It does not matter how long you've been playing video games for, or how many of them you've finished: Crimson Desert has the ability to make you feel like you're back at the beginning again. The new open worlder is one of the most baffling games we've ever played — from almost every angle.
It's a lesson in how a video game shouldn't control. You're going to press and hold combinations of buttons you've never thought of before, and find simple actions like jumping and sprinting mapped to inputs that break over a decade's worth of muscle memory.
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You'll press Cross/X to sprint and you'll press Square to jump, and you’re going to like it — or more than likely not. It's a truly baffling game that feels like it was drafted in an underground silo 15 years ago, then locked off from the outside world so the lessons developers have learnt in the time since couldn't filter through.
Crimson Desert is a unique experience you need to meet on its terms if you're to have much fun with it. Having said all that: is what it's putting down actually any good? Yes and no.
The biggest talking point in terms of Crimson Desert in the console space is performance, and on a PS5 Pro at least, it mostly runs well. This is a perfectly acceptable way to play the game, particularly on Performance Mode.
For some base PS5 footage of Crimson Desert, please see below:
Despite the Performance Mode's focus on frame rate, the open world still impresses, with all the screenshots within this article taken from the Performance Mode on PS5 Pro. It's far from perfect: we could make the game hard crash back to the PS5 home page on demand using the map screen, and there's quite a lot of texture pop-in at close range. However, it is overall a decent version of the game — it's good enough.
What's so baffling about it, then? Almost everything else.
Crimson Desert will forever be known as having one of the most bizarre introductions to a video game ever made.
It opens normally enough: you play as Kliff, a Greymane who's ambushed at camp. You're killed in battle, chucked off a cliff into a river, and then resurrected by a magical bracelet. Having made your way through some kind of magical sky island, you return to the open world of Pywel.
A man helps you get back on your feet with a horse, and the two of you ride into the town of Hernand.
Without any context or narrative reasoning, you're then told to "enter a tavern to gather information". The only thing you can do is take part in an arm wrestling contest, and you never gather anything close to resembling information. Next, the objective tells you to give a coin to a beggar, then head into the sewer via the grate he was lying on, and then untie a woman you find down there. She disappears into thin air, having given you a letter.
While you are still underground in the sewer, the objective updates to tell you to rescue a cat on top of a house. There's absolutely no connective tissue between these tasks; you're not told to go and complete them by an NPC after each one. They just randomly appear, like open world events or side quests, bizarrely stitched together to form the basis of a basic mission.
Except this is the main quest, and it's what Crimson Desert demands you do just 30 minutes into the game.
It's been discussed pre-release how Crimson Desert may not have much to offer in terms of an intriguing narrative, and the initial plot setup certainly indicates that's the reality. Nothing makes sense, and it's difficult to work out whether this is all standard to the world of Pywel. Kliff, the main character, brushes everything off like it's no big deal and reacts with little to no emotion.
We wrapped up our first play session as chapter two started, rather baffled by the sequence of events the game opens with. The opening at least concludes well: you gain the wings that let you gracefully glide back down to the ground from the top of one of the sky islands.
Unless you go looking for it outside the starting town, there's very little combat in the introductory hours. You attack using the shoulder buttons, and a skill tree unlocks new abilities to tag onto the standard swipes. Awkward moves like pressing R1 and R2 at the same time feel unnatural, however, so the controls (which can't be remapped) again represent a stumbling block.
What can't be disputed is Crimson Desert is a stunner... in the right setting. There are times when the screen can look a bit too busy or the scenery will seem far too bright, but catch the lighting at the right angle in the correct location, and you'll probably have the best examples of console graphics in 2026.
Pearl Abyss has done a fantastic job crafting a beautiful world that — at least judging by the stunning view at the top of a sky island — has multiple different biomes, all offering their own colour palette and landscapes.
The test will be whether there is anything intriguing to do in it. No matter how pretty it might be, there has to be a reason to explore it. We're not convinced by the disjointed nature of the quest design, and the story already seems to be a bit of an afterthought.
Let us reconvene when our full PS5 review is ready, but if the only thing that was holding you back was a performance report on PS5 Pro, then Crimson Desert runs suitably fine on the system.
What are your first impressions of Crimson Desert on PS5? Post your initial thoughts in the comments below.