You know that part of Pirates of the Caribbean where the soldier tells Jack Sparrow that he's the worst pirate he's ever heard of, to which Jack responds gleefully, "but you have heard of me"? That's kind of how I feel about Crimson Desert.
Too narratively disjointed to stand among the best RPGs, too much of a stylistic hodgepodge of everybody's favorite open world experiences to deliver something unique, it's ambitious yet overfamiliar at the same time. In fact, I'd wager that if you asked anyone who's spent a couple of hours with it over the past week, they'd agree that the most immediately memorable thing about Pearl Abyss' latest is its confounding controls.
Therein lies its quiet genius. To paraphrase our Guides Editor in his Crimson Desert review, this is a game that thrives when you go off the beaten path and get lost. That's only possible if the befuddling controls don't lose you first, but I'll be damned if the challenge to overcome them isn't irresistible.
Personal Everest
Gamers love to prove one another wrong. We can't help it; we love to be right, even if that means putting ourselves through repeated psychic damage in the process. Maybe that's why one of the biggest takeaways I see about Crimson Desert is that the game is fun despite its best efforts to put you off.
It all starts in the preamble. Before I even take a step in Pywel, I note that my game looks muddy and terrible from the off. My Series S might not be a PS5 Pro, but I know PS2 graphics when I see 'em; blurred textures, angular asset borders, water that resembles a child's crayoned creation more than anything remotely liquid. While I'm (trying) to fix that in the game's settings, I make a point of turning off the lock-on camera rotation too, which was one of my most glaring issues with the demo when I played it at Gamescom 2024.
That alone had made me apprehensive for the final experience. I'm not known for my gifted short term memory, which puts learning combos up there with platforming and other fine motor tasks as my own personal ADHD nightmare fuel. But nothing could prepare me for the fact that the wider control system would be a whole 'nother mission in itself.
Interact is the same button as jumping. Blocking is the same button as pointing, which is something you need to do to speak to the majority of people in Pywel. Running borrows from the Rockstar school of tapping X on your PS5 controller, which would be fine if I didn't keep hitting one of the joysticks instead, drawing from more conventional muscle memory and launching an Axiom claw by accident.
The only recognizable controller input is hitting up on my D-pad to summon my horse, and even then it magically teleports somewhere nearby instead of actually running to my aid. Both my hands cramp up while arm wrestling; I have to hold my Xbox controller in a very specific way, thumbs on the Y and A buttons respectively, as I button-mash miserably and fight against severe input lag.
Even fishing is unnecessarily complicated, relying on observing the tiniest particle movements which are largely invisible unless playing on the highest graphical settings. Xbox users on Reddit report that they needed a wired controller setup for the reel-in motion to even register. The result is that in 20 hours of play, I have yet to catch a single fish.
Everything about the way Crimson Desert plays seems sent from some higher, unknowable power that has never glimpsed a modern video game, let alone designed the controls for one. One of my colleagues described it as similar to the feel of an early PS2 game, plucked from a time before consensus and convention drew up the control-mapping blueprint most developers work from at a base level. It's as if Pearl Abyss looked at its most obvious influences – The Witcher 3's roving mercenary hero, Breath of the Wild's medieval-futuristic tech puzzles, Dragon's Dogma 2's highly responsive open world, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla's ambitious country-sized map – and decided to differentiate itself by throwing controller manuals in the trash.
Secret sauce
Maybe the best way to prove yourself in the gladiator arena is to pose a fresh challenge?
Somehow, though, that's what makes it unique. I spend so much time thinking about which buttons I need to carry out a basic function that I find myself studying Crimson Desert like some sort of new species, parsing its myriad systems the way a historian might transcribe forgotten languages. Eventually, a new normal is established, and before you know it, you're speaking fluent Crimson Desert.
It's mystifying. It's aggravating. It's a stroke of errant genius. Pearl Abyss' PR team recently said that the controls are intentionally fiddly, like learning to ride a bike. While that sounded like a spot of sugar coating to me at first, I'm starting to actually believe it. Maybe the best way to prove yourself in the gladiator arena is to pose a fresh challenge?
The jury's out on that one. With the developer promising a fix to things like baffling controls and other known issues, having release its first post-launch update mere days ago, it's a stretch to call Crimson Desert intentionally infamous if the devs are hellbent on unpicking that infamy. But that would be catastrophic in my mind, because we would lose the most special and original thing about it.
Without its mental gymnastics and the satisfaction of overcoming them, Crimson Desert would be just another melting pot of recycled ideas pulled from open world gaming's greatest hits, sans the nuance or prestige ascribed to any of them. I'm sure Pearl Abyss would prefer Crimson Desert be remembered for more than its controller jank, but much as Jack Sparrow's own reputation precedes him, at least we will remember it.
Crimson Desert is undoubtedly one of the best open world games of 2026 so far... even if it's questionable elsewhere
