Crimson Desert has finally arrived and, upon contact with the gaming public writ large, appears to be a mixed bag—we gave it an 80 in our Crimson Desert review, with our own Mollie Taylor dubbing it both "a game for the sickos" and "full of archaic design choices that only make sense when you remember Pearl Abyss has been maintaining an MMO for 12 years."
This is a game bloated to bursting with systems, which both lends it its own form of madcap charm and bogs it down—and to support the grist of said systems, Pearl Abyss has constructed a control scheme from the pages of an ancient wizard's spellbook, married with some occasional moon logic that expects you to just intuit a 12-step program to solve a puzzle, or get a pet dog or something.
