Pearl Abyss first announced its sophomore game in 2020, and during The Game Awards last year, they announced a release window. In Crimson Desert, you play as Kliff as he investigates events that transpire across the region of Hernand and embarks on a journey of exploration through a vast open world. An open-world action-adventure game, the story focuses on Kliff and his Graymane comrades as they fight for survival on the expansive continent of Pywel. But beyond that, we don’t know.
I’ve been covering Crimson Desert for some time now. Last year, I got the chance to play through a boss rush demo that tasked me with defeating four bosses with wildly different combat styles. It was great. The immediate combo-based combat for Kliff caught my attention.
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At this point, it feels like nearly every action-adventure game just wants you to press “A” and maybe hit a bumper to slow things down and do something else. And while those combat mechanics aren’t inherently bad, they don’t make you lock in. You can be distracted and zoom through for a story, and that’s not what I want.
Crimson Desert expands its demo from boss combat to world immersion.
Now, it should be said that despite the difficulty curve for Crimson Desert during the Summer Game Fest Play Days, it’s not actually hard. This isn’t a game designed to be difficult or to cut you off and make you learn through failure like a soulslike. Instead, Crimson Desert is here to make you pay attention to what you’re doing.
Performing combos while in a boss rush felt great, reminiscent of hitting all the right moves in a fighter. But in the Play Days demo, my focus on the combos had to be deeper, and my need to finesse my way through objectives pushed me farther than I thought it would. Crimson Desert is here to lock you in, and it’s not sorry about it.
It’s a difficult element to get across in a demo where you have to just drop players into it without any prep or tutorial. Still, with press encouraged to book 60-minute slots and a great demoist at my side, my frustration level stayed low even if I had to cut my time with the demo early to make it to my next appointment. But this is because I let my preconceived notions fall away.
In the Play Days demo, Crimson Desert takes the player through a string of objectives that highlight the fantasy realism that Pearl Abyss is going for with this title. Kliff is on a battlefield. First, he has to blow up watch towers with cannon blasts from a distance while dodging a mob of enemy soldiers. As you make your way through the battlefield, there are tons of enemies. I mean, there are enemies as far as the eye can see. Your instinct is to keep fighting them, but you won’t get anywhere if you do that.
Once you stop fighting your assumptions, combat becomes intuitive.
The goal here is to treat this as a rush to an objective. While you can call your horse to move faster, you can be knocked off. Instead, I just ran, stopping to use my mana to force push people out of the way or using the handy artillery arrow that brings down an AOE of fire arrows.
It’s this latter element that tells you as a player to work smarter and not harder. You have to manage the mob, but if you don’t engage or engage too much, you will struggle and die. Mastering that is one thing, and it requires the player to drop how they usually interact with games of this nature. That’s the first time that the game asks you to lock in.
The second time Crimson Desert pushes its player to understand and use its systems is when you take on a spike-studded spinning tank that shoots out fireballs while an endless mob takes swings at you. It’s hectic, it’s tense, and it’s not forgiving. The tank assault isn’t forgiving because it requires the player to think about placement and movement more than combat.
After laying a steady stream of artilerary arrows and wiping the folks around me, I ate food, filled my mana, and then tried to get on top of the damn tank. I failed. I tried again, and I kept failing. It was Lady Stonecrab all over again, and to be honest, I was all in on clearing it.
Pearl Abyss isn’t pushing difficulty so much as it’s asking players to understand its systems.
While I said that Crimson Desert isn’t a soulslike, there is one key element of the game that is. If you fail, it’s your fault. But that also means you can overcome the issue. For the spinning, annoying tank of doom, I just needed to move slower. To beat it, you jump up, glide, land, jump again, force palm down, hitting its vulnerable spot, and ending it in one hit. This is essentially a simple combo input, but with the area on fire around you, enemies swarming you, and fireballs popping out sporadically, that tension keeps you from executing the sequence calmly.
This highlights what I think stands to be Crimson Desert’s best feature: tension. For some reason, knowing what you have to do feels more intense when the world around you is deeply responsive to your movements. The fact that you can’t escape the mob of enemies keeps you on your toes, and ultimately, it’s what drives your mistakes. Take a breath, lock in, and you’ve got it.
Crimson Desert also adopts this approach in its boss fights. While the boss we fought in the Play Days demo was easier than the ones we fought in the boss rush demo, this one pushed you to engage differently. With a stagger bar, you could build up with every hit you land. Once the boss goes down, you have time to pick up a destroyed pillar and him. This deals large chunks of damage, and it is the only way you can defeat him, at least within the time limit.
An action-adventure game for people tired of action-adventure single-input combat.
But unlike other games that tie interactions with the world to just one button, Crimson Desert brings its combos back. While Kliff is a large man, he’s not easily picking up a pillar. To do so, you activate your powers and use a combo of buttons to lift before aiming and taking a swing. The complexity of the inputs can be frustrating, but it’s yet again your time to lock in. With a small window to complete picking up the pillar and swinging. Trying to follow the inputs on screen while the time is running down and the boss starts to get up is a challenge.
Crimson Desert, however, can’t just be distilled into its combat mechanics. As we covered before, the BlackSpace Engine is a marvel of a proprietary engine. I mean, it even made the game the highlight of Apple’s latest push into gaming. Yes, it runs on Mac. But taking people through a pre-determined technical look at an engine doesn’t always mean that it will stand up to scrutiny when the player is controlling Kliff. Luckily, Crimson Desert does.
While I have talked extensively about my time with the combat, the in-between elements, walking through the camps and looking at Kliff in different costumes (yes, we can play dress-up), were just as thoughtful as completing objectives. While I wasn’t a fan of being lock-step with an NPC as opposed to entering a cutscene (an issue I’ve had in other games), the world I walked through was spectacular as I walked to learn more about the task.
The Play Days Crimson Desert demo was more than just combat; it’s also pretty.
The movement of the grasses, the lighting effects created by the fire, and the way the stag helmet I put on had individual red ribbons that moved independently of each other was gorgeous. The level of detail that has gone into Crimson Desert is immense, and none is hidden. This also shines when you look at the animals in the camp. The dogs and donkeys all have depth and even look at you as you walk by. My only small gripe is that I need Pearl Abyss to let Kliff pet things. All of the things.
With more development to go, Crimson Desert’s state of development for the demo is exciting. The controls are responsive, the mechanics are interesting, and its ability to force its player to pay attention can’t be understated. Every time I’ve picked up a controller and begun my time as Kliff, I was in love with it had to offer. An action-adventure game that differentiates itself by asking more of its players. It trusts the audience to explore, experiment, and learn. In a few ways, it inspires curiosity in you as you play.
I made it through the Play Days Crimson Desert demo, and ultimately, I carried the reward I got by doing so the rest of the day. Still, the reality is that I can see Crimson Desert alienating players in the same way as other genres that test you. But for those looking for something more than single-button inputs, this game you’ve been waiting for is worth celebrating.
