Dread Delusion

Dread Delusion offers an amazing and evocative fantasy setting about illegal gods and an inquisition hunting their worshippers. It avoids generic and boring tropes and replaces them with refreshing ideas. Gameplay-wise it is simple but offers enough mechanics that are fun to try out, be it upgrading weapons, casting spells or finding secrets. The latter is in my opinion one of the game's biggest strengths since exploration is rewarded and leads to some of the most interesting storylines. Right now it has some perfomance issues, but the devs are clearly listening to the community when it comes to fixing bugs and patching the game.

Very good, can't wait for the Clockwork Kingdom update. If you haven't played this recently, it's a must.

feels weirdly cosy. great art direction, interesting story. I appreciate this game's decision to not hold your hand, however I struggled to stay invested halfway through.

I wish I could give this game a higher score, but it has some glaring issues that prevent me to do that. 1) There's no manual save, only a single autosave. Which is an awful idea; I know WHY it's there, but I don't like it. I don't want to replay the whole game just to see a different outcome of a single choice, I just don't. This is really annoying and my main issue with this game. 2) the use of the compass is awful, you can't open the map when looking at the compass and it's not immediate, you gotta wait for the animation. This is ESPECIALLY BAD when managing the ship, you need to leave the controls, open the compass, close the compass, check the map, close the map, then back to flying. EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to check your position. Incredibly annoying. 3) Combat is... okay? Not great, but looks like most people hate it but it doesn't bother me. It's simple and straightforward, and it's not the point of the game. 4) I discovered too late that investing in agility or strenght is just a waste of skill points. Only Charm and Lore matter and can block you to get into certain locations. Pretty bad design. 5) Backtracking is painful. There's not enough teleport points and doing back and forth between locations can at times be ATROCIOUS. Great lore and writing, the world is really interesting and there's a number of interesting choices along the way, hope for a sequel that fixes the issues.

I was intrigued by the game's fairly unique visuals and numerous Morrowind comparisons, but I must say I was sorely disappointed. The developers say the game prioritizes character interaction and exploration over combat and grind, but it doesn't work on any level you look at. They clearly do not understand that in order for exploration to be interesting, you need superb level design, one that keeps the player intrigued throughout his progression and then rewards them upon completion. But the level design in this game is about as simple and boring as it gets. A potion hidden behind the stairs is the pinnacle of level design in Dread Delusion. The odd color palette and wobbly textures make the locations look interesting on the surface, but when you peel back all the superficial gloss, what you find is lazy level design through and through. As for the character interaction and roleplaying itself, the writing in this game is mediocre at best. I've certainly seen worse, and if there's one good thing I can say about it, it's that at least it's mostly brief. If there was more of that mid-a*s, Robert Salvatore-like writing, I'd probably quit this game even sooner than I did. And I did quit it pretty damn soon. As far as difficulty goes, this game is surprisingly easy. Most enemies drop after three hits with the starting weapon, the throwing knives honestly feel like a cheat code, and you can find potions everywhere. Literally everywhere, I'm not exaggerating. I suppose it makes sense to find them at someone's house or in a fortress, but what sense does it make for them to fall out of a slain beast? What sense does it make for them to be just lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere? It all just reeks of artificiality and takes you right out of the experience. But I suppose the devs figured that having tough enemies and rare potions ON TOP of the mid writing and terrible world map would just be too much for the player to stomach. Ok, what's next... Navigation. If I've ever seen an artificially inflated challenge, it's the navigation in this game. Oh yeah, you can kill almost any enemy in three seconds without even dodging, and we put health potions around literally every corner, but giving the player a map? No, no, no, that would just completely casualize our game! Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against not having a map in the game as a concept. But I at least need to know the directions. About the tenth time an NPC told me to go "somewhere southeast", I knew that was it for me and this game. The developers clearly don't understand that having to navigate the world on your own without any quest markers worked so well in Morrowind because a) YOU HAD A FRIGGIN' MAP FROM THE VERY START, b) you literally had every word of the directions written down in your journal, and c) the world had almost no verticality, so it's much easier to navigate when you have pretty much the entire terrain in front of you like the palm of your hand. Next, the music. Okay, this has got to be some kind of joke. For the first four or five hours I played this game, I only heard ONE track playing over and over again. Hell, it's hard to even call it a track - it's just the same four notes of some sort of angelic choir playing on repeat ad nauseam. And it doesn't even fit the mood of the game! Ok, so I'm in this brutal medieval-esque world where people are getting killed left and right like it's nothing, I'm surrounded by surreal vistas, weird violent creatures, zombies, ghosts and whatnot. So obviously the perfect soundtrack for that would be new age yoga ASMR ambient, which would hardly qualify as background music for reading. Jesus Christ, can I at least get a different track when the fighting starts? Morrowind had about 45 minutes of music, which is obviously criminal for a 100+ hour game, but it was remedied by the fact that it was undoubtedly some of the most epic and gorgeous medieval fantasy music ever written. Here though? Four notes of choir is all you get. To sum up this mess, Dread Delusion definitely had a lot of cool ideas in concept, and in the hands of a more skilled and experienced team, this could have been a very unique Morrowind-meets-Pathologic type of game. But sadly, as it is, this is just a lot of wasted potential wrapped up in pretentiousness that is meant to cover what is underneath - utter mediocrity and boredom.