Crimson Desert launches to 239,000 players on Steam but 'Mixed' reviews, and it's mostly because of how dense and cryptic the whole thing is

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.

That unwieldiness seems to be the driving factor behind a mixed reception on Steam, despite launching to a 24-hour peak of around 239,000 players at the time of writing. Taking a peek at the negative reviews, we can see the controls and systems bloat crop up time and time again:

"Want to talk to an NPC? You need to press multiple buttons. Doesn't matter if most modern games just have you press E or F," writes one player. "Puzzles are literal atrocities," writes another, adding: "The visuals from The Magic Energy are so everywhere that it's often unclear did you activate a thing or it's just effects that are bouncing off a non-interactable one."

Even if you play the game on controller (and you should play the game on controller), Crimson Desert is still prone to misinputs and clunky fumbling because there's so many damn things you can do. This means the combat's deep and satisfying, mind—I'm enjoying learning my ways around my sword combos.

I am enjoying learning how to loot efficiently far less. And if I were going into this game without looking at things like our handy tips guide (wink wink, nudge nudge) I wouldn't know a ton of basic stuff the game utterly neglected to tell me. For instance, did you know you need to ring bell towers in towns to have your map revealed for you? Pearl Abyss didn't tell me that.

Our guides writer Sean Martin, who has been putting a frankly herculean amount of time into this game to try and figure all these systems out, had to tell me. This all leads to a game that I reckon is going to be cleanly divisive, though broadly more positive as time ticks on. Despite all her gripes, Mollie still thinks it's "by far one of the most interesting games I've played," and an 80 is no poor score at all.