Indie Game of the Week 418: Dread Delusion

Aw yeah, aw yeah! It’s been so long, you thought I left you—but I was in Nintendo jail with my nephew. I'm still not entirely sure what the future plans are for the newly independent Giant Bomb and whether they can afford to keep the lights on for a site this large, but all the same I'm going to keep on keepin' on for a while longer (though with some serious consideration for an alternative dumping ground, just in case). At any rate, I've returned to being on my semi-regularly scheduled bullshit for now. Good to be back.

Bethesda's Morrowind was an example of a semi-rare phenomenon with certain game sequels, along with Majora's Mask and Yoshi's Island and a few others, where—when faced with trying to one-up a previous project of either enormous scope or success or both—the developers decided the best course was to go a strange new direction with it. To create something no-one had ever seen before; a truly alien setting or structure or gaggle of wild ideas that couldn't easily be dismissed as a mere water-treading measure to allow the series to bide its time until the next technological leap could make for a more meaningful shift. It's for this reason that the silt striders and steampunk Dwemer ruins of Morrowind, which otherwise had the unenviable job of ushering the expansive Elder Scrolls series into fully 3D environments and character models for which they would necessarily have to rein in the absurd ambition of Daggerfall, tends to stick with TES fans more so than the two preceding and succeeding entries. Lovely Hellplace's Dread Delusion is very much trying to tap into that same mind-burrowing celebration of uncanniness, utilizing its low-poly tech to create a large open world game that is both alienating and obfuscating by design.

Dread Delusion's setting sees a world torn asunder by arcane forces and the tyranny of minor deities demanding blood sacrifices of the oppressed mortals in their midst. At some point, humanity banded together to create the Apostatic Union as a means to destroy these deific dictators with the most potent technology they could dig up, inadvertently supplanting a terrifying new form of zero-mercy despotism in its place with the Union's stringent rooting out of god worshippers and magical practitioners, replacing the latter with a thaumaturgical "ciphermancy" that could be carefully regulated. It's a disproportionately brutal militaristic response to a potentially dire existential threat—perhaps drawing some parallels to a certain ongoing conflict here on Earth, though I'll leave that to the political professionals to interpret—and supporting or defying this Union is one case of many in the game where the player is expected to take a side where there is no clear right or wrong answer. Regardless, they captured and tortured you for reasons you manufacture yourself when creating the character—a similar background development system in the TES games that determine some early stat boosts, such as a bonus to the Might stat for having a martial upbringing—and are loosed on the world to chase down the mercenary queen Vela Callose, whom is seemingly on the precipice of uncovering some terrible, lost power from the ancient world. To earn your freedom, you must stop (or perhaps assist in) her apocalyptic scheme.

Beyond that overarching mission chain, however, the world is your malformed chthonic oyster. Dread Delusion's first-person peregrination puts exploration and experimentation at the forefront, as evinced quickly by the way it chooses to incorporate a level up system. To upgrade stats and improve your skills, beyond various equipment boosts and temporary buffs, you must build up a "delusions" gauge. This is done by either completing quests or finding these floating blue skulls out in the world, usually behind locked doors or places that might require some careful platforming to reach. The idea is that, this being a world where mind over matter is a major factor given all the chaotic creative energies flowing around, if you believe you are more powerful then that belief can manifest for real. It also means you don't earn XP the traditional way by defeating enemies or, as is usually the case in the Elder Scrolls series, using your skills over and over until your competency in them improves. It's a system I last saw in the equally obtuse CRPG throwback UnderRail and its system of discovering "Oddities": an approach that encourages looking into every nook and cranny around the world map and finding ways into secure places that puts up barriers to entry, whether that's a locked door or a trap or a barricade or a series of mechanisms to activate. It does, conversely, disincentivize combat quite a bit which also happens to be pretty easy on the standard difficulty, to the extent that you're usually better off running past most monsters on the world map. The item pool is relatively small too, owing to the game's more streamlined Indie nature, so enemy loot tends to just be extra lockpicks, consumable potions, ammo for ranged weapons, or a handful of loose change. Of course, there's a substantial amount of equipment, accessories, and key items to find too, but those tend to be purchased from vendors or found in chests which are tracked down in much the same roundabout way as the delusion skulls. Point being, combat and showing off skills are far less important here than exploring everywhere you can go and resolving the sidequests you're given by whatever means your character build allows.

There are times where the game can be too obtuse for its own good, far more than even its inspiration source. A good example can be seen in how it adapts the compass and mapping tools that are often essential for any open world game. Instead of having something built into the interface like the narrow directional band across the top of the screen that a TES game might have, the compass is a physical item that you need to procure first and then equip to the quick-item slot (which, given the game is apparently prioritized for consoles over PCs, is a single slot you have to toggle through rather than a line of NumKey-bound options) to pull out and observe. The map, meanwhile, needs to be developed by seeking out landmarks in the world and jotting them down once you're close enough: certain major landmarks will also fill in the surrounding landmass. You cannot otherwise annotate this map and the icon that represents the player does not include which direction the player is currently facing (which is doubly odd, since that icon will only appear on the map if you have a compass equipped). It makes exploration, already emphasized by the game design, that much less palatable as a result. Other problems are those it shares with TES: the combat has you swinging wildly but in a manner that makes it difficult to accurately determine range, which can be an issue with enemies that have greater reach than you do; offensive spellcasting can be a bit of a crapshoot owing to its inaccuracy, making the utility spells (like teleporting back to the last checkpoint, usually found only near towns or the entrances to major dungeons), healing, and summoning spells your best bets; and, perhaps expectedly, a significant number of bugs and visual glitches—though I will say that I didn't run into any issue that unfairly killed me (like clipping through the world) or crashed the game, so the developers have clearly been busy in the long period this game spent in early access.

I think going into Dread Delusion by treating it as a vibe piece more than a fully-featured RPG will result in a greater appreciation and enjoyment of what it's going for here. Similar sentiment can be put towards Obsidian's The Outer Worlds too which also felt as mechanically stretched thin. Rather than get too obsessive about scouring the world for points of interest, since the rewards usually aren't all that great, it's better to prioritize the well-written sidequests and their dollops of clarifying lore/backstory and engaging with the game's decision matrix of Morton's forks in this increasingly dire global state of affairs. By the time you've reached the end of the game and are contending with whether Vela was right or wrong to throw out every scrap of rationality and personal relationship in pursuit of a deus ex machina to fix all the world's many problems, you'll ideally be in a place where you could just as easily agree with her as disagree given everything you've seen and the thin hopes you have for everything your choices have set in motion. Anyone looking for a TES contender probably needs a better sense of perspective than to expect one from a tiny Indie studio, but if you're looking for a heavily streamlined first-person RPG with plenty of tough coin toss decisions to make and a world of bizarre sights to see then Dread Delusion presents a gaming experience you're unlikely to find elsewhere in this tier of game development.

Rating: 4 out of 5.