As you will know if you've been following this blog religiously, I tend to take a jaundiced view of videogames these days. Not all of my friends are so jaded, though, and thanks to their influence, I occasionally get roped into some zeitgeisty new hotness. A little ARC Raiders here, a little Clair Obscur there. I'm glad to have had a chance to try them out, and at least equally glad not to have wasted too much time, or my own money, on them. But every now and then, something really seizes my attention. Like today. Today, I got to play Crimson Desert.
I keep seeing people describe this game's story as “bland,” “boring,” or “forgettable.” I do not know what kind of brainrot these people have been exposing themselves to that Crimson Desert strikes them as being on the bad side of normality. It is terrible, to be clear, but “forgettable” is the last thing I'd call it. Others have called it “convoluted,” “incoherent,” or “nonsensical,” which are all closer to the mark, but I think those adjectives, sapped by overuse of some of their power, also fail to do it justice. Crimson Desert might have the worst story I have ever seen in a game, and it also might have the worst storytelling I've ever seen in a game. It is fucked up in ways that have permanently rewired my brain.
* * *
The game is actually in pretty good shape, technically, for a new release. No game-breaking bugs, nothing that impedes progress, hardly any minor visual glitches, even. It's a rat's nest of insanely bad design choices in every possible area, from the user interface to the control scheme to the inventory system, but it all seems to be working as designed. Not bad for a big-budget game at launch.
And the life-changing badness of the story sneaks up on you. It all starts the way I've seen people write about it, with some generic but incongruous elements slapped together in a way that's a bit discordant but mostly just tiresome. First there's an attack by (one presumes) the main bad guy on the good guys' camp, and our protagonist gets repeatedly stabbed, his throat is slit, and he's thrown in a river. Seems like he ought to be dead! But instead (or maybe as a consequence?) he goes to techno-heaven and learns the first of many abilities that have been shamelessly cribbed from other, better games. There are no NPCs in techno-heaven. There are no explanations. Is it real? Is it a dream? Does it matter? Eventually, our hero returns from whence he went and washes ashore, uninjured.
His name is Cliff, by the way. They spell it “Kliff,” but…come on. It's Cliff. He has a friend named Duane. This is in a world with orcs (with names like Oongka) and ogres and wizards. There's some guy called Jian (Chinese?). The realm we're all in is called Pywel (Welsh?). Zero effort whatsoever to make things coherent or give any of the proper nouns legible relationships to one another. It's great. The whole thing seems haphazard, slapped together, just an excuse for a beautiful open world to roam around in. Fine.
But there is a main quest, and if you follow that main quest, the sense that things have merely been kludged together lazily begins to give way to something more uncanny. More unsettling. A couple hours in, you realize that you're playing out a waking fever dream, and that your actual flesh-and-blood brain is overheating. The following is an actual sequence of steps in the game's main quest.
* * *
You jump off some sky islands, which are 1) one of the very most shameless of Crimson Desert's many, many deeply shameless borrowings from the last couple of Zelda games and 2) called “the Abyss” for no reason I can even begin to imagine. You land back near the starting town where much of the quest line has taken place thus far. You are prompted to go to a watchtower nearby. Nobody actually gives you the quest; no NPC has even mentioned the watchtower. You just know: It's time to go there. The holy spirit, or the insistence of the 10-year-old Zelda-loving DM running this most unholy railroad of a D&D campaign, compels you.
As you approach the tower, you hear NPCs yelling about bandits. Seems some bandits have captured the watchtower! You'd better fight them. You do, which is pretty fun, to be honest—trampling them with your horse, hacking at them with a one-handed axe—and the instant the last one falls, the screen fades to black. You've been teleported off your horse to the base of the tower; all the dead bandits have vanished (their gear has helpfully been whisked away to a chest in your quarters, from which you can extract loot, but which you cannot actually manually add anything to; you can only store things in your personal inventory). Up come several of the game's never-ending blizzard of tutorial screens explaining one minigame or arcane sub-mechanic (claiming territory! fishing! investing in the stock market! arbitrage!) after another. You close them out. Your quest now is “Go to the top of the tower.” Do you smell burning? Is something burning?
To get inside, there's a sort of puzzle where the solution is basically, “Hey, you played Zelda, right? You know how this works.” (If you hadn't played Zelda, you'd probably have no fucking clue what's going on. You have played Zelda, for better or worse.) You go inside. There are some extremely half-assed traps, easy to bypass, trivial to evade even if you do trigger them. Did a human being design this? Like, in the game, are we meant to believe that an NPC put these traps here, on purpose? What kind of a watchtower is this anyway, with only one door and no windows? Is any of this real? Is it meant to be? Did a human being design this? Like, was this made by AI, in the real world? Is any of this real?
You hike to the top. There are three traps, and maybe five stories to the tower. Or maybe fifty. It all looks the same, and it's taken you so long. You're feeling a little dizzy. There's nothing at the top except loot. Better get to looting! Halfway through picking up coins and books and random flatware—everything is labeled ??? until you pick it up, and I do mean everything, from grasshoppers to cheese—you accidentally pick up a weird helmet. Your quest now is “Put on the weird helmet.”
You put on the weird helmet. There's a hologram of a wizard who made this helmet to record memories or something. He says something about you being the chosen one, maybe? Or maybe that was somebody else. Who can remember? It's all hallucinatory, and it's hard to hear him over the ringing in your ears. Your quest now is “Talk to the child.” What? Who? Where? Why? (At least you know when. Right now!)
You go back down the stairs and out the tower's front door. There's a kid on the wall. Ah, you do recognize her. For a moment, things snap back into place. The ringing recedes. Back in town, you helped her rescue her cat from a rooftop. Also, she's probably not actually a kid, because that earlier part of the quest line involved an old beggar who turned out to be off-brand Merlin and a noblewoman who turned out to be…a talking bird? Like, a seagull, but magical? Gandalf, but a lady, and a seagull? Don't think too hard about it; you'll only hurt yourself. Follow the cat, the kid says. That's your quest now.
You follow the cat. It takes like an hour. The cat goes halfway up a mountain, and it's not that fast, and it gets stuck in a stream and on a rock along the way. Time unspools. Your eyes lose focus. You shake yourself. How long were you out like that?
Oops, the cat's moving again. Up on the mountain is a magical ruin that's the 185th thing you've seen in the past two hours (four hours? six?) that was shamelessly lifted from Tears of the Kingdom. You watch a hologram do magic to a holographic door, which teaches you a magic spell that lets you do magic to a real door. You go inside the magical ruin. You learn another magic spell by watching a hologram. A different one? The same one? It's all running together, but it doesn't matter. None of this is real, you promise yourself.
You are presented with a puzzle that, perversely, is solved with neither of these new magic spells but one you learned three magic spells ago, back in the Sky Islands, excuse me, the Abyss. Your quest is, once again, “Talk to the child.” What the fuck? How'd the child get here? What happened to the cat? Was there ever a cat? Was the cat the child all along?
You go outside. Oh. It's not that child from before. It's a new magical child. The kid blathers at you about destiny or the balance or something. Your ears are ringing again. Blood trickles from your nose. Wipe it away. A wave of dizziness buffets you. Fight it down. You can't really understand what the kid is going on about. You can't concentrate. But you can stay on your feet. Your head swims. Stay on your feet. Your quest—that's simple enough. That you can understand. “Go back to town.” You can do it.
You go back to town. Some guy wants to fight you. Sure, you say. You say yes to everything. There literally aren't any dialogue options in this game. You simply do whatever the 10-year-old DM railroading you through life and death and unlife thinks would be cool next. Every step of every quest is just “Make the next thing happen,” or “Go to where the next thing is going to happen to you.” You have no choice. You kick the guy's ass. Oops, he has a second health bar. You kick the guy's ass. He compliments you a bunch. You respond with great humility. You are always extremely humble. You have no choice. Your quest now is “Speak with the man who seems to have something to say.”
That's actually from the game. I mean, all of this has really been from the game, but I've been paraphrasing the quest text, mostly. This one is verbatim. That's what this next step of the main quest is: “Speak with the man who seems to have something to say.”
You experience a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
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