Dread Delusion (2024)
Genres:Role-playing (RPG), Adventure, Indie
Themes:Open world, Action, Fantasy, Horror
Game modes:Single player
Story:Dread Delusion is an open world RPG brimming with strange places and dark perils. Carve your own path through the flying continents of a shattered land. Discover curious towns, unearth occult secrets, master powerful magic - and change the world through your choices.
This game looked so bizarre that I had to try it, and I loved every minute of it. It might not be the biggest open world game, but for what it's trying to do, it feels huge and bizarre and amazing. It feels like we have endless fantasy games about elves and orks, but what about a game about sky-islands lit by neuron-stars and full of mushrooms growing on the remains of slain gods? It's wild, and it's very much the sort of game that should be on GOG. I keep checking to see if it will happen.
Dread Delusion is just really excellent. It's made for people who are interested in running around and looking at the world. It's like the cozy version of a hack n slash RPG. The combat is simplified because it isn't the focus of the game, though there are plenty of combat related items to gather up for people who would rather spend their time focusing on that. But you can do a total pacifist run if you feel like. Most of your deaths will come from falling off the map. Each area has two or three outcomes to choose from depending on your actions in the area and your dialog choices at the end of any quest. About halfway through the game you finally get your own airship and there are several customization options available, and you can even get equipment inside for doing alchemy and getting buffs and sleeping and stuff.
Overall, it's a neat place to sink in to and just chill for a while.
I struggle to write about Dread Delusion fully because I don't want to spoil some of my favorite writing of all time. The Clockwork Kingdom is one of my favorite settings ever: A formerly anarchist land that built their own machine god king that is now glitching out and destroying their land, all while their main export is bottled dreams. It's a nation where a glitching god is handing out gold chains instead of food, and the people are trying their best not to be helpless in the face of it and fix the king one way or another. Another story features a kingdom of people cursed to never die. Never dying does not, however, mean their bodies don't decay, so it's just a kingdom of rotting corpses walking around trying to figure out very depressing ways to deal with what they do with their soul once their body is gone. It is a whole quarter of the game, essentially dedicated to helping honor the dead and secure their safekeeping in a living afterlife.
The writing within this world has been kicking around philosophical debates in my head every day since I first played it, and I doubt they’re exiting any time soon.
Quite possibly the best game of 2024. It is unique, whimsical, terrifying, joyful, ugly, beautiful, and overall simple to get into and enjoy. It's a charming world, intelligently designed and alien in nature, and saying anything else about it would spoil the wonder you could feel while playing. I think about it very frequently even now, even after getting 100% in it, and I want to buy it again on GOG and wherever else. It simply needs to be on other platforms just to support the developers in making future content, and hopefully a sequel set in the same world. It's just that worth it. It deserves to be preserved. It needs it. It needs to reach a larger audience. There's nothing that feels the same.
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