Every few years, a game comes along that feels truly special. In 2015, that was The Witcher 3 with its branching narrative. 2017’s Zelda: Breath of the Wild reimagined what it meant to give players true open world freedom. And 2018’s Red Dead Redemption moved the needle in its attention to detail and systems-driven gameplay.

It feels like it’s been a while since we’ve seen a game truly push the medium of video games to its limits – but I think that’s just changed with the release of Crimson Desert. Developed by South Korean developer Pearl Abyss, which is known for its work on popular MMO Black Desert Online, the team has delivered one of the most impressive technical showcases that feels like a glimpse into what games of the future will look like.

Except this game wasn’t made in the future. It’s right here, right now, ready to play for anyone with a modern console or even a modest PC.

It’s not perfect, as Pearl Abyss has certainly let its own ambitions get in the way of itself when it comes to some basic, yet crucial, gameplay aspects. But the sheer scale, variety, and polished nature of the vast majority of what Crimson Desert manages to pull off alone cements it as a game we’ll no doubt be referencing as the new benchmark for open world RPGs.

If you’ve not been following the pre-release hype train, you might be wondering ‘what on earth is Crimson Desert?’. Honestly, even after pouring tens of hours into Pearl Abyss’s mammoth creation, I’m still sort of wondering the same thing.

The amount of things you can do in this game beggars belief. It feels as if the developer has taken stock of the core DNA of every big open world hit of the last decade and gone ‘yep, we’ll have a piece of that’.

As such, it does lose a bit of its own identity in the mix. But at its core, Crimson Desert is an open world RPG that truly embodied what it means to be a sandbox.

Your journey through the lands of Pywel begins as Kliff, a member of the Greymane mercenary group. The opening section sees your clan overpowered by a rival group, and despite your best efforts, Kliff is defeated in combat and brutally killed.

An abrupt end to Kliff’s story this is not, though. Within a matter of minutes, he reawakens on a river bank, seemingly perfectly fine and ready to mingle with the nearby locals. I found it a little odd that Kliff doesn’t seem to be phased by the fact he’s just cheated death – even more so when he fails to acknowledge his imbuement of magical powers that essentially turn him into a fantastical version of Venom.

However, the more of Crimson Desert you play, the more you come to realise that there’s a lot of suspending your disbelief. The quicker you go with the flow, the more fun you’ll have.

It’s in the opening few hours that the inspiration of Red Dead Redemption 2 really shines through. As Kliff strolls across an expansive bridge, the camera zooms out to let you take in this expansive world, invoking that same feeling I had playing Skyrim back in the day where I genuinely felt I could go anywhere and do anything.

That same feeling continues as you stroll into your first big town. Crimson Desert borrows the focus mechanic from Rockstar’s western, letting you hone in on any NPC and trigger either a conversation or an action. It’s not quite as in-depth as Red Dead, but it does make the world feel tangible.

Lived-in is also how I’d describe the rest of what I explored of Pywel. Towns are bustling with activity as NPCs go about their daily business in a life-like manner. It feels as though each of them have routines and relationships, with the voice acting being pretty stellar across the board.

The level of detail that Pearl Abyss has poured into every nook and cranny is astounding, and a testament to the work that’s gone into the BlackSpace Engine. Running on a fairly modest PC rig, I was able to hit 60fps at 1440p without breaking much sweat, or even enabling DLSS. And still, it’s likely the prettiest game I’ve ever loaded up on the platform.

The lighting is especially grand, even without raytracing enabled. But it’s the amount of detail rendered into the distance that impressed me most with the usual open-world pop-in a thing of the past. I was also super impressed with just how much the game can handle being on-screen at once, with NPCs and enemies aplenty barely causing the game to chug – and there’s quite often a lot of chaos on screen during some of the game’s biggest battle set pieces.

I’ve talked a lot about how impressive the world of Pywel is, but how is it to actually play?

For the most part, pretty sublime. Combat feels incredibly deep, almost to the point where it’s tricky to keep up. Tutorials quickly throw a shower of button combos at you that I regularly found myself double checking in the options menu.

Get the basics down though, and Kliff is able to chain together heavy hitting attacks that feel plucked straight from a Devil May Cry game. With responsive inputs, he feels sublime to control and can easily take on hordes of enemies without much trouble.

An expansive skill tree supports ways to spec into a playstyle that works for you, with skill points earned fairly regularly throughout the early hours of the game.

Combat is a major gameplay pillar, but there’s a lot of puzzle solving to be done, too. Kliff is imbued with the ‘Axiom Force’ ability pretty early on, which essentially works like Link’s UltraHand ability from Tears of the Kingdom. It lets Kliff manipulate objects in the world, and is often used to solve intricate puzzles scattered throughout the world.

These puzzles can sometimes be a bit obtuse, and I often found myself wondering whether I was barking up the wrong tree, only to realise I was pressing a slightly wrong button combination for the solution to actually trigger.

A lot of that friction can be felt in other areas of the game, with some gameplay additions feeling like Pearl Abyss has made things far more complicated than they ought to be. A great example of this is watching back memory fragments, which are often used in quests to explain events that happened in the past.

To watch a memory, you first need to analyse it in an Assassin’s Creed-like eagle vision mode. Then, you must don a special helmet from the armour menu. Once that’s done, you then need to go to a separate menu and hit play on the specific memory you want to watch – but it’s also possible to watch any other memory you’ve already collected, so make sure you select the right one!

It’s a task that requires about 12 button prompts to get right, when it feels like the more immersive route would have been to just walk up to the memory and press X. It’s a strange misstep, but not something that ended up harming the overall experience.

There are plenty of other gameplay wrinkles for fans to enjoy, and writing about many of them feels like robbing Crimson Desert of its best cards. Part of the fun when playing this game was discovering a new gameplay mechanic and going ‘oh, you can do that in this game too’. Just when I thought Pearl Abyss couldn’t possibly have any more ambition up its sleeve, it always seemed to have one more thing to pull out of its hat.

I will say, the story never really had me enthralled outside of its opening moments. Although Kliff’s opening scene is strong, the game quickly sprawls in so many directions that it’s tricky to see how the mainline quest ties it all together.

That said, I think the story here can quite easily take a back seat. Just like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the narrative is rarely sitting front and centre with the moment-to-moment gameplay the main reason you hit play in the first place.

Whenever you’re not messing around in finicky menus, which is only about 5% of the time anyway, Crimson Desert is an absolute blast to play. It’s easily the most next-generation game I’ve played on modern consoles.

Put simply, Crimson Desert raises the bar of open-world sandbox games to a height we’ve never seen before. I think it’s going to be a good while before anything else comes close to achieving its ambition once again.

Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.