Reviewing games can be kinda weird. When I’m playing stuff for personal reasons, there’s no deadline. No definitive date that I have to roll credits or reach 100% completion by. It’s just me and the journey. However long that takes.
But I am also employed by one such website called PC Gamer, and sometimes I do have to play games as part of my job. Ones which do come with deadlines. I’ve just spent the last week of my life devouring as much Crimson Desert as I could feasibly manage alongside boring regular human stuff like cooking and showering and sleeping (blech!). Another few days and I probably would have developed a Scottish accent and started cooking two dozen steaks in anticipation of a looming boss fight.
I’ve got a lot of takeaways from my 75 hours of playtime—you can read all about them in my Crimson Desert review if you haven’t already, thank you very much—but one of my biggest ones of all? This is not a game to be devoured. It’s a sippin’ drink, not a tequila shot. It’s one of those weird little sweets your grandma always had that were undeniably better when you spent five minutes sucking them to a razor-thin pebble rather than crunching straight into it and shattering it into tiny pieces.
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It’s a game that absolutely thrives on the joy of discovery. To paraphrase Joel Franey from how review over on our sister site GamesRadar: Crimson Desert is better savoured as “a sandbox than as a story.” One where the journey is infinitely more interesting and satisfying than the destination.
There are so many damn things to do that it feels like a disservice to ignore it all in favour of questing your way to the credits. Some of the most fun I got out of Crimson Desert was when I halted progression of the main story entirely and spent some time with my fellow Greymanes. Running errands for them, expanding the number of allies at my camp, and seeing it become a real community. A home to return to. One with merchants and farmhands and freeswords. One which really came to feel like a tiny slice of familiarity and warmth in a vast, overwhelming, and occasionally unforgiving world.
At one point, I wasn’t pursuing any quests whatsoever. I hopped on my horse and rode around the forests lining the outskirts of Hernand. I picked peonies. I listened to the birds cawing and squawking nearby. I… er, shot a few deer for their meat and hides. It wasn’t all going to be sunshine and roses, I’m a freaking medieval swordsman. I gotta eat somehow, man.
But it was therapeutic. Taking time to soak up the world, gather some important crafting materials, away from combat and quests and systems requiring attention. Venturing off the beaten path in a semi-desperate attempt to find more fast travel points so that I didn’t have to hoof it halfway across the map so much.
They’re all things I would have taken so much more time to do outside of a review, so I’m now doing my best to implore you all to do the same. Go and gamble! Create the best damn farm on your camp Pywel has ever seen! Decorate your house with a bunch of useless junk! Take all the time in the world to puzzle your way through the world’s ridiculous number of riddle-laden labyrinths, caves, and spires.
And when you do play some of the main story, you’ll be even stronger for your galavanting, and it won’t feel quite so much of a grind. Crimson Desert is also a little guilty of locking some of its neater systems behind progression—but don’t feel the pressure to blitz straight to the end. You’ll have a far worse experience for it.
