tsushima. The character-swapping system of GTA V, the freedom and sheer volume of quests from Skyrim. And the sandbox open-world feel of the recent The Legend of Zelda* titles.

That a studio could combine all these elements and still deliver a coherent product that mostly works is borderline miraculous. But there's a difference between working and working well, and Crimson Desert lands somewhere in the middle. Depending on where you look, it's easy to see why critical reception has been so divided. This is an ambitious, flawed game whose execution breaks from traditional open-world Action RPG conventions in ways that can easily become exhausting for players who don't click with what it's trying to do.

The first few hours of Crimson Desert are frustrating for anyone looking for engaging action and story right out of the gate. The plot kicks off with Kliff — a protagonist with as much charisma as a lamppost and the depth of a puddle — and his group being ambushed by the Black Bears. During the fight, the hero is killed and tossed into a river.

The next segment has you walking through a mysterious temple while learning new moves like jumping and climbing. After a brief platformer section, Kliff is back on his feet in a camp, fights off some bandits, and rides toward the first major city.

The game never bothers to explain how Kliff survived, let alone how he can talk after having his throat slit. It all seems like a big narrative mystery — just like why the early quests involve arm wrestling soldiers, helping beggars and prisoners, or rescuing cats from rooftops, only for them to turn out to be mystical creatures and deities that grant the hero powers with no explanation beyond "you helped us." It's so convenient that it strains any ability to take the story seriously.

The next two hours consist of running small errands for villagers and resolving uninteresting regional conflicts while slowly learning a dozen increasingly complex commands. The game constantly reminds you that you're the hero, and as the hero, you need to help people and do good deeds.

When you finally face the first boss, you realize you're too weak because you've only followed the main story and haven't explored. If you don't explore, you won't have the resources to boost your stats. Without boosted stats, you'll always be too weak for bosses. It's almost as if the game wasn't made for the Western audience, or as if the development team had one vision in mind and players had another.

Once the initial frustration passes and you take a few hours to clear your head and give it another shot, you have to approach the game on its own terms rather than how you expected it to work.

Exploring, fighting enemies, and doing side content aren't optional. They're the grind, and you need it to move the main story forward. At the same time, the narrative is easily the game's weakest point, so it's not like you're missing much by wandering through maps, finding hidden ruins, clearing bandit strongholds, or helping someone clean a chimney by climbing onto their roof.

Crimson Desert wants you to get to know Pywell in every detail and take your time enjoying it through that dynamic. Once you accept its "rule set" and embrace what it's offering, you find one of the most ambitious and visually stunning open-world RPGs ever made — but still one riddled with design flaws.

The world is the game's main feature. It follows the classic sandbox model: you're free to explore whatever you want, whenever you want. There's no precise metric for how long it would take to do absolutely everything, but it's easy to imagine a completionist run clocking in at 200 hours or more, possibly pushing 300 depending on how much you rely on guides instead of discovering everything yourself.

There are some early limitations, so it's best to push through until you unlock the character-swapping and camp systems before going off to explore freely. Another limitation is power level: you can travel from one end of the map to the other from the start, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to handle hostile enemies you run into with the same ease as you would in Hernand.

Even the first region, though, has so much to do and is so expansive that you won't run out of options or activities to boost your stats. In fact, the sheer volume of content can be overwhelming — it's hard to think of something you can't do when everything is available everywhere all at once, and you don't always know where to look or what to prioritize.

Fortunately, Pywell is stunningly beautiful and fun to explore, even in quality mode on the base PS5. The variety of biomes, how lighting shifts between regions and times of day, and the care put into urban environments and wildlife diversity make every corner of the map feel fresh. One of the game's biggest joys is stumbling upon a new region, catching a beautiful view from a mountain peak, or exploring the interior of a house to uncover little secrets.

On the other hand, discovering the world is rewarding when driven by curiosity. Crimson Desert rewards those who stray from the beaten path with hidden dungeons or small settlements with merchants, but it also makes exploration a mandatory part of character progression. Fast travel points — and trust me, they're essential here to avoid riding the same route for ten minutes for the fifth time — are scattered across the map in spots that require some effort to find, sometimes in unintuitive locations.

You can't ignore that the open world is just a layer on top of the grind and leveling structure. Some side quests and optional activities are so confusing or dragged out that the mere act of trying to earn a needed resource to boost stats becomes a chore, the kind that makes you rethink whether you want to keep playing or spend your time elsewhere.

Take combat, for instance — Crimson Desert's second biggest strength. Being surrounded by ten enemies and dismantling each one with a varied string of moves and perfectly timed parries is incredibly satisfying. Once you get the hang of it, it's hard not to want more.

Learning it, though, is a problem. The control scheme feels designed with a fighting game philosophy in mind, mixing different combinations that demand timing and memorization. Against a single enemy, it works great. In an Action RPG where you're constantly swarmed by groups trying to kill you, it becomes excessive, frustrating, and too complicated to be practical.

Picture this: you're fighting bandits in their stronghold, and your movement gets locked because you pressed L3 too hard while moving and accidentally triggered a hook that shoots into thin air. You need to press L3 again to retract it before enemies surround you, but that little mishap already broke your rhythm and might even cost you one or two hits you could have blocked.

It's frustrating the first time, even more the second, and by the third, you start wondering why you can't remap the controls to make things easier. The natural tendency for most players will be to find a few functional combos and ignore the rest — which is a shame given the depth and dedication poured into this combat system, but it's also the least exhausting way to play.

Boss fights are another highlight, a true test of skill. No boss encounter is a walk in the park, and most require a mix of adapting to the environment, memorizing attack patterns, and finding the right combination of skills, parries, and blows to overcome the challenge. From start to finish in the main campaign, fighting them is fundamentally about adaptation, and there may be even tougher foes waiting to be discovered in dungeons or hidden in remote corners of the world, which requires much more than just adaptation.

Combat isn't the only source of grind, but it's the most frequent: a bar fills a little more with each enemy defeated. Once it's full, you get a resource to learn new skills or boost stats. You'll naturally spend a lot of time fighting, and there's some freedom in how you handle each encounter, but like everything else, there comes a point where fighting enemy after enemy while watching the "experience" bar crawl upward stops being fun and starts feeling like a chore.

Although combat has its frustrating moments, it doesn't come close to how you feel when you realize how much Crimson Desert's interfaces and design choices are crying out for quality-of-life improvements. So many quest lines and tutorials are needlessly bureaucratic. Not for what they ask, but because of how the game explains — or fails to explain — what they're asking for.

There are entire sections where the tutorial or quest description doesn't clearly convey what to do next. Sometimes the answer is buried in a submenu within the map menu. Other times, the game seems to expect you to figure it out on your own.

Some of these feel unintentional and could be — or might already be — addressed in future patches. Others, like the puzzle design that calls back to classic adventure games from the '90s — think Alundra — aren't going anywhere. They're part of the studio's DNA, having spent the last eight years on this title while rooted in the MMORPG market, where the audience is dedicated players used to investing time in learning complex systems through unintuitive menus.

Pearl Abyss brought that same mindset to a single-player open-world title, but that's not the kind of experience players in this niche are used to. Sometimes having to solve a puzzle with no hints or visual cues becomes an exhausting chore for someone who just wanted to unwind after a stressful day. Crimson Desert, however, is packed with challenges that demand the patience of a monk and the stubbornness of a teenager to get through without looking up a guide online.

Another clear sign of bureaucratic design is in the menus. From equipment to upgrades, descriptions and commands aren't intuitive. It takes some time — and a lot of button pressing — to figure out why your lantern isn't working, where that item you found ended up, or how to use a command you just learned. There's a lack of detailed explanations or options that aren't so confusing to execute.

The Bugs

A game of this scope was bound to have its share of small technical hiccups — Skyrim still does to this day. Some are funny. But there are also items that vanish after being collected without ever reaching your inventory, NPCs that are supposed to mount your horse but stand there after a minute of waiting, or stamina that doesn't drain and gives you "infinite resource" but won't let you interact with the map.

Each of these forces a save reload to fix and move forward. Crimson Desert is absurdly huge, packed with activities, and its autosave is generous, but that doesn't mean players are safe from losing meaningful progress when something glitches and locks them out of interacting with the world or continuing the story.

Since the March 22 update, the number of bugs seems to have gone down, but occasional hiccups still happen, though less severe.

Crimson Desert is far from a game you play for its story. As outlined above, its entire system is built with the narrative as a tertiary concern — for good reason: it seems to exist only to give a sense of narrative progression to a single-player game built on multiplayer mechanics.

Kliff, for example, is a generic hero. He has no personality beyond a sense of duty and determination. He feels like nothing more than a vehicle for the player to explore the world, not a protagonist capable of driving the plot.

Besides him, there are two other playable characters — Damiane and Oongka — just as devoid of personality or charm as the hero. They exist to add gameplay variety through a GTA V-style character-swapping system and to create a party system that apparently many players didn't even know existed despite being evident from the very moment they arrive.

The average voice acting doesn't help, but even a stellar cast would struggle to elevate the writing since the dialogue is generic and rarely offers more than the bare minimum to push you to the next quest. It actually feels like the entire narrative budget went elsewhere.

That's not to say there's no lore, but it's so poorly written that it demands as much effort to understand its story as it does for any other activity. Pywell is a diverse place rich in culture and worldbuilding, but these elements never surface in the main narrative. They're hidden in books and bits of knowledge you absorb by observing the world or reading notes scattered across the map.

Pros