Dread Delusion Is What Happens If You Make The Elder Scrolls A Weird Little Guy

There’s a lot to be said for a game that just makes you feel like you’re a kid again with no access to the internet and without decades of experience of gaming’s tropes and typical plays. Some people are actually those things anyway, but it’s rare to find a game that does that now if you’ve been gaming for a while. Dread Delusion is one such game, and it’s just gloriously odd.

It’s a little reductive to describe it as being a weird Elder Scrolls game, but it’s hard to compare it to anything else to help you, our dear readers, anchor it your imagination. That’s important too, because Dread Delusion is a game that feels so immensely imaginative.

Come with me, and you’ll be…

Dread Delusion kicks off by telling you a little about the completely unhinged and hauntingly beautiful world you find yourself in. The short version is that the world has been torn apart by a curse, which means that humanity has just about survived by living on flying continents in the sky. These aren’t what you’d expect on a normal plane though, and include things like enormous mushroom forests and immense monsters.

You take control of a prisoner who gets sent off on a quest to try and hunt down a baddie, according to a weird fanatic in an iron maiden with little mechanical arms and legs. This is how things start, this is as normal as the game will be, so buckle up. We’re not going to go into the specifics of any story beats because that’s simply not our vibe, but the main thing is that everything is strange in this world, so you’d better get used to it.

On a quest

You’re going to have a lot of quests to complete across your Dread Delusion playthrough, and for the most part, you’ll be able to approach them in different ways. Sure, a big monster might need to be killed, but maybe you can find someone in charge of it and talk them down, or maybe you can sneak in and release it without anyone realising it.

You get to dictate some of how you’ll be playing when you create your character. You get to make a few choices as you’re doing so that’ll help shape your stats, but you can change those as you go through the game too. It’s fairly standard in that one sense, but the way you can change up even just the first mission based on what you chose is astounding.

When you add all of that freedom into this world that looks like a Studio Ghibli low-resolution nightmare, you’ve got an RPG that’s just plain different. Dread Delusion is a delight, and one that’ll haunt you for some time to come. It’s a meandering wonder through an alien landscape that’ll constantly surprise you, and it couldn’t be more refreshing if it tried.