In 2002, a western RPG by the name of Morrowind came out and at the time it took the world by storm. It was the third entry in The Elder Scrolls series and was developed by Bethesda who also at the time were quite small. This was before they became the gaming behemoth they are now, and an icon that everyone loves to make fun of and hate including myself. Morrowind was the next step forward for The Elder Scrolls as it made use of the tech of new consoles to create huge realized environments. No longer were players confined to looking at pixels disguised to look as if they were 3D. They could witness the beauty of a fantasy world from a first person view, and it was revolutionary. Soaking in the atmosphere and knowing something like it was finally possible in a video game. Morrowind wasn’t the first game to do 3D models. Heck it wasn’t the first to be a first person game with 3D environments. What it did manage to do was stunning and this helped pave the way for Bethesda’s future success. Expanding Morrowind through future ES titles, and applying their formula for exploration and sandbox design to the later acquired Fallout series and recently the colossal Starfield. Morrowind was important, but how did it age?
Full disclosure before moving further into this review. I have never played Morrowind. In fact, I am not a fan of The Elder Scrolls. I tried Skyrim back in 2019, b-lined through the main story, did not grow any attachment to the world, wrote it off, and never thought about it again. I have always been a bigger fan of the Fallout series to be honest with you, and there’s so many fantasy games out there that have more depth and whimsy than anything The Elder Scrolls have conjured to me. I don’t have anything against these games and can understand why people love them. Just like the Fallout games these are RPGs you can dump hundreds of hours into for how immersive the settings are. So most of my knowledge of The Elder Scrolls comes from friends who grew up playing the series. Their opinions on Morrowind are a bit mixed to be honest. On one hand they say it has a wonderful take on exploration. Giving players direction of what they should do, but not too much so that they can figure it out themselves. Have them explore, pay attention to the world, and feel rewarded when they finally reach their objective. However, the lack of direction and feel of gameplay may not click for some
Many open world games especially now have offered the sense of being lost, but none of them have done it in the way Morrowind did and I kind of understand why. How do you recapture the feel of a great game that aged like milk? What do you do when you run the risk of recreating the same problems again but worse? I don’t exactly know the answers to these questions. Most of the time I try to offer my own take on how to work around them, but this time I truly don’t know. Well someone decided to offer a modern take on Morrowind recently and that’s Dread Delusion. Developed by indie studio Lovely Hellplace and has been in the works since 2018. It wasn’t till 2022 that it entered early access and this year the full version of the game was released. Critical reception of the game was mixed, because why recreate a game nobody wanted a recreation of to begin with. A lot of 7/10s from outlets, but amongst the general audience it succeeded. This is a game that does one thing really well, and that is to offer the sense of adventure that Morrowind and many games out there offer. It’s fun to explore in this game, and its crazed contrasting world had tons of depth lying beneath its surface. Dread Delusion is one of the biggest surprises I’ve played this year as I, a non-Elder Scrolls fan, did not expect to love it very much. I thought it wouldn’t for me, but after playing it nonstop for the last week I can safely say it hooked me in. This is one of the best indie RPGs of 2024. I don’t expect it to get nominated for any awards, but it should be at least recognized for what it has achieved. It’s a marvel someone could make a successor to Morrowind this amazingly well, and today we’ll be explaining how so. Let’s delve into why I love Dread Delusion and why it deserves your attention.
Story
The world we know has been destroyed. A catastrophic event hundreds of years ago named the World’s Rend tore the surface apart and what’s left is a planet burning with a pink bliss. What is left of the world are floating isles miles above the now ruined earth. Shortly came another event that nearly brought the end of man. The human race went to war with the gods who ruled over them, and they brought these gods crashing towards the earth. Either slaying them, imprisoning them, or banning all worship of these gods so they wouldn’t grow stronger. Mankind has only themselves now, and they work together to survive during this trying time. Repopulating and learning to tame the flying isles. Nowadays there’s spiraling kingdoms and factions that try to maintain balance. One of these key factions is the Apostatic Union, the ones responsible to make sure no one in the isles is praying the act of worshiping. They have decided to release you from your prison and send you out on a quest they cannot handle. Seeing how easily disposable you are, they want you to march into a fortress stationed nearby and arrest an individual by the name of Vela Callose. Leader of the Dark Mercenaries.
The High Confessor who released you from your shackles says if you do this you’ll be given eternal freedom. With no other choice besides going back in your cage you venture forth to get the job done. Things don’t go out the way you expected as once face to face with Vela she says she has big plans before fleeing on an airship. The Union turns the desolate fortress into a special output and then promotes you to be a temporary inquisitor. Granting permission to explore the land and seek out the former adversaries of Vela. You meet Jack Basalt who tells you that you’re gonna need all the help you can get to bring down Vela. Explaining since his time serving Vela she went mad and is going to bring about a plan that may destroy what’s left of the world. You’ll need to locate these individuals, resolve their past, and bring them together to pin down where Vela is hiding. It’s the journey of a lifetime for this accursed prisoner.
Gameplay
If you’ve played an Elder Scrolls game before or titles similar to it like King’s Field or another indie first person RPG I’ve played called Lunacid then you’ll feel familiar with Dread Delusion. This is a game where after going through a brief tutorial area you’ll be dumped into the world to figure things out by yourself. An NPC will give you direction on where to go and what to do, and what they told you will be recorded in a journal. Unlike most games though Dread Delusion does not give you a map or objective marker on where you should head. This game is not gonna hand hold you in terms of exploration and progression. You’ll have to work with the information given and at times go off assumptions. For example, an NPC told me a person I would be looking for is camping out in the woods. The best piece of info they could give was that the woods are west to where I was at the moment. So I started heading west, but they did not tell me what the camp would look like, so it was up to me to explore and determine to the best of my ability where that person was staying. Maybe a building, a tent, some ruins, and the list goes on. This is what most of Dread Delusion is going to be. Figuring out where you need to go, but it’s not all that bad as during your travels you will find a lot of interesting structures and ruins you’ll want to check.
You get a map early on, but the map is blank. The only way to draw out the map is to walk up to interesting landmarks and record them on the map. That way you can chart out the area and use it to determine where you currently are. There’s even a sidequest for every cool landmark you can manage to record. Along your travels you’ll run into a variety of enemies who will attack you at first sight. Luckily you’ll have a trusty melee weapon to defend yourself with. Attacking uses up stamina and charge attacks which deal more damage use up more stamina. You can block which uses up stamina with time, and you can run which depletes stamina quickly the longer you run for.. Stamina does recharge, but a gimmick Dread Delusion has is that the more you adventure through the world without resting, maximum stamina depletes. Meaning you get less back even with recharging. The only way to recharge the bit of the stamina bar that has been lost is through resting either at an inn or bed you may find lying in the world. Getting hit leads to health going down, and if health goes all the way down it’s game over. You respawn at a checkpoint but with only some of the health you had. There are crystals you can find to restore mana and save the game. You get a spell early on to respawn at crystals, so they’re basically secondary checkpoints. However, they don’t replenish health or stamina so you still gotta make use of inns and beds.
There are a plentiful amount of items you can pick up during your travels like health and mana potions to refill on either or. There’s also stamina potions, but more rare. There’s lockpicks, ore to upgrade your gear, ammunition, money, and most importantly of all there’s Delusions. These are basically upgrade fragments and once you collect enough you gain a full Delusion. Basically a skill point you can invest in one of four stats. Might determine your attack power and amount of health you have. Guile determines maximum stamina and lockpicking skills. Wisdom allows you to use more spells and analyze certain lore tomes in the world. Then Charisma for those who want to be able to take their way out of trouble or have faster stamina regeneration. These stats may also determine the improvement of side stats which are a whole different beast to talk about. Delusions can also be gained by completing quests, so there’s an incentive to help out NPCs so you acquire the means to grow stronger. Explore the world, find the former Dark Star mercs, and reassemble the most badass adventurers the lands have seen. That’s your main goal and all you gotta do is hope you'll make it.
Thoughts
Dread Delusion is absolutely stellar. It’s a little flawed in certain areas, but the overall package is splendid and I had an extremely fun time from beginning to end. As you can tell the exploration is by far the best aspect of this game. Quests start out with you being given some direction on where to possibly go, but don't downright point out what to do. The lack of objective markers and icons on the map mean you have to pay attention to the world, and this is where a lot of the game’s immersion and atmosphere hail from. You may get a quest that asks you to journey deep into some nearby mines. Well you passed a sign earlier while heading into town that pointed out some mines, so you might as well head back that way. A guy asks you to go into a mushroom spire, and finding a structure like that should be easy so better start looking around. The journal says to look around the northeast coast to find another way to access a different portion of the world. Might take some time, but it’s better to explore than do nothing. It’s this lack of direction that gives Dread Delusion a good feeling of adventure. How do you create these fun trips while avoiding what is basically the rollercoaster experience? There were times though I felt like some direction could be good. One quest asked me to find a safe place to imbibe a drink when all I had to do was drink the flask right there and find the next place to go. Still, exploration is done well.
There’s a lot of walking in between getting from supposed Point A to supposed Point B, but the game has a good atmosphere. The echoing music, sounds of creatures in this distance, and being ready for what lunges at you next. Top that with what I consider really great art direction. It looks like a game from the late 1990s or early 2000s where everything is made of polygons. You can’t exactly tell what something is in Dread Delusion even up close, but it’s better that way. It is better to be horrified by something you don’t fully understand rather than something that makes it clear what it is. Not saying Dread Delusion is a scary game. Quite the opposite in fact. I found this game quite relaxing. Despite saying the music is echoing it’s somber, and I like the use of cool and warm colors. To create these environments that are easy to tell apart and look at. Being able to notice new paths you can take and plotting them into your find because maybe there’s a new structure you want to check out. Exploration is given a further incentive with upgrade points that are the Delusions being rewarded for exploring and doing quests. Stats while not all too complicated get you to think a bit about your playstyle. Some people might want to take combat head on while others want to avoid it. Some may want to play stealthy and others will try to talk their way out of every problem. You could lockpick that door, or just bash it down.
The story ended up being really good and at times I thought it was smart. The main story is about finding this woman you don’t know and learning about her and her comrades’ past. With better inspection though you find a story that asks the question of “What is the purpose of having gods to look up to?” What do gods do for people for them to deserve worship? Why do people flock to the gods? Is it because of what the gods will give back or is it for hope during trying times? Were having gods a good thing? Was that god war cruel punishment or was it good for the freedom it brought for man? Does man deserve to operate by themselves? Should they be given the trust to fix a broken world, or do you create a new god and order to keep them in check and rebuild it in a specific but maybe correct image, These are constant questions I had while playing this game and I’m surprised Dread Delusion, a game aiming to be modern Morrowind, managed to conjure all of this from my mind. It’s truly brilliant and I think the writers deserve a raise for what they have managed to cook up.It’s not the most thought provoking game in the world. I can see a lot of people rolling their eyes at what I said and I say it’s fair. Still, this is a smart story and it got me to think about a lot of the critical choices I made during my playthrough.
Now this is where I move onto my critiques for the game, but just know that Dread Delusion is a title I strongly recommend to those wanting an immersive RPG with good enough mechanics. I don’t think combat is bad, but there’s a reason no one has imitated the combat of Elder Scrolls. Even Dishonored, a game also published by Bethesda, avoided it and made strides to improve first person melee combat. The combat is finicky and relies on a lot of back and forth motion. You hit the enemy once or twice, back away, do it again, and do this until they are dead. Drink a potion if you are low on health, but the game isn’t really all that hard. I want to say it may be due to how I was playing on normal mode, but even then it was pulling stuff outside of combat to make things absurdly easy. Enemies always drop items upon defeat and the most common are literally potions and ammo. You’ll be stacked on potions both from what you get in combat and laying out in the wild, because apparently people like leaving cash and potions in the open. The economy is broken to top that off. Potions don’t cost much and neither does ammo. Upgrading a weapon costs nothing besides resources, and sometimes it’s just better to buy new gear rather than try to hunt for it. Renting a bed costs next to nothing. I’m surprised that one night cost five coins. The inn owner hasn’t shockingly gone into debt from being given pocket change.
By the end of the game you have a ton of money with nothing to spend it on, and don’t even try to bring up the base upgrades which also don’t cost too much. I wish the game had some sort of fast travel system. I know that would ruin the exploration, but trudging halfway across the map to get to the next region or go back to a place where you missed something is annoying and not in a good way. I know they save fast travel up because later on you unlock a ship. Allowing you to sail around easily and dock wherever you want. It’s a nice endgame reward, but what about asking a sailor at one of these depots to take you to a depot you've been to before for a small fee. That way you save time without having to ruin exploration entirely. The last hour or so while good isn’t as strong as the rest of the game, and in some ways I feel like the ending could have been a bit better. Dread Delusion has some minor hiccups, but at the end of the day it does great work to recapture what made Morrowind and titles like it amazing. It’s like Lunacid in that it is a homage to what came before, and proof that these types of games aren’t completely dated. I give Dread Delusion a 9/10 for excellence at best.
This critique was written by the single man at Review on. Stay tuned for more content and feel free to check more reviews out over at my site
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