Crimson Desert has been out for about 12 hours, and alongside a peak of 240,000 concurrent PC players, it’s already received over 13,000 reviews on Steam. And boy, are opinions split. Of the 13,477 ratings, just shy of 60 percent are positive, pegging the game firmly in the “Mixed” territory.
That pretty much matches critical consensus, once you filter the 98 reviews on Metacritic for reputable sites. It’s currently sitting on a respectable 78 overall, but that’s heavily skewed by an fair few peculiar 10s, and even this wasn’t enough for investors to stick around. Which is to say, Crimson Desert is proving to be the most divisive game of the year.
Steam reviews are, of course, a mess. Positively rated entries are filled with furious complaints, while negative reviews are often driven by ill-conceived vendettas. About a quarter of positive reviews I read openly state they’re written in revenge against critic’s reviews (“IGN sucks” reads one entire review), with many more written in an attempt to “counter” a narrative they’re perceiving. So, all the usual stuff that makes judging a game by its player votes a dubious exercise. However, consensus across both extremes is reached about the game’s controls, which are universally decried as “shockingly bad” and “clunky,” to pick terms from either side. One more extreme view suggests, “The controls are tedious and feel like they were designed by some creature that doesn’t have hands.”
Meanwhile, one positive review explains, “the movement is weird, the game’s a bit buggy at times, there are a ton of systems and things to keep in mind, and the story is a bit confusing.” Someone else points out that under “Accessibility Options” the game only allows you to shrink the scale of the UI, which is perhaps not all that access-providing. “It’s like Pearl Abyss put some of the top 100 games into a blender and hits start,” explains another positive review. Quite a few are complaining that they pre-ordered the Deluxe version but have yet to receive their bonus items. Oh, and at least two people have leapt to leave a thumbs up because the game lets you cuddle a crying cat. And that’s quite hard to argue with.
But nearly all come back to those controls, where so many new systems are thrown at the player in quick succession, and then mapped peculiarly to either keyboard or controller. Yet, it turns out, they’re all wrong! Pearl Abyss’s PR and marketing director has posted to X to explain that it’s “like riding a bike,” because “it comes naturally after you learn it. just takes a minute.”
think of it like riding a bike, it comes naturally after you learn it. just takes a minute
— Will Powers (@WillJPowers) March 20, 2026
I’m pretty sure that’s not how you’re supposed to use the “like riding a bike” analogy, which is usually reserved for saying how you can return to something and have it all comes back to you immediately. Will Powers instead seems to be employing the more unusual “It’s like learning to ride a bike” version of events, wherein you must wobble around, repeatedly fall off, cover yourself in cuts and bruises, but then eventually be able to precariously pedal along for a bit. Which is probably true, but not quite the calming message likely intended.
The first patch is already rolling out for PC, bringing the game to 1.00.02, with the PlayStation release somewhat more confusingly staggered in two halves, the first of which is ready to download. It adds a new tutorial quest for a system introduced in chapter 3, a bunch of other tweaks and fixes, and most importantly has “removed the bear’s instant-kill damage.” It doesn’t, however, mention anything about improving controls.
