After 6 hours, Crimson Desert is one of the most overwhelming, chaotic, madcap videogames I've ever played—and I'm hungry for more

Crimson Desert is one of the most overstimulating games I've ever played, and I'm going to make it my mission for the rest of this article to convince you that this is, despite everything, a compliment of the highest order.

In case you're unfamiliar, Crimson Desert is the first proper attempt at a singleplayer game by Black Desert Online developers Pearl Abyss. It's an action romp with some light RPG elements—think on the level of the recent Legend of Zelda games, plus a skill tree.

It follows Kliff, a former Greymane, as he seeks out his past battle-brothers and gets pulled into what I can only assume, based on the exposition I've been privy to, a reality-threatening plot.

I've recently played about six hours of the game, however, and I can tell you for a fact that the above description doesn't do it justice. Crimson Desert is a delightfully absurd high-fantasy rampage with absolutely zero restraint. It is unrepentantly dedicated to the rule of cool. It is on something.

Which is all the more whiplash-inducing given how the game starts out—with a Game of Thrones-esque mourning of a fallen Greymane battle brother that gets scuppered by the Black Bears, who have it out for Kliff's more honourable mercenary company.

The game sustains this tone for about 40 minutes before a mysterious beggar vanishes in a cloud of light, leads you to a floating technological sky fortress, gives you a cloak of feathers and a grappling hook and tells you that reality hangs in the balance. I then proceeded to find a person's magic helmet that could read ambient memories and learnt how to lift trees with my mind via the help of feylike children.

Nothing encapsulates Crimson Desert's tone more than a fight I was challenged to by a knight in the town square. If this were a grimdark fantasy, Kliff might have somberly put him down with a warrior's respect. In Crimson Desert, however, I spent five minutes learning how to do a jump-kick from the guy, stabbed him a few times, and watched as he stood up like a bested antagonist from Dragon Ball Z and praised my strength.

It's like if George R.R Martin had gotten really into Bollywood action movies—you know, the sick as hell ones like Baahubali, where legions of soldiers launch themselves onto enemy walls via palm tree catapults. That hasn't happened in Crimson Desert yet, but I can tell you there are mechs and a knight who teaches you how to bodyslam people. And if it did, it would barely be out of place.

This all sounds like it shouldn't work, but honestly, Crimson Desert has done nothing but delightfully tap into my inner 14 year old's neurotransmitters and set them all firing—and its combat system has me absolutely ravenous to play with my new toys.

Full course, plus desert

Crimson Desert's combat is nuts. I've talked about this before, but now that I've played several more hours of it, I can confirm that it is more nuts than previously anticipated.

At the event, a fellow journalist marvelled over my shoulder at the fact I'd developed a completely distinct combat style from them, chaining a three-strike heavy attack into a palm strike combo that kept my foe stunlocked long enough to charge up a jumping double-kick to the chin.

While Kliff's skill tree might change, it's absolutely flooded with options for archery, unarmed combos, swordplay, or using the aforementioned grappling hook to hurl enemies all over the shop—or Kliff himself, as I quickly discovered, who can eventually unlock the ability to swing off objects like Spider-Man and then (I am not joking) launch into a Sonic the Hedgehog-style attack where he spins in a ball.

Kliff can parry, he can grapple, he can do five straight vertical jumps then do a Red Dead-style deadeye flurry of arrows in bullet time. He can meteor strike from the heavens and bellyflop onto his foes. He can also apparently throw a tree at people.

This is counterbalanced by the fact that Kliff's opponents have a lot of ways to ruin your day, too—giving almost as good as they get, hurling you about with grabs or utterly swarming you with blades. These guys don't wait their turn, I can tell you that.

If this sounds overwhelming, that's because it is. But as I played more of Crimson Desert, I simply decided to surrender myself to the nonsense, adopting the same mindset I did while I was playing Dragons Dogma 2, and you know what? I had a blast.

This game is a combat sandbox. Kliff has so many ways to dispatch people that the objective starts becoming less "how do I dispatch these foes efficiently" and more "how do I dispatch these foes in the most clippable way possible". I felt like how I imagine an overexcited puppy must feel when wrestling with a fellow dog in the mud.

The biggest mark of absolutely biblical greed on display from Crimson Desert, however, is the fact that this isn't even the only character you can play. Later in the game, you unlock Damiane and Oongka—and while they share a similar chassis with Kliff and have smaller skill trees, they feel just as distinct.

Damiane is a flintlock gunslinger and fencer who can hurl her shield Captain America style, or Black Widow leglock-throw enemies a clean ten feet, or call down spears of light from the heavens. Oongka is a big bastard with a huge axe and a Barrett-style gun arm.

I giggled with abject glee once I realised Oongka had a grapple-based parry, where if you hit the grab button at the right time, you could stuff a poor sod onto the end of your arm-cannon, aim him at the sky, and send him flying. This feels exactly as good as it sounds.

This occasionally gets Crimson Desert into trouble, mind. You should play this game with a controller like any self-respecting character action game enjoyer, but boy, is the control scheme crowded. Absolutely no button real estate is wasted, here, leaving to a boatload of mis-inputs and a Tekken-style list of combos to memorise.

Kliff and his allies control with about as much complexity as any technical fighting game character—which means that you'll be spending much of your playtime experimenting or bungling button-presses. You can pull off some absolutely absurd nonsense in Crimson Desert, but the price you pay is in usability.

You've got a lotta time to learn, though, because this game seems downright massive.

Everywhere, Videogame, All At Once

At the tail-end of the preview, I was given access to a few saves—which, alas, I could not record for posterity, but can in fact talk about—where I was given a dragon mount you get later in the game, as well as a flying mech. On this dragon, it took me a solid five minutes just to drag Kliff from one biome to the next.

I obviously cannot vouch for whether or not this ocean is an inch deep, mind, but judging by the sheer amount of objectives hidden in the completionist menu, Crimson Desert seems determined to be freaking huge. My four-hour play session prior to that was spent jogging around a single town and its surrounding territories, and I hadn't come close to cleaning up all my side quests.

The slightly concerning amount of busywork Crimson Desert will be throwing at you is bolstered by the fact that this thing wants to be every videogame at once.

Breath of the Wild-style cooking is present for you to create consumables. You can cut down trees for lumber, you can get a GTA-style bounty on your head, you can gamble or do wrestling minigames, you can get faction reputation up or go on bounty hunts, you can clear out outposts, you can go fishing, you can, according to someone a couple stations over from me, bribe members of the church. For what purpose? It is unclear.

And that's just covering the stuff I found in four hours: According to prior gameplay videos and discussion from Pearl Abyss, this game will also have harvesting, ranching, stronghold management, follower missions, and minigames galore.

The real question here is whether Crimson Desert will buckle under its own mammoth weight—and it's been the question in the middle of my mind. This preview did a decent amount to assuage those fears. Everything I did was basically fun, but I also felt like I was staring down the barrel of a colossal game, one whose devs have Icarus as a role model.

It's as though every idea, every feature pitch meeting, every post-it note for "this would be cool!" on a developer's desk, has been fleshed out into its own full-bodied mechanic. And I'm not sure if it'd work if the rest of Crimson Desert wasn't so hilariously unrestrained.

Crimson Desert's mechanical gluttony is somehow charming—it pairs really well with its irreverent story, filled with NPCs who all feel well-suited to the pantomime. A man who can't stop throwing tantrums over his goat's stolen horns or a strange interdimensional wizard in a sky fortress all seem like completely reasonable additions in a game where I can bodyslam a group of bandits from the top rope.

It helps, also, that Crimson Desert takes itself so seriously. This is an utterly absurd game, but it's also completely sincere. You won't find a single lampshade or "so yeah, I do that now" inside. Kliff takes the presence of dimensional sky wizards in his stride, and the world warps to the constant moon logic in a way that is honestly delightful.

So far, Crimson Desert is a game I'm somewhat concerned Pearl Abyss tore from the imagination of a 14-year-old Harvey. It is lab-designed to produce "hell yeah" moments. I cannot say whether the full thing will work—in my six hour playthrough, it didn't stop working, but that is but a small bite of the everything bagel Pearl Abyss is hubristically constructing like a Tower of Babel.

It is an oncoming tidal wave of unrelenting mechanical complexity and systems where absolutely nobody, at any point, asked if this was all a bit much. But you will find me there, arms outstretched, bellowing "Witness Me!" with silver spray paint on my teeth—ready to be swept away, whether that's into greener pastures or to get dashed upon the rocks.