Whopping new Crimson Desert video sharpens suspicion that it's a really shonky Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

When I first played Crimson Desert I had trouble working out what it wanted to be – Spider-Man? The Witcher? Dynasty Warriors? Dragon’s Dogma? Jedi Academy? The first of three new talkthrough videos from developers Pearl Abyss has helped concentrate the game in my mind. This is a grittier medieval fantasy take on The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, isn’t it! Those airborne ruins are a dead giveaway. All it’s missing is the elegance and feeling of completeness. OK, it doesn’t have a magic vehicle editor, either. That I know about. Without further ado, here’s the video.

Crimson Desert looks madder than a catful of hatters. If you’re wondering why main guy Kliff Macduff walks in such a weirdly jerky way, like a toddler on springs, it’s probably because he’s trying to restrain the compressed energies of every open world mechanic ever devised. He can grapple. He can mech pilot. He can throw barrels and do wrestling moves. He can fish.

I don’t mean this as criticism, though I don’t entirely mean it as praise, either. I strongly suspect that this game is going to be a triumphant combination of mechanically silly and tonally self-serious and savagely broken in a way that somehow demands to be experienced for tens of hours.

In watching the video, you are sparing yourself the derangement of mastering Crimson Desert’s control scheme, assuming they haven’t revised it since I played the game last year. I got thrown in the deep end with that preview, asked to make sense of a midgame Kliff with a multitude of clashing abilities to choose from, while fending off the hydra of jetlag.

I spent a lot of my demo either caterpaulting Kliff Macduff into holes, or confusing Kliff Greymane with all the people killing Kliff Macduff, or plaintively asking the PR to explain why Kliff Macduff is on fire now. The boss QTEs are like something out of the original Steel Battallion. You will beg for the sweet relief of a Bennett Foddy game. Anyway, Crimson Desert is out on March 19th this year.