I was a wretch, a mere thief serving out a sentence in an inquisition prison until the Confessor gave me purpose. Tasked with tracking down a pirate known as Vela Calose, I embarked on a mission that could possibly change the world. Meeting Vela, this imposing figure bid me adieu as she took off in her airship, leaving me with a failed mission. I reported back to the Confessor who promoted me and gave me a new task. I was to find Vela Calose’s crew, former members of the crew known as Dark Stars, and ask them for help tracking Vela Calose down. This trip would take me all over the Oneiric Islands, a floating archipelago within the borders of the Apostatic Union, starting with the central region of Hallowshire. And so began my journey through this broken world full of death, destruction, and dread. I began my descent into Dread Delusion.
Dread Delusion
Developer: Lovely Hellplace
Price: $20
Platforms: PC
MonsterVine was provided with a Steam code for review.
Dread Delusion is celebrating its 1.0 release, having been in early access for roughly 2 years now. I like to do a little research about early access games before I take on a review and was surprised to see how well received Dread Delusion’s early access has been. After playing it for the past week I can certainly see why. I think the niche Dread Delusion fills is something that’s been sorely lacking in game releases for the past two decades. Some of that is chalked up to its art style, boasting a low-poly, high-concept style that quite frankly looks gorgeous. However the somewhat esoteric nature of the design also plays a large role in that realm, favoring cartography over waypoints and having information presented by some unreliable narrators. Some of the highest praise I can give a game I can give about Dread Delusion, it’s very unique.
The core of Dread Delusion is its insistence on being able to avoid combat. This is presented as being a part of Dread Delusion’s stat system. Delusion is gained from collecting floating blue skulls and occasionally as a reward for completing quests, and it can be used to improve your stats. The stats are simply Might, Guile, Wisdom, and Persona, each representing things like Attack and Defense or Lockpick and Agility. I spent a lot of the early game sneaking around encounters and while I was successful for the most part, some encounters felt unavoidable, flying in the face of the initial boast. However, sneaking soon became trivial as the crafting system was introduced and I upgraded my sword.
No joke, I am sitting at one might and most encounters are a joke to me. Granted, some of that has to do with my guile being so high. I’m able to dip in and out of combat on a whim and am so fast, most of the time if I want to avoid encounters I simply breeze past them. Since you don’t gather delusion from winning encounters, this seems to be the preferable way to play. Might isn’t simply combat based, high enough might allow you to simply cleave through doors that might be blocking your path. Unfortunately, I simply didn’t run into too many doors that offered me that option. Far more doors that impeded progress were passed by through either a key, lock picking or my lore stat. Equipment kept my charm and my lore quite high so outside of the doors that were either barred from the other side or required a story key, I was able to loot as I pleased.
Given how often I was able to bypass doors had a snowball effect as a lot of random buildings have delusion hidden behind a locked door. So while initially I was just lockpicking my way through Dread Delusion, finding little in the way of trouble considering how frequently lockpicks drop from enemies or are just found randomly throughout the world, soon I had the lore and charm to get through any encounter. I’ll be honest, I was a little disappointed. I thought the challenge had been stripped away. But as questlines began to unravel and new objectives seemed to open up, I realized that simply having free access to most of the areas on the map wasn’t the massive advantage I thought it’d be.
Most of the challenges you’ll encounter from Dread Delusion are either simple navigation or understanding quest objectives. There are no waypoints here. I was told to seek out a former Dark Star member known as The Emberian. One person told me they thought they might be in swamps to the southeast, another in the forests to the west of town. After leaving Hallowshire by navigating wooden bridges tethering floating islands together, I had no idea where to go. First, I pulled out a compass I purchased at a shop and was able to navigate to the marshy area that a shopkeeper directed me but unfortunately, no Emberian. It should be noted that I’m somewhat thorough and spent a considerable amount of time searching around these marshlands to no avail.
Eventually, I found myself heading west to look through the forests. I was told there was a large turbine that I might find the Emberian camping out near. I think simply saying ‘West’ is disingenuous. The distance west I had to go from town well exceeded the distance I was expecting when the seller of oddities simply told me, “West.” But that’s what I was looking for. I wasn’t looking for a waypoint. I wasn’t looking for the perfect NPC to tell me exactly where to go. I certainly wasn’t hoping for some AI to argue with me about the distance required. I met a seller of oddities who had to hazard a guess about where this person he had never met was camping based on how frequently he saw her around. I was living in this world.
So much of Dread Delusion is built around understanding the people who live in this world and the situations they’re in. And they’re not in great situations. Eventually, I found myself in the Endless Realm, and the people there are merely corpses, immortals who look to feed on the living flesh of man. And if that’s not bad enough, I came across an artificial flesh farm, creating flesh to sate these hungers so the Endless no longer crusade against the living simply to survive. Dread Delusion has created an incredible world that I want to spend time in, I want to explore. And I did! So much of my early game was simply exploring the world, I didn’t even have a map! I had no idea where I was or where I was going, I couldn’t tell you what was unique about my surroundings just yet, but I could identify some landmarks. Years of lazy and convenient gaming had weakened that brain function and it was struggling to come back.
I realized a little late that I had completely missed a camp set up by scholars to map out the Oneiric Isles; they gave me a map and asked me to track some landmarks. Even before you’re given a map, Dread Delusion tells you that you’ve found a landmark. It just does very little to help you understand where you are until you get the map. And now I get a little joy every time I come across a landmark as I rifle through my inventory looking for the map so my character can doodle the location down.
Ahead of the 1.0 release, I was expecting a level of polish to the game that would be release-ready. For the most part, that’s what I received. I played through a lot of quests, I explored a large amount of the available areas, and I had a very good time doing so. I wish that was the end of it but Dread Delusion still has some pretty glaring issues ahead of release. It should be noted, that the press build is 0.97 so 1.0 could very well fix some of these issues but I wouldn’t be doing my job without mentioning them.
Dread Delusion is a first-person game so the center of your screen has a crosshair and you align the crosshair with things you’d like to interact with, fairly simple. In order to disarm traps or talk to certain folks you’ll need to align your crosshair with them and a button (I played entirely on the Steamdeck and it was the A button.) Most traps would require you to put your crosshair on the edge of the trap, not in the center. This caused me a headache as I would skip over armed traps thinking they were disarmed when I moused over them. Same with a few people, I’d walk up to them and the only way I’d be able to talk to them was from a weird angle or by moving the crosshair away from them.
A very bizarre bug I kept running into is that every time my game auto-saved it unequipped every spell I had equipped except for the spell in spell slot #1. It took me a while to notice this because the amount of spells you could equip is based on your spellcasting stat so for the first third of the game I only had one spell equipped. Another issue that kept cropping up was texture overlapping, some traps were literally beneath the floor texture. I was able to disarm the traps but I could not see them, so I had to almost die before I could find out where they were. I occasionally ran into NPCs that were stuck in the ground, including hostiles, forcing me to fight a rooted enemy that had no legs.
Finally, two of the biggest issues I had while playing Dread Delusion were the most game breaking. I ran into an issue where some of the conversational options simply didn’t exist, but the hooks to bring you to the next part of the conversation were available. My only options in this conversation were ‘<HighCD><p58><English>’ or ‘<HighCD><p59><English>.’ Luckily, this was during a benign part of a conversation and hopefully the only instance of this happening in the game. The last issue was when I spoke to a ghost in a dilapidated manor that showed me a screen as if it was about to tell a story and the game simply soft-locked forcing me to restart without a nearby save. These bugs didn’t happen often, but the fact that I ran into so many varying bugs made me wary. Hopefully, they’re resolved in this 1.0 release.
I should note that I played the entirety of the game on the SteamDeck. On the first launch it ran poorly, bouncing between 30 – 60fps and never settling, new areas forcing it to chug, I thought I’d have to switch over to my desktop. After an update though, the performance was great. Dread Delusion settles in around 40fps and sometimes shoots up to 60 depending on the area, overall though it’s just a more stable framerate. This entire review was written based on playing on the SteamDeck and I couldn’t be happier with the performance, control scheme, and overall playability.
I love the art style for Dread Delusion, reminding me of some really fun RPGs from the early 2000s. Likewise, the art is very unique despite the reminiscence of other games. Everyone and everything has this level of detail that looks really good with the pixelated style and yet is also very grimy and gritty at the same time. In a word, I think Dread Delusion is gorgeous. Pairing well with the art style is the music, offering a soundtrack that is eerie, surreal, and haunting. These stunning islands that represent such a lived-in world are enhanced greatly by Dread Delusion’s soundtrack.
The Final Word
Dread Delusion fills a specific niche that hasn’t been touched in decades. While I wouldn’t recommend this game to just anyone, Dread Delusion sets a high bar for adventure RPGs and utilizes its art style to perfectly capture the era of gaming it draws inspiration from.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
