Day 14 - Dread Delusion
RPG, Walking Sim, Nightmare Fuel ·
Sam’s Take:
If you look at reviews for Dread Delusion, you’re going to see a lot of comparisons to The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. On the surface this does make some sense, there’s a lot of visual similarity in terms of flora and architecture:
The hud in the bottom left corner displaying health/mana/stamina is straight out of Elder Scrolls:
And of course, waking up as a prisoner on a ship in a low-poly three dimensional world.
You may also know (if you’ve met me in real life, or even heard me talk one time) that Morrowind is my favorite game of all time. This is not an exaggeration, I keep a list:
The list goes to 100, but you haven’t earned that yet. Stay tuned if you want more of my dogshit gaming tastes.
I could (and would love to) go into detail about everything that makes Morrowind incredible, but there’s no need to in this case, because once you get past these more surface level comparisons, Dread Delusions really isn’t much like Morrowind at all.
I don’t want to shoot down everyone that made the comparison, I saw giant mushrooms on the screenshots and thought the same thing. I’m certain the developers of this game have PLAYED Morrowind before. I’d even wager that they also have it very high up on their top 100 games lists, but I’m also willing to bet they played the soothing-witch-horror-hiking-simulator The Northern Journey as well:
Point being, this game has enough unique influences and elements to sufficiently distance itself from Morrowind. Basically I wrote all this to say that I don’t want to spend a whole review just proving that this isn’t Morrowind. I’d prefer to talk about what Dread Delusion is, rather than what it isn’t, so from now on I will not be mentioning Morrowind. Probably. I’ll try. Hopefully.
Okay, but I will mention Deus Ex one time real quick:
Alright I’m done. I promise.
Dread Delusion is one of the strangest combinations of game and simulation I’ve played in a while. Every location and faction has a vast backstory to pick apart. The weight of history is laced into all the character dialogue, from the town elders who can’t move on, to the children who have yet to learn from it. There is a very concrete world here.
At the same time, an entire town can be made up on one mushroom field and five buildings, laws and regulations can be drastically different from a location that’s a 50 second jog away, and potions/money/lockpicks float in completely random places all over the land for travelers to just run into and pick up like Pac-Man and his cherries.
It might sound like I’m presenting this dichotomy as a negative, but I really don’t mean it that way. What I do want to make clear though is that Dread Delusion is not sweatin’ the small stuff. Modern 3D Bethesda-likes are always concerned with where to place the forks and knives. Why would this room have a bucket, why would anyone put three spinning lockpicks behind this house? Dread pulls you aside and says “hey bud, things ain’t going to make sense here all the time, we cool?”. It sacrifices some consistency on a micro level, so that it can be more freely odd.
To illustrate this idea, one of the first characters you meet is a reformed prisoner who is forever trapped in a iron torture coffin to atone for his crimes. He spurtles out blood between dialogue boxes and generally seems to be having a pretty bad time. Despite all this, he has seen the error of his ways, and is working full time for the inquisition, apprehending criminals with his spindilly metal spider arms that protrude from the torture-coffin.
Obviously, on a reasonable, logical level, this character is stupid. There’s no world in which this guy is believable. On the other hand, your boss is a torture-skeleton and LOVES every second of it, and if you can’t enjoy that fact, then I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Also the IDEA of someone being tortured into believing their torturers are correct absolutely has validity, Dread Delusion is just indulging is some poetic license. That’s the level we are operating on here, and the game makes it clear early on, if you can suspend your disbelief for us, then we can provide a hell of a ride for you. Despite the game’s influences, this is not hard fantasy, we are playing fast and loose with the rules on this one.
I think I’ve played the impartial critic role long enough at this point, might as well come right out with it. I fucking love Dread Delusion. The lo-fi neon-nature aesthetic, the Jules Verne style contraptions and airships, it’s even got maybe the best character creation I’ve ever seen:
Take a look at those four choices. Simple character backgrounds, not too bogged down in stats. There’s a problem in large-scale RPGs where making your character is the most knowledge-intensive part of the game, and they ask the player to do it before playing any part of it. Here we keep it simple, four backgrounds, a minor stat boost to go with it. Nice and easy, but this is not why it’s my favorite character creation system. On my playthrough, I chose Urchin here and this was my next set of choices:
I saw these and thought, “huh, all of these descriptions seem very specific to being an urchin” so out of curiosity, I went back and selected Noble and was instead presented with these:
Same stats, but different titles and positions. I love this. Statistically all it equates to is a boost of your choice, but growing up a charming Urchin should be different than a charming Noble. In three screens and a few sentences of text, you have decided how your character grew up, what they were good at, and how they got put into prison by The Inquisition. I’m the type of person to sit at character creation for an hour, so the fact that I got there in less than two minutes is astounding. I’m sure there are games with similar systems, but the only one that comes to mind is System Shock 2’s where you go through military training (though it’s very easy to not realize you accidentally went to space wizard school in that game, so Dread Delusion wins via the clarity rule). Simple and elegant, top marks.
So far I’ve played through the tutorial area, and the first little town, and I’ve been presented with an interesting world, multiple ways to solve questlines, one genuinely interesting moral conundrum and Nudd - my favorite person in the universe:
This motherfucker right here, need to know what’s going on with occult activity? Nudd’s always got his ear to the ground. Trying to find out who’s resurrecting the old god? Nudd’s got the only advice you’ll ever need. Want to threaten Nudd? I wouldn’t! That fucker’s sipping on tea that can show him the future so he will KNOW YOU ARE PLANNING TO STAB HIM BEFORE YOU EVEN GET THE CHANCE. Nudd rules. Hell yea Nudd.
Morrowind comparisons do this game a disservice, Dread Delusion stands on its own as a unique and fully crafted experience. I would love to go deeper into how the combat and stat choices feed into each other, and if playing a different character feels functionally different, but I’ll save all that for a future revisit once we’ve played more of this game. For now I’ll give this game the highest compliment I can:
I want to stop writing this review, so I can go play more Dread Delusion.
Recommend: Yupyupyup
Replay Percentage Chance: 95%
Time Played: 3 Hours
Skeeter’s Take:
Starting this game gave me similar feelings to starting Mass Effect for the first time. That’s not to say this game is anywhere near Mass Effect in terms of story, aesthetic, characters, how the game plays, etc. Rather, I was dropped into a world that is inhabited, and has been around for ages. A world that all the characters you meet understand. A world they already know how to navigate and they will talk to you like you are already familiar with all the terms they are using - “the Dark Stars are trying to bring about a new heaven”, “The confessors ahead of you were brutally slain, you don’t stand a chance” “Bring me Scryshroom Tea”. It’s a strange feeling, and often confusing at first. You basically get an information overload of new names, places, ideas and imagery that you are expected to piece together. This is the kind of thing where the second time you play through, it will all probably make sense to you. But to me, that’s a sign that the lore in this game runs deep. Dread Delusion does a good job of introducing you to these ideas, while not over complicating things with too many characters or factions at first (Looking at you, Game of Thrones. It took me a whole season to know what the fuck they were talking about half the time). Dread Delusion - I’m going to abbreviate it as DD - feels like a world that shouldn’t exist. It feels like a walking nightmare at times, and a really cool psychedelic prog rock album cover at others:
Hell, the lady in charge of freeing you from prison so you can try to earn your freedom by bringing the cult leader they’ve been chasing in to her looks like this:
Fucking radical. An eternal pain-machine coffin-robot who you find out was also a prisoner at one point, much like yourself. This character could have easily been some person in a suit of armor, but the devs went “NOPE, Check out this metal shit!” and I love it. There’s some old tech you come across that talks about a war to kill the gods or something along those lines as well, and a Cult leader who claims they can create a new heaven, so there’s some really fun ideas going on here. DD really strikes a nice balance of somehow making the player feel like this is all just a normal day in the world it’s created, while still keeping things simple enough for the player to follow, but not so simple that it’s boring. The backstory and lore I managed to piece together after just playing the tutorial is enough for me to want to see what happens between the two factions that are warring, and the game has hinted at quite a few others you will get to encounter. I did stop playing right as it felt like the game opened up for you to explore, so there is probably a lot I’m missing here. Regardless, the world that is created here is interesting, visually very cool, and it feels like it’s lived in. I’m interested to see how deep that lore really runs.
The game essentially allows you to pick from 4 main archetypes as you class for your character - there’s the fighter, the rogue, the wizard, and the charisma guy (I don’t think that’s what the game actually calls these, but you’ve seen these same classes before). DD does let you mix your stats - I won’t get too far into it since it looks like Sam is doing a full write up of the character selection and he is way more knowledgeable in these kinds of games than I am, but I essentially picked everything to min/max the spellcaster. I was worried at first, since often in these RPG games spellcasters start off really weak and are OP by the end, and I did groan when the first spell I found was a “Teleport Home” spell, but DD does a really decent job of still making you feel like you have options and aren’t locked into one playstyle. For instance, from what I can tell the stealth mechanic isn’t tied to the Agility/Rogue class and is just a basic feature. I really found this refreshing as I was able to play the whole level with my max Wisdom character as I was a damn rogue. Granted I couldn’t open all the lockpicks I found, but DD doesn’t say “Sorry, you don’t have enough SKILL to even try this lock!” Instead it sets a dice roll number you need to beat and goes “good luck”. The game just sets a high number for harder lockpick checks. I even snuck in the side of the castle I was meant to be storming - I was told this was the appropriate route for a rogue/stealthy type character - I got really lucky with some rolls, and really unlucky with others (I did trigger some traps), but DD never once told me I couldn’t attempt what I wanted to do. That freedom is something I don’t see that often and it’s really refreshing here. It’s never all that fun for me when a game just flatly tells you you cannot do something. Hypothetically speaking, it’s like adding invisible walls. Sure, you should be able to jump over that mountain and avoid the Cazadors in the canyon below, but the devs didn’t want you to play that way, so they are going to make it impossible for you to even attempt it (shout out Fallout: New Vegas)! I don’t get that feeling from DD. Granted I’m still early, but everything I’ve seen so far the game just tells you “Sure, go ahead and try that.” and I’m all here for it.
Since the comments seem to mention Morrowind a lot, I feel like I should mention something - I have played maybe a couple hours of Morrowind and let me tell you, the dice roll every time you swing (which gives you a chance to miss even if you are sticking your sword right into their asshole) felt so, so dated and bad. Do not worry - DD does NOT have that mechanic. You can sneak right up into someone’s hairy bunghole and tear them a new one with one swing!There’s even a little parry system.
Also, I appreciate the use of signs for the tutorial messages. This small thing makes it so the next time the player starts a new game, they can literally walk by and ignore the signs if they know what you are doing. I really dislike forced tutorials, especially when I’ve already played the game. I appreciate that dev is considering those things - it means they are a xXxgAm3r_3LiT3xXx as well.
All in all, I’ve played around an hour and only got through “tutorial island”, but I can confidently say that so far this game is fun to play, it’s fun to look at, it’s got interesting set pieces and strange creatures and machines that I will no doubt see floating in my nightmares tonight. It’s got a cool “hook” and set-up that makes me want to explore further into this bizarre realm. It really feels like I’m walking through a living world that the deeper I go, the richer it gets. And hey, if we get more Machine-Coffin Robot creatures or other horrors, I couldn’t be happier.
Recommend: Hell yeah
Replay Percentage Chance: 90% - it’s only losing replay percentage because Sam might finish this game by the time we hit next week
Time Played: 70 minutes
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