It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Crimson Desert. I love its open world and the sandbox approach it takes to presenting Pywel as a place brimming with possibility for those who figure out how to meet it on its terms. I absolutely love its combat, especially once I got Daminane some cool gear and a few upgrades, and I’ve been having a blast building up my Greymane camp to be at its absolute best. I’ve caught myself staring slack-jawed at every view The Abyss has to offer, and scratched my head as I tried to solve each piece of complex machinery that powers it.
That last part is what reminded me of my days on the PS3, in a world where my video games didn’t bother with holding my hand as much as the ones on offer today do. My protagonists weren’t as chatty, often suffering alongside me as we tried to figure out a way forward in a game that stubbornly stood in our way. Of course, I was never truly alone, as the internet was always at my side, helping me find other players who were there for the very same reason. Crimson Desert brought it all back, making me do something I hadn’t done in years: I had a device close at hand with Google readily available as I made my way across Pywel.
It’s a special callback to the days of engaging with a community of players, exchanging solutions to problems we were facing while giving our fellow players who managed to offer those solutions the respect and validation they were due. Pywel reminds me of a time when even single-player adventures could have online communities form around them and thrive, their players always ready to lend a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on when things got too difficult.
Crimson Desert makes every Greymane who’s playing it a part of the adventure. But how has it managed to do that in a world where games such as this one can largely be enjoyed alone? Join me as I take you through the multiple tabs this one has made me keep open in my brain as I play it.
A Sense Of Mystery and Intrigue
I kind of found it odd to be playing a game that had me look up guides this quickly after Elden Ring gave me a humbling reminder that all of my snooping skills weren’t enough for me to see everything The Lands Between had to show me. But here we are, a few years later, courtesy of how jealously Pywel chose to guard its secrets. It’s not because its puzzles and secrets were broken, but because they were just there, with very opaque clues and the game refusing to whisper helpfully in my ear as other titles do.
So many games from back in the day had me doing this, and those guides were indeed the inspiration for me to write about video games today. Skyrim immediately comes to mind, which was so thoroughly overwhelming with its systems that I needed to make sense of it all by asking players with more experience. Any of the Souls games at that point were the same, and I’d say they continue to be a gold standard when it comes to hiding secrets. All of these titles made each playthrough a research project, funded by a sense of curiosity and fuelled by an intrigue so deep it kept any potential fatigue at bay.
But Crimson Desert comes pretty damn close to that same feeling, and Pywel’s sheer size had me convinced that taking a bit of help with this one was going to be a good idea in the long run. But that isn’t an indicator of a game’s challenge, isn’t it? The puzzles tab joins the walkthrough tab as the second one, feeding me a stream of thoughts every time I dove back into Crimson Desert for a jaunt through Pywel.
They’re the hardest part of the game in my opinion, and that’s after trying to take on the boss of Karin Quarry with the gear I began the game with, unaware of the magic of Abyss Gears. I hadn’t even met Hornsplitter at that point. But if you’ve been up to The Abyss through any of the Spires, you know that even getting the damn door to open is an uphill task. It took me right back to Prince of Persia (2008), a game that had you accompanied by a very knowledgeable companion, but one who was as beat as you were when it came to its puzzles.
Skyrim is another example, as are so many of the puzzles from Zelda. A more recent example would be last year’s Hell Is Us, a game that had me taking as many notes as I could while trying to pay attention to what was being said. But that’s just one new game versus so many from the PS3 era that were real head-scratchers. It’s good that Crimson Desert took that route, as the land of Pywel is able to really grab your attention with its air of mystery and wonder.
Call me crazy, but there is pleasure in trying to piece together a solution, my brain coming at a problem from a multitude of angles before I finally swallow a slice of humble pie and look up a solution online. I kind of like feeling a little stupid when I see a solution that was staring me right in the face. I’m laughing with you at the fact that I totally missed the memory of seeing somebody stab those pillars you use to rotate puzzle pieces, but I’m dying on the inside when I think of the two hours I spent trying to figure that out, my knowledge of the skill tree more decidedly biased towards my Axiom abilities at that point.
It’s something that used to be normal, a facet of gaming that I’d grown to miss after it became as rare as it has. But Crimson Desert brought it back. But there are more tabs open for us to click on.
The Fear Of Failure
The first two tabs that Crimson Desert has opened up for me dealt with problems I knew existed. But what about the ones I didn’t know of? Or know about but hadn’t encountered yet? They opened up two new tabs, both fuelled by an anxiety that I was going to break the game by exploring too much of it, a sentiment that only grew as I tackled quest after quest from Hernand’s residents.
And as with all anxiety, it helps to know you’re not alone. I found myself scrolling the game’s subreddit in my spare time, finding so many other kindred spirits who were worried about something they couldn’t yet solve, or perhaps excited about things that they’d seen on the forum. I was firmly in the latter camp after watching somebody use Kliff’s fists to devastating effect, which made me promptly load up my save to check out Unarmed attacks and their skills.
I’ve met people as obsessed with the game as I am, which invokes fond memories of playing Skyrim for the first time, or posting rants about Souls bosses and having other players agree while people who’d beat the boss shared useful advice and tips. I’ve beaten so many bosses based on recommendations from my peers over the years, and I tip my hat to those helpful folks. Crimson Desert brought collective discovery back again and made it really cool, too.
There’s also the tab that wonders about the consequences of my actions. You’re probably aware of the Fruit of Life at this point, and if you’re not, just DON’T pick it up until the story tells you to. I learned that the hard way after I picked it up, the sense that it looked important prompting me to take a break and learn from my fellow Greymanes that I had just bricked a quest. I considered a new playthrough, but after 80 hours of diligent exploring, I’ve since decided to eat the loss and watch a YouTube video instead.
All of the PS3 era games I’ve talked about had that sense of a first playthrough being one where you learn the ropes, and your second one being the full experience, where you come at the game armed with all the knowledge of its system you need to make it work in your favor. You tested its boundaries and learned from them the hard way before joining the community and obsessively looking up discourse around the game. Well, my phone’s screen time has seen a drastic uptick since Crimson Desert came out, and it isn’t a coincidence.
Its magic comes not from certainty, but from the possibilities Pywell offers to those who look to conquer it instead of merely exploring it. Which brings me to the final couple of tabs in my brain when I play it.
Stubborn and Proud Greymanes
Conquering Pywel is a great initiative, but executing that in Crimson Desert’s early days was quite the challenge. It’s pre-release, and release builds had their own problems, and yet, the gaming community persevered through it all, belting out solutions to tackle both the game’s challenges while also trying to solve individual problems. I got my legendary horse after a very helpful tip that made the entire taming mini-game a whole lot easier than trying to tilt my thumb stick away from the wild horse as it tried to throw me off.
Yet another video guide helped me solve a puzzle that a text-based one couldn’t, thanks to the description going above my head and not really helping me find what I was looking for. On another occasion, I was convinced that I was locked out of completing an important Abyss puzzle, the one that would allow me to begin using elemental attacks. I spent a lot of time looking up different ideas until the suggestion to just visit my camp and try to find lost items there finally pointed me in the right direction. The Frost Mantle is a very important part of my take on Kliff now.
It’s probably easy to tell that Crimson Desert has become an obsession of mine at this point. I take that as a compliment, as the final tab the game has open in my brain is one that’s just a banner of flashbacks to a time when I was more curious and less efficient in my games, a heady combination that could lead to disaster (looking at you, Witcher 3) just as often as it could lead to incredible moments. The hours spent on that high-level early boss in Nioh 2 immediately come to mind.
Pywel doesn’t just transport me to another reality from time to time. It sends me several years back into my own, when I could pull an all-nighter on a game that deserved it. But my bedtime is stricter now, and life gets in the way of most games. But for the few ones out there like Crimson Desert and its inspirations, I’m happy to trade a little shut-eye for the chance to feel like I’m back in the PS3 era of games again. And that, perhaps, is its greatest achievement.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
