Crimson Desert does what other games do backwards and that's why it's a beautiful freak of nature, says imsim vet at Arkane Lyon

Crimson Desert, a game about simulating a large Scottish man and his friends and sometimes their adventures in space, is pretty weird. Depending on which precise member of the PC Gamer editorial staff you ask, that's either high praise or venomous criticism (I'm neutral—the game runs terribly on my machine, so I've not played much of it).

Dinga Bakaba, studio director at Arkane Lyon whose name is on all three Dishonored games (including the first game's Dunwall City Trials DLC, against which I bear a personal blood grudge), is firmly in the former camp. He's all about Pearl Abyss' wacky wonderful world. In a post on X, Bakaba donned his analytical hat and pointed out that "Crimson Desert functions opposite to most games of this type."

In other words: it's backwards. "Generally the beginning is magical and after a while you start to see the strings," says Bakaba, but Crimson Desert somehow inverts that. "You start with the gameyness front loaded: the inspirations, the controls, the systems: it's almost all you see. But after a while all this takes the back seat: magic kicks in and doesn't disappear because you have already accepted the rules/constitutive elements."

Like I say, I haven't played too much of the game myself, but that matches up with my early experience and the later details I've heard from the PCG elite. Pearl Abyss practically smashed me over the head with Crimson Desert's "gameyness" in my early hours, but all I hear from my colleagues who love the game is their long, well-laid schemes to abduct goats they've taken a liking to.

Bakaba reckons it's all quite board-gamey. "It's almost like the specific type of immersion of a board game where at first all you see is the board/rules but then you enter the magic circle properly and the real fun begins."

Plus, Crimson Desert keeps its powder dry, holding mechanics and systems in reserve to spring them on you well past where other games would: "It keeps on introducing new things, giving more significance to systems and making them interact with each other. It doesn't hurt that most of them are 'meaty' and realized diegetically, and that there is also some tonal liberties with some (smartly engineered) stupid fun."

I can certainly see where an imsim sicko like Bakaba (and me) would take a shine to Crimson Desert's weird gamut of strange systemic goings-on. I suspect Bakaba might find it a bit heartening, too, that a game so thoroughly peculiar has garnered such a strong response from players. "In a time of fast consumption, a game that is sticky because it has friction, and not because it's smiley feels amazing," he says. Well, that bodes well for Dishonored 3, then.