Crimson Desert is an unrestrained feast of violence, with a toolkit of moves that's like a fusion of every action RPG protagonist of the past decade rolled into one

Kliff, protagonist of Crimson Desert, clashes swords with his foe.

I had the joy of playing Crimson Desert, the first proper singleplayer effort by Black Desert Online developer Pearl Abyss, again this week—and while I had some sense of how the game works, given I played it during Gamescom last year, getting my hands on it in an air-conditioned London building rather than a stuffy, loud hall in Copenhagen allowed me to stare deeper into the action RPG tesseract, and I've come away with my head spinning.

The elevator pitch for Crimson Desert sounds a bit dry: You play as Kliff, a gruff fantasy mercenary in an archetypical fantasy setting, and leader of the Greymane Free Company. A bunch of vikings rock up and, best I can tell, kill most of them. You get stabbed but not killed, and eventually set out on a quest to deliver some payback in a wide open world, yada yada.