Crimson Desert (PS5) review: a massive, beautiful fantasy simulation where stuff happens

I’ve held back from reviewing Crismon Desert on PS5 until I’d played enough, seen its highs and lows, waited for the patches, and generally given it time to brew, as it's such a large game, it’s hard to get a feel for it until you’ve spent days and weeks in its world, because the immediate experience of Pearl Abyss’ epic game is… frustrating.

I, like many, spent the first hours in Crimson Desert wrestling with a control scheme that feels like it was designed by someone with a fondness for MENSA tests; you’re often asked to input unnatural combinations of buttons to perform the simplest of acts, and many of this kind of game’s standard ideas are locked behind obtuse menus. Why do you need to open coin pouches in the inventory once collected? Why do I need to manually read every note and letter I find - go to inventory, examine letter, open letter, hold letter, read letter, mission note unlocked – it’s like that VR skit from Community, Crimson Desert makes the most natural tasks feel unnatural.

It's because developer Pearl Abyss wants the game to feel like a real place, a simulation of a fantasy, not a video game. Get on board with that idea, and everything starts to make sense. That, and when you pull yourself out of those menus, the camera widens, and suddenly you’re staring out across a vast, detailed landscape that stretches to the horizon, dotted with ruins, wildlife, and the pull of adventure, and Crimson Desert demands your attention. It's a game I've been playing obsessively, even after open-world fatigue from Assassin's Creed Shadows.

Complex controls, personal discoveries

This is, without question, a love/hate game. Not in the sense that you’ll bounce off it entirely, but in the way you’ll find yourself muttering under your breath one minute and then completely absorbed the next. For every complex, claw-like controller input demanded of you in combat – fire the Abyssal claw, pull, tug, target, melee strike, dodge, and hope the game registers all of that in the right order – there’s a discovery that feels genuinely personal, from a flooded cavern hiding a temple to a strange relic tucked behind a breakable wall and even cats in armour, inexplicably adorable.

That push and pull defines the experience. Crimson Desert is sometimes messy, often frustrating, occasionally baffling, and yet consistently compelling, beautiful and rewarding.

Combat is where that friction is most immediate. There’s nice weight to it, a sense that every strike connects with purpose, but it comes wrapped in a control scheme that can feel needlessly overcomplicated. Boss encounters, in particular, demand a kind of finger gymnastics that doesn’t always translate cleanly from intention to execution. For example, you’ll often know what you need to do, you’ll have the timing down, and still find yourself fumbling because an input didn’t quite register or a mechanic wasn’t explained clearly enough.

And yet, when it clicks, it really clicks. There’s a satisfaction in chaining together abilities, in using the environment, in finally taking down a towering creature that’s been flattening you for the past half hour. Once you grapple with the idea, you hold down attacks, not tap Elden Ring-like, and link in abilities and specials on top with other button combinations, it begins to feel less stressful and more flexible.

But that lack of clarity of how things work is baked into Crimson Dester and spills over into puzzles and exploration. The game has a habit of giving you just enough information to understand a solution exists, but not quite enough to execute it cleanly. You’ll stand in front of a puzzle knowing exactly what needs to happen, only to fumble through attempts because the control inputs are ambiguously explained or the game hasn’t yet handed you the specific ability required to complete it. Sometimes that ability is hidden halfway across the map, tucked into a cave you might only discover by accident.

You;'ll come to learn its rules

There’s a certain logic to the game, though. Crimson Desert is a world that operates on its own rules, and it expects you to learn them through immersion rather than through its often confusing, limited training missions and tutorials. Spend enough time here and things start to make sense, not because the game has told you outright, but because you’ve absorbed the world’s rules. Solutions emerge from familiarity, from hours of wandering, experimenting, and occasionally stumbling into the right answer.

That might sound obtuse, and at times it is, but it also feeds into what makes the game so absorbing. Generally, this isn’t an open world that leads you by the nose – though early on it does bombard you with endless gameplay ideas to master at the expense of narrative cohesion – it’s one that expects you to live in it for a while and come around to understanding its peculiarities.

And it’s a world worth living in, too. Foregoing Unreal Engine 5, used by so many devs, in favour of its own BlackSpace Engine, the scale is enormous, almost to the point of being overwhelming. I spent close to 60 hours in the starting region of Hernand alone, because I rarely felt the need to leave. Whether freeing locals from bandits, rummaging around in someone's house to steal a special sword, or just wandering the mountains to see what’s over the hill, the promise of a new shiny thing or beast to discover.

It’s Elder Scrolls-like in this sense, as you’ll set out to follow a quest marker and end up halfway across the map because you saw a tower that demands to be climbed, only to uncover a chain of quests and characters that feel entirely unscripted, like the moment you stumbled into a flooded cavern temple guarded by a stone golem. It’s in those moments that Crimson Desert is at its best, when it becomes less about objectives and more about exploration for its own sake.

Part of that comes down to the sheer density of systems layered on top of one another, like *takes deep breath” fishing, hunting, crafting, mining, chopping trees, and cooking; managing a mercenary group, trading, stealing, and taming mounts; tavern diversions like arm wrestling and a gambling card-like game; you can ride horses, wolves, bears, and even take to the skies on dragons, and of course, there’s upgrading your stamina, health, and spirit through Abyss Artifacts and unlocking new abilities and upgrading and crafting weapons and armour.

Then there’s the dual-world setup, with the land below and the Abyss above, each demanding to be explored in different ways. I lost an entire day just hopping and clambering around the Abyss, solving its environmental puzzles and connecting bridges, which in turn opens up faster travel around the world below and upgrades. These puzzle maps could easily stand alone as their own game.

And there are two other characters to play as by hot-swapping at any time or be called upon for support, but, in typically Crimson Desert fashion, they are often locked behind story missions and have no real agency of their own.

It’s an absurd amount of content, and not all of it gels neatly. In fact, a lot of it feels like it’s been thrown together with a kind of reckless ambition, systems layered on systems without always considering how they interact. It can be overwhelming, especially early on when the game drops all of this in your lap, and more or less tells you to get on with it.

But that same excess is also what makes Crimson Desert so compelling. This is a fantasy simulation in the truest sense, a world where things happen whether you’re paying attention or not, and your role is to carve out your own path through it. The main story, such as it is, struggles to hold everything together. It’s hit and miss, often veering into the unintentionally amusing – “You’re destined for defeat now you’re in my nest,” shrieks the Crow boss with all the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon – and it frequently acts as a gatekeeper, locking off areas or mechanics until you’ve completed the associated quest, ticked the right box.

That gating can be frustrating. You’ll find locations that feel oddly empty, like the ruined Sanctum of Absolution that drew me in because of its mountain-top location, because the associated mission hasn’t yet populated them, or puzzles that can’t be solved because you’re missing a key ability, or characters who simply won’t engage until you’ve progressed the story. It runs counter to the game’s otherwise open nature, creating these artificial barriers in a world that clearly wants to be explored freely.

And yet, even here, there are moments where it gets things right. Side quests, in particular, tend to be more focused, more contained, and often more engaging than the main narrative. There’s a series of Witch quests that send you into various Sanctums, each one a carefully designed gauntlet of puzzles and combat encounters, culminating in some genuinely inventive boss fights. These smaller stories have room to breathe, to develop ideas without being stretched across a sprawling 100-hour campaign, and they’re all the better for it.

Though the writing can be just as poor, after one Witch gives hero Kliff (with a K for personality) a long and complex task of roaming the entire map, defeating these bosses and freeing her witch-friends, he simply shrugs and says “sure”, like he has nothing better to do and witches existing are just a thing that happens now. I laughed, but I also found myself shrugging and thinking, “Sure, why not?”

In this sense, Crimson Desert is reminiscent of the best open-world games in that regard, where the most memorable moments aren’t the headline plot beats but the side stories, the unexpected encounters, the things you stumble into rather than are directed towards.

A technical achievement on PS5

It’s helped that exploration is easy because technically, the game holds up impressively well, even on the base PlayStation 5. Playing in Performance mode, it maintains a smooth experience for the most part, with only minor frame drops in particularly dense areas, notably the tropical north-western region. It’s a good-looking game, often a stunning one, with a level of detail that rewards slow exploration. Since launch, patches have smoothed out some of the rougher edges, addressing some game-breaking bugs and tweaking balance, and it feels like a game that’s steadily improving. (There's even been an apology for Crimson Desert's use of AI art.)

Which brings me back to that love/hate dynamic. Crimson Desert is clumsy in places, bloated in others, and occasionally gets in its own way with systems, like the addition of companions, that feel undercooked or poorly explained. But it’s also ambitious to a fault, packed with ideas, and capable of delivering moments that genuinely surprise. If you can push through the friction, if you’re willing to meet it on its own terms and accept that it won’t always make things easy, there’s something special here; a world that feels alive, unpredictable, and worth exploring.

It doesn’t always come together as neatly as it should, and there are times when you’ll wish it had been a little more restrained, a little more focused. But then you’ll find yourself wandering into another hidden corner, uncovering another secret, and that frustration will fade, replaced by the simple urge to keep going.