Dread Delusion
Dread Delusion is an open world RPG brimming with strange places and dark perils. Carve your own path through the flying continents of a shattered land. Discover curious towns, unearth occult secrets, master powerful magic - and change the world through your choices.
Dread Delusion is a rpg, adventure and open world game
developed by Lovely Hellplace
and published by DreadXP.
Released on May 14th 2024 is available in English only on Windows.
It has received 3,307 reviews of which 2,992 were positive and 315 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.7 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 12.59€ on Steam and has a 25% discount.
The Steam community has classified Dread Delusion into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i3-2100 | AMD Phenom II X4 965
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTS 450, 1 GB | AMD
- DirectX: Version 10
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Dread Delusion features extraordinarily fantastic world-building and hauntingly engrossing writing, but also struggles with balancing issues in most aspects of its gameplay. Nevertheless, the sheer uniqueness DD provides through its setting makes it well worth experiencing. 🟩 Pros 🟥 Cons ✔️ DD features some phenomenal quest design, which also leans heavily into providing some decent replay value. Choices feel meaningful, and due to the very grim tone of the story, they are often not as easily made as in other RPGs. ❌DD is extremely unbalanced in favor of the player. No enemy across the entire game provided any challenge, including a joke of a final boss. Player stats feel unimportant and hinder a sense of character progression. ✔️ Due to its unique level-up system by way of the titular Delusions, essentially items rewarded both for quests as well as found out in the world, the game incentivizes and rewards exploration. ❌ Depending on the player’s willingness to interact with the various systems, DD may feel monotonous at times due to a need for constant backtracking and stale combat. Many quality-of-life items only appear very late in the game, making the early game pacing quite slow. ✔️ While the open world is limited in size, great care has been taken to flesh out each and every corner, providing a sense of immersion in addition to the exploration. One such example is the inclusion of housing as a resource sink for the player, which is expertly woven together with additional sidequests and content to engage in. ❌Despite the art style being obviously unique and certainly fitting, there are some issues with the game’s presentation. The narrator’s voice acting is lackluster; there are some issues with textures, such as flickering, and a lack of accompanying music, except for a handful of ambient tracks of varying quality. Technical Issues and Performance Dread Delusion, as of the time of writing, is pretty buggy. While I have not crashed during my playthrough, I have encountered flickering textures, voiceover during the narration cutscenes that do not fit with its subtitles, floating objects and nonsensical hitboxes, and worse yet, falling through the world twice. This is particularly noteworthy, as dying for the first time is tied to a plot event. Graphics and Sound Undeniably, one of Dread Delusion’s most striking features are its visuals. Featuring a self-described “retro 3D aesthetic," the low-poly art style matches the brokenness of the setting the game takes part in. Nevertheless, this choice of visuals is a two-sided sword; on the one hand, it provides equally unique designs for enemies and the gods much of the story revolves around, as well as adding to the haunting atmosphere, but it can also often blend architecture together a bit, making certain locations a bit confusing to navigate. A real issue is that the game loads pieces of the overworld in chunks; however, this is rather similar to TES: Oblivion, where it’s dependent not on the distance of the player but on predetermined loading zones. This can lead to situations where there is a barely textured house right in front of you, and taking a single step forward suddenly lags the game as everything loads in. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3263991379 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3263991358 The sound, while good, is largely limited to a handful of ambient tracks for each region. Thus, over long periods of questing and exploring, it can add up to feeling a bit monotonous. Combat SFX is similarly lacking, and the game does not feature voice acting of any kind outside of very limited narrated cutscenes. Story and Setting The world is shattered apart by a cataclysmic event. With the surface world uninhabitable in the aftermath, a faction of humanity has taken upon itself to wipe out the remaining gods that had once blessed humanity through contracts and allow the remnants to fend for themselves. On the Oneiric Isles, the player is forced into a hunt after a Sky-Pirate who is after an artifact that promises to be able to change the fate of this shattered universe. There are two major conflicts on the Isles that the player gets to explore. Firstly, there is the hunt for Vela. For this, the player explores the various kingdoms, which have their own stories to follow. Among them, for example, is a kingdom of undead, whose undeath is accompanied by a constant hunger for flesh and whose true inability to die is affecting their internal politics, which the player can explore. While the story of Vela concerns itself with navigating the player through these factions and exploring the events that have led to the sundering of the world, the second major conflict is one of humanity versus gods. In Dread Delusion, gods used to be abundant and have contracts with humanity, offering them blessings at a cost until they were hunted to near extinction. Most of the morally strongest writing comes from interactions between the remnants of such entities and the implications of supporting or annihilating them. Quests can feel a bit linear at times, but this is made up for by how impactful the choices the player can make are. Furthermore, very little is gated behind Charm (Charisma) Checks, as RPGs so often like to do, and instead Dread Delusion relies on the player reading and following through according to genuinely what they think is best in the given situation. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3263991138 Gameplay DD features a fairly unique, but ultimately obtuse, stat system in which each of the stats you can increase by collecting Delusions, governs a set of skills; for example, the stat Guile governs skills such as lockpicking or agility. Ultimately, however, due to the aforementioned balance issues, the player’s stats only matter insofar as you want to meet relevant skill checks to continue exploration. Furthermore, gear applies vastly greater stat bonuses than leveling up, further devaluing player progression via their chosen stats and background. Combat is likewise disappointing; magic is extremely underpowered in comparison to melee, and that issue is compounded by the monotony of enemy types. Meaning that while there is decent visual variety in the monsters you encounter, all of them are tackled the exact same way: weaving back and forth and hitting them with whatever you may have. Even with minimal Might investment—governing melee damage—I could comfortably one- to two-shot even late-game enemies. Ultimately, DD suffers from stats simply not being meaningful as they are irrelevant for combat and can otherwise be “forced” to meet certain stat requirements to continue your exploration or quests by keeping up-to-date with your gear. It is a means to engage with DD’s setting, but sadly, it is not competent enough to recommend it to people who may look at DD in search of a strong dungeon-crawler. Final Thoughts Dread Delusion is unique. It has some of the most interesting fantasy concepts I have ever seen in a game, from syntax-based magic to its incorporation of factions, but I think it is this ambitious world that also simply rubs up to the limits of what an indie game can provide, as the endgame feels almost rushed—not unfinished, but clearly aware as to how lackluster the actual RPG systems become the further the player is going. It’s a great experience if people can stomach the look and the somewhat slower pace and are willing to engage with a story first and foremost, with gameplay serving more as a vehicle to experience said story through. Follow our Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/] Summit Reviews , to see more high-quality reviews regularly.
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This is the first game in YEARS to evoke the same feelings I had as playing Morrowind for the first. The only difference is that this a near no difficulty game. Don't get me wrong, that is not a dig at all. This is the first EXPLORATION RPG I've ever played and I had a BLAST with it! The narrative craft on display here is honestly beyond my expectations for any indie game and I absolutely cannot wait to finish the plot when v1.0 drops this month. Recommended 100 times over unless you are looking for a challenge. This is a lore game. You will love it or hate it but I've been anxiously awaiting the final version's release. Truly a wonderful, peaceful and unique experience of a game. The texturing alone is worth a visit.
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In spite of its obvious influences, Dread Delusion is not Morrowind 2. Just putting that out there. It's in early access, and you feel it, but Dread Delusion creates a very unique and curious world that effortlessly encourages you to explore it at length. I think if you're in the market for a fleshed out, strange world to get lost in, then Dread Delusion is up your alley. At present, it's not the largest experience, but I enjoyed all of my time with it.
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PLEASE make the combat more interesting! This game has tremendous potential and I'm recommending it for that reason, but right now the story and worldbuilding are the main draws. Even the RPG mechanics are somewhat underwhelming, since you'll progress to godhood with absurd speed (literally, leveling agility is all you need). This game needs a big difficulty boost, whether that's with faster NPCs who do more damage or just a complete overhaul of combat systems. I love the world and the flavor. It's very exciting stuff. But the core gameplay (the combat) feels mind-numbingly simple even at the start. Please take a few pages out of Lunacid's book as far as enemy design and overall combat feel. That all being said, this game WILL be a masterpiece. Buy it to support great devs improving an already intriguing product.
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If you are into old school RPG/adventure games and don't require modern visuals, this game might be for you. To me Dread Delusion evoked memories of two of my favourite games: Majoras Mask for the melancholy, the looming dread and the strange art style, and Morrowind for the uniquely alien setting and the stat based skill progression towards slowly becoming a god (don't tell the Union...). I spent my first few hours with careful exploration, enjoying the setting, the surprisingly deep and effective world building and getting to grips with the mechanics. Fatigue had to be managed carefully to perform decently in combat and with skill checks, while also not moving at a snail's pace. I want to stress that this part was a fantastic experience that I enjoyed a lot, because now I will come to the negatives. Just like in Morrowind, it seems I've passed the breaking point of the game. After about 7 hours into the game, I can blast across the map at 60 mph without even losing stamina (which I'm not sure is intended). Overworld enemies cannot touch me because I run circles around them, and even if they land a hit, it barely does enough damage for me to feel threatened. I can also jump from any height without losing health, so traversing the map has changed from slow and careful exploration to speedy gonzales murdering everything and reaching any place on the map in under a minute. Just like in Morrowind, this is sadly where the game takes a steep dive for me. The journey up to this point was fantastic, but progression was way too fast. Agility seems to be too good of a stat, as it not only solves map traversal (movement speed), but also stamina management, and melee at the same time. So once you find the armor pieces that boost agility, you are basically set for the game. Just add whatever headpiece you need for the occasion. With only 5 base Guile, I was able to dump all remaining delusions into charm and lore to access the remaining gated content, leaving me with little to no weak spots. I once found a mine shaft door that couldn't be picked and only smashed at 7 might, which is the only content I have not been able to access with this build so far. Maybe there is more down the line. My suggestions for the devs: - Agility needs to be toned down a lot for the reasons explained above. Maybe tie stamina to might. Reduce the speed gain from agility. Make it apply only to forward and not lateral and backwards movement, so you can't kite enemies around as easily. Maybe also nerf the recovery rate. As I said above, me not losing any stamina from running might be a bug. If it's not, this probably needs to be toned down heavily. - Enemies should be much more lethal. This will make sneaking an actual strategic choice for non-combat characters. As it is now, you will want to kill most enemies because it becomes trivial fast and results in item drops. You will not die often in this game, which is a shame considering what happens when you die. So far I died twice (!) during my entire playthrough. Once by walking into a trap and once by running off an island. If I had been a bit more careful in these instances, I might never have met you know who. With more lethal enemies, progressing skills and items into might/attack/defense becomes more viable, which it currently isn't, because agility breaks the game. - Item drops need tweaking. Between items hidden in the overworld and enemy item drops, you accumulate too many health potions. I've sold about 100 by now and money does gate some elements of the game, so you don't want this mechanic to break too easily. You also don't need that many health pots because lethality is too low. Lockpicks are more complicated matter. They do drop very often in certain areas / from certain enemies, but you will also burn through your stack on a regular basis if you are not heavily invested into lockpicking. I'd say they are fine from what I can tell. All of that being said, this is a gem of a game that needs a bit of cutting and polishing to reach its full potential. The world is simple but intriguing with fantastic world building both visually and narratively. The game oozes atmosphere and the dialogues are reminiscent of old CRPGs. They vary from light hearted fun to serious drama and outright horror – think a light variant of Planescape Torment – with a fair share of puns, details and interconnections that make the setting surprisingly robust. The little time spent in this world had me relive some of the excitement only the very best games of their time have done in the past, something that modern games sadly fail to replicate. This game, with a bit more time, polish and content, can become a classic. Changes to this review will likely happen as I progress further into the game, so please feel free to check back. Comments and discussion are also welcome, of course :)
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 16 November 2024 00:18 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 19 December 2024 20:00 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:50 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 15:57 |
Online players
81
Developer
Lovely Hellplace
Publisher
DreadXP
Release
14 May 2024
Platforms