Crimson Desert Review

Crimson Desert has an interesting history. At one point in time, it was going to be an MMO prequel to developer Pearl Abyss’ Black Desert Online. That was before the team shifted plans and decided to embark on the journey of creating their first ever single-player open-world game.

Ever since I had the chance to preview the game last year, it was clear Crimson Desert had the potential to be something very special. With complex combat and a brand new game engine purpose-built for open-world games, it immediately stood out. Since then, expectations for Crimson Desert have skyrocketed as we approach release.

Game Name: Crimson Desert
Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Reviewed On: PC
Publisher(s): Pearl Abyss
Developer(s): Pearl Abyss
Release Date: March 19th, 2026

Now, I’ve had the chance to spend almost 70 hours with the game for review. So, does it live up to those mammoth expectations? And is it a Game of the Year contender? I’ll answer all that and more in The Outerhaven’s review of Crimson Desert.

What Is Crimson Desert?

Despite popular belief, Crimson Desert is not an RPG. It is more of an open-world action-adventure game where you play as Kliff of the Graymane clan, a group of peacekeepers from the region of Pailune in the world of Pywel. The Graymanes are essentially Pywel’s peacekeepers, known for their loyalty and dedication to maintaining order throughout the land.

Unfortunately for the Graymanes, Crimson Desert begins with a series of events that lead to their clan being scattered across the world of Pywel. While I won’t be spoiling any of the story here in detail, I will say that your adventure initially revolves around rebuilding the Graymanes and reuniting with other survivors of the opening incident. However, as you progress further in the story, there is a wonderful escalation of the stakes that grow to become much bigger than just the fate of the clan.

The World Of Crimson Desert Is Massive

Even 70 hours in, I have yet to actually finish the story. Not because I don’t want to or can’t, but because the world of Crimson Desert is one of the most enjoyable open worlds I have explored in the genre. Corners of the world feel like they are constantly hiding something new to discover, and every town is bustling with life. You’ll often find yourself getting distracted by something you spot in the distance while traveling, which frequently leads to discoveries you would never have found if you were simply moving from point A to point B.

At the time of writing, I have only explored about 50% of the first two regions you will visit in Pywel, and I have yet to even reach the titular region of Crimson Desert itself. In total, there are five regions to explore, and each one appears to be packed with content. While you could mainline the story much more quickly than I have been, it’s clear that Crimson Desert was designed to incentivize exploration and reward it with content, whether that be a quest, a mini-game, a puzzle leading to rewards, or something else entirely.

One of the things I enjoyed is that simply greeting the same NPC each day to build a trust level with them can result in gaining access to new items or even having a pet that follows you around to pick up loot. For me, this system encouraged me to take a step back and almost live in the game. I’d walk around town greeting NPCs, giving spare coins to the homeless, and just listening to the stories that you can occasionally hear being told to other NPCs.

All of this makes the world of Crimson Desert feel alive, since the world doesn’t revolve around Kliff. He is just a cog in the machine of Pywel, and that is a beautiful thing. We haven’t even spoken about the optional content itself yet, and that only makes things feel even more alive.

The Many Activities Of Pywel

While exploring the world of Pywel, you’ll come across many different things to do. This ranges from engaging mini-games, such as arm wrestling, archery challenges, and even a blackjack-inspired card game, to activities like cleaning a chimney, catching a cat, becoming a bounty hunter, and much more. The activities I just mentioned are all things you can find and engage with within the first few hours of the game.

Once you unlock the two other playable characters, Damiane and Oongka, they each have their own side missions and activities that you can engage with. However, from what I have experienced so far, their content is entirely optional.

One thing that isn’t optional, however, is puzzles. You’ll encounter these during mainline quests, side quests, and general exploration, and you’ll need Kliff to complete them. Puzzles come in all shapes and sizes, from lockboxes in houses to hidden rooms carved into the side of a cliff, and much more.

Many of these puzzles can be found in the Abyss, another realm that floats above Pywel, somewhat similar to the sky islands from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Solving them will require the use of one or more of Kliff’s Abyss-powered abilities and just like in Tears of the Kingdom, Crimson Desert does not hold your hand.

You are left to figure things out on your own, and while this can lead to some initial frustration, once you finally solve a puzzle, you feel an immediate sense of pride that most games in this genre never quite deliver.

How Does Crimson Desert Play

At this point, you’re probably wondering how Crimson Desert actually plays. The truth is that this is a very complex game with many systems that work in tandem to create a wonderful moment-to-moment experience. However, being so systems-heavy means that the way Crimson Desert plays, at least in part, depends on how you engage with it.

For example, in combat as Kliff, you can use one-handed weapons with a shield, dual wield weapons, attack from range with a bow, or go completely unarmed. Each playstyle has its pros and cons. Dual wielding allows for more rapid attacks, but my favorite, a sword-and-shield setup, allows for a balance between offence and defence. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy the ability to block multiple attacks with a shield? I certainly do.

Where the complexity really comes in is through Crimson Desert‘s control scheme. Unlike other titles such as Elden Ring or the recent Assassin’s Creed games, Crimson Desert does not rely solely on a simple two-button light and heavy attack system. Combat here feels closer to a fighting game, with different button combinations performing different actions.

Sure, you can perform a basic attack with the right bumper and a heavier attack with the right trigger. But you can also press combinations like right bumper and Y to perform a forward stab, or right bumper and B to perform a dodging swipe attack.

I haven’t even touched on the various grapples you can perform using different combinations of face buttons. Want to hit a cutter out of nowhere, like you’re Randy Orton in WWE 2K26? Crimson Desert has you covered. Or perhaps you want to dropkick someone off a mountain? Yes, you can do that too. And all of that is just with Kliff alone.

Damiane and Oongka have their own capabilities in combat that make them feel completely unique to play as. Damiane is faster and more agile than Kliff, using a rapier to quickly attack enemies. She effectively serves as the game’s high-DPS character and even carries a small shield that can be thrown at enemies like Captain America. Oongka, on the other hand, is a brute. He is much slower than his two companions but hits incredibly hard. Although I haven’t spent much time playing as him yet, sending enemies flying never gets old. The depth of combat options in Crimson Desert is unlike anything I’ve experienced before, and it only gets deeper as you unlock more skills.

Progressing Skills Rewards You With A Deeper Experience

So how do you progress in Crimson Desert to unlock new skills? Well, for skills specifically, you will want to find and obtain Abyss artifacts. These artifacts can appear at the end of puzzles, as a reward for quest completion, or simply be stumbled upon while exploring the open world. Some Abyss artifacts will be sealed at first, meaning they are unusable until you complete whatever in-game challenge is tied to them. Completing these challenges will unlock the artifact, allowing you to allocate it to the skill tree of whichever playable character you choose.

That’s right, Kliff, Damiane, and Oongka each have their own skill trees, which can greatly affect their playstyles. One small downside is that they share the Abyss artifacts, meaning that if you put a point into one character’s tree, you cannot use it on another character without having to respec completely. Thankfully, this can be done with Faded Abyss artifacts, which you find regularly in many of the same situations where you obtain standard Abyss artifacts.

The only issue is that because Kliff is the character required for the golden path, this system slightly disincentivizes using the other characters on a regular basis. It hasn’t bothered me much, as Kliff is my preferred character anyway, but I can see it potentially frustrating other players.

Other Types Of Progression

Of course, skills are not the only way you progress in Crimson Desert. Since there are no difficulty settings in the game, other forms of progression can be key to your success. This can range from upgrading armour and weapons by refining them at a blacksmith, to increasing your inventory slots through completing side missions and tasks for the people of Pywel so that you can carry additional healing items. You can also help the various factions of Pywel to gain reputation with them, which unlocks unique gear that cannot be obtained anywhere else.

There are many progression systems in Crimson Desert, but it never feels overwhelming. Having so many options means there is always a different way to succeed. For example, I might spend two hours hunting so that I have the ingredients to cook twenty or thirty meals and heal my way through a difficult boss fight. Another player might choose to go mining for resources to upgrade their armour and tank their way through. Someone else might go on a twenty-hour detour of side-questing to obtain a unique piece of gear from a faction.

There are countless ways to make Crimson Desert as easy or as challenging as you want it to be. But for me, it quickly became clear that the more you put into the game, the more you get out of it.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of the farming system, which appears to feed directly into the cooking and crafting systems. Farming is something I have only just started to engage with after 70 hours. Again, not because I don’t want to, the game is just huge. If I detailed it all in this review, we’d probably be here until the inevitable sequel releases.

What A Stunning Game

Crimson Desert is one of the most beautiful games I have ever played. Not because of some unique art style or because it is doing flashy things we have never seen before, but because of the incredible level of environmental detail combined with excellent lighting, dynamic weather, and a day-night cycle that genuinely changes how the world around you feels.

Achieving this level of visual fidelity at such a large scale is something we rarely see in games. Not to mention that Crimson Desert features flowing water that properly reacts to the environment around it.

Audio will likely go unnoticed by many players, but the sound design is superb. It helps you keep track of combat encounters, makes the world feel alive, and enhances immersion at almost every moment. I also love the game’s musical score, which at times feels every bit as bombastic, peaceful, and heartfelt as the legendary Howard Shore’s work on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films. Primary composer and Pearl Abyss audio director, Ryu Hwi-man (CROOVE), should feel incredibly proud of the work delivered here.

Accessibility

At the moment, the accessibility options within Crimson Desert are limited to the basics, such as subtitle adjustments and UI size changes. The game even lacks the ability to toggle between press and hold for certain actions. Normally, this would be something I would criticize heavily. However, I am aware that the team is actively exploring ways to improve accessibility in the future. So, given the complexity of the game and all its systems, for now, they get the benefit of the doubt from me on accessibility.

Technical Stumbles Hurt Brilliant Performance

On PC, Crimson Desert absolutely shines in the framerate department. On my PC, I was able to achieve 60+ FPS at native 4K resolution with cinematic settings and ray tracing enabled, which to me was fantastic experience. Most of today’s games struggle to reach this level of performance at such a high resolution without relying on upscaling technologies, even on top-tier hardware. However, Pearl Abyss achieves this in Crimson Desert without breaking a sweat thanks to its work with the BlackSpace game engine.

However, I did find one oddity that I noticed when I enabled DLAA, which would actually increase performance, which doesn’t appear to be correct behaviour at this time. It certainly wasn’t what I expected to see, so I have reached out to the team for clarification and will provide an update once I have an answer.

For even more in-depth information on Crimson Desert’s PC performance, make sure you check out our benchmarking video on YouTube.

Unfortunately, Crimson Desert isn’t the perfect technical specimen, and even the BlackSpace engine has some limitations. One such example is the very aggressive near-field LOD changes and pop-in you will notice even at the game’s highest available settings. It can be distracting at times and definitely immersion-breaking when noticed, but in truth, during normal gameplay, it becomes much less noticeable and never overshadows Crimson Desert’s amazing visuals.

What is somewhat more noticeable are the bugs that I’ve encountered. Don’t get me wrong, this is far from a disaster and isn’t anywhere near as bad as some of the competition at launch. But one side quest did break on me, where a bounty would just never appear, and having subtitles not match what NPCs are saying at times in the open world is annoying.

None of these issues managed to sour my experience or enjoyment of Crimson Desert, and, to Pearl Abyss’s credit, I’ve never seen a team deliver substantial patches at such speed. We had two patches in the review period alone. For a studio that is used to updating an MMO on a weekly basis, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. If they can keep up the current patch rate, all the issues I experienced could be gone within just a few weeks. The team has a set of known issues they are currently working on, many of which will be fixed before launch, with some slated for a post-launch patch.

Jordan’s PC Specs: AMD 9950X3D, RTX 5090 Founders Edition, 96GB DDR5 6000MHz Corsair RAM

Final Verdict

Pearl Abyss’ expertise in the MMO genre has allowed the studio to craft an open-world action-adventure that draws inspiration from many of the best games of the last decade. These inspirations include Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher 3, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, among others. Yet Crimson Desert still feels uniquely its own. Despite a few minor issues, Crimson Desert sets a new benchmark for this style of open-world experience, one that will be extremely difficult for future games to match.

If you enjoyed this review, explore more of our in-depth video game reviews across PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: A copy of Crimson Desert was provided to us for review purposes by Pearl Abyss. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.