By Tiernan Blanchard
Dread Delusion is one of the most interesting games you’ve not played yet. In fact, I’d say you should press pause on this essay and go play it now. It’s one of those games that’s best experienced as fresh as possible, to really enjoy its impact.
On the surface, it’s a simple and deliberate homage to PS1 era fantasy gaming. The mushroom-heavy environment and acid fantasy graphics have drawn understandable comparisons to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind from 2002, though I think that’s only a surface level similarity. Dread Delusion adopts aesthetic similarities to the third installment from the Elder Scrolls series, but whereas Morrowind became famous for its narrative depth, Dread Delusion is a fascinating game due to the gameplay limitations and how those limitations define its narrative.
It’s a simple enough story – and simple enough gameplay – on the face of it. You are in a jail cell, a prisoner. You choose your background, which gives you bonuses to skills. On release from the cell, you are given a mission to track down a criminal airship captain, Vera Calose, or you will be killed. You don’t even have a name any more, just a prisoner number.
People experienced with this type of game will immediately go to killing the enemies and looting the corpses. Combat, they will discover, is rudimentary and unsatisfying. You hit the enemy and try not to be hit, and when they die they drop very little at all. You also discover this is not a kill XP system. There will be no grinding enemies here. Instead, you gain new abilities through embracing ‘delusions’ – blue floating skulls that shimmer. You are given these for completing quests, but can also find them all through the wilds of the game. Locked rooms you have to magic or charm your way into, places you have to jump or climb into, floating above the mummified bodies of the dead in a ruined house.
This is the first place, then, that Dread Delusion turns its limitation into storytelling. Combat is dull and there is no reason to do it. You get nothing from it. You can easily power walk away from most enemies, and they don’t track you down. The game tracks how many kills you have and judges you for them. The only reason to do combat in this game is because you expect a game like this to be about combat – and the game not so subtly informs you otherwise.
This game is about choice, belief, and the weight of being a person.
Many games have boasted about the gravity of player choices when, in reality, the decisions the player takes throughout the game mostly result in minor cosmetic changes. Choose the colour of your apocalypse. See the much-discussed Mass Effect games, or the Dragon Age games where all those choices had increasingly limited impact as the series went on. (Alistair, get on giving the Dalish their lands back already, it’s been decades).
In the real world, choice is a chaotic nightmare. You may not see the result of your own decisions for years, decades, or ever. Choice in video games is often simple (give stray puppies to a loving family or drown them in a river), and never questions whether you are the correct person to be making those choices at all. You’re the player character, the only person who really matters, so of course you should.
Dread Delusion, however, presents the player with choices rooted in the core of the world. They start relatively simple, and get progressively more difficult. Do you let a young man sacrifice himself or let his village die? Do you let an insane God regrow the crops or hand the God over to the very group who imprisoned you, dooming a region to starvation? Do you decide for an entire culture whether they should die? Who are you to be making these choices for so many people?
Because that’s the other thing about Dread Delusion. Because combat sucks and most of the gameplay is walking around, looking at things, and putting on ridiculous hats to get your charm, lockpick, or lore high enough to open a door, you have a lot of time to actually talk to and think about the characters in the world. And they matter, they matter as much as you do. They are people, and they believe things. They believe them often with delusional intensity, and you do too – that’s how you level up. You embrace delusions, and those delusions make you a better lockpick, more charming, more powerful. You believe in something so much it changes reality.
And all over the game you meet people and whole cultures who have done the same.
You live in a world of floating islands, the remains of an existence shattered by belief. You are in the wreckage of a war where people killed their gods, out of necessity. You can find the remains of these dead gods, and the machines that killed them, and in that machine you can find jewellery from a dead man to give to a veteran who was clearly in love with his fellow soldier and what matters in all of that is not the skull of a god or the god killing machine, but this quiet love and grief.
You can go to a world made of clockwork and metal, where it always snows, where the people tried to build their own god and found out it went mad. People are disappearing, not just from the world but from memory and reality. You can decide whether to cure the god’s madness or destroy it entirely, and either way means death and destruction for so many. On the way to this conundrum you will have helped a man mourn his forgotten daughter, who was treated appallingly for the research to build this god. You will help a woman care for her daughter who is impossibly lost within a dream. And because of the way the autosave and save system in this game works, once you’ve decided you can’t un-decide. You can’t reload and try again if you don’t like what you did.
You have to live with it. The world has to live with it.
Some would call this a flaw. On the game’s steam page, you can see multiple reviews calling both the inability to undo decisions and the featureless combat bad game design. This criticism misses the point. They could certainly have built a game with robust and satisfying combat. They could certainly have let you have multiple saves, and choices where you saw the results quickly and immediately. They didn’t, and they didn’t for a reason.
Games are a story-telling medium where you are playing the story. In the best games, the narrative and the gameplay are matched and work together to reinforce each other. Most games don’t do this. They have a story and they have gameplay, and either the story exists as an excuse for you to do the gameplay, or the gameplay exists as a way to make a few pages of narrative take up sixty hours.
But in Dread Delusion, gameplay and gameplay limitations are story-focused, and the story reflects back. There’s no reason to kill when you can just walk away. You’ll very rarely be forced into combat. Talking and magical knowledge will get you further than violence. And when you’ve done something, you can’t undo it. You can’t go back and take another path.
It’s powerful, I think, when a game’s limitations and “flaws” make the story stronger. It turns juvenile power fantasies into lifelike narratives. You are not a special forces badass or a reincarnated god or a chosen one. You are a person with decisions to make and you will often make the wrong one. Even Dread Delusion’s graphical limitations are a deliberate choice. The acidic colour combo highlights how strange and alien the world is. The low-poly, low-pixel art makes it oddly easier to slip from skepticism into wonder, like a 90s child filling in 8-bit graphics with their imagination. This was an excellent design decision for a game developer who probably didn’t have the money for modern AAA hyper realism and who still wanted to create a fantasy world. This game would look worse with more polish, and the story would be less impactful too, and they know it.
Throughout the game you are frequently conversing with a ghost. She suggests you go places to learn more of the secret tragedy behind the actions of Vera Calose, your ultimate goal. As you do so you realise Vera is the protagonist of her own story, as everyone you meet is. From the frozen and stagnant Endless to the desperate Clockwork Kingdom, everyone is trying to survive in the ruins. Everyone is trying to make a better world. They have all made decisions for others. Vera is simply making one of the largest.
And as you go, you become more and more like her. You decide whether people live or die, and how they live or die. You call people to your aid. You go into the shattered world and see the results of such thinking and you do it anyway. And all the while you learn more and more secrets, embrace more and more delusions and you, the player, start to wonder – who am I? To make this choice for everyone?
Ironically, you can even say this to one major NPC. You can ask her why she has the right to choose for everyone, while you… you choose for them too. The fact that your choices are limited, and that the game doesn’t do what a lot of games do – find a perfect third route if you do enough work – that’s powerful. That’s meaningful.
It’s human.
Because humanity is the core of this game. That’s what it’s trying to convey with its boring combat, limited saves, and strange leveling.
What matters is people. What matters is being a person and doing your best and not rotting away while others suffer. Who are you to choose for them? Well, you’re the player character, but you’re also a human being who has found yourself in this position. And even if you fail, even if you were wrong, the attempt is worthwhile.
The Clockwork Kingdom wasn’t wrong to try and make a better fairer world, even if the result went wrong. The Endless weren’t wrong to try and make their eternal existence less harmful, even if the result is their constant boredom and emptiness. The people weren’t wrong to kill their gods, who had become tyrants, even if the result is the ending of a million ways of life. You can only know what the result of the choice will be after it’s made, and you can’t go back and make another. What matters is that if it goes wrong you need to be able to say ‘let’s try again’.
It’s worth playing Dread Delusion, and going into it with an eye to what its mechanics may be telling you alongside the story. It’s worth looking at any game by these metrics. I look forward to a future of games where the mechanics are part of the narrative.
Tiernan Blanchard is a writer and occasional poet from England, who formerly wrote as C.B. Blanchard. He has a wide range of interests, opinions and obsessions which he cannot shut up about as @GayCannibalism on bluesky. His website is CBridhBlanchard.weebly.com.
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