‘Dread Delusion’ Embraces a Different Kind of Nightmare

Some nightmares do not frighten you. Instead, they grab and pull and writhe, recontextualizing your days and inverting referents. The feeling of hardwood begins to remind you of bone, or a street lamp first reads as an oddly shaped spire—these nightmares make the material feel like perversions of the real world of dreams. Dread Delusion, a new first-person RPG which just released in early access, is that kind of nightmare.

Dread XP, the publisher behind the game, is no stranger to uncomfortable horror. Its previous anthologies, the Dread X Collections, arecomprised of half a dozen or more short horror games, each of which is made by a different developer. The games are not always scary nor always good (though they are frequently both), but they are, without fail, interesting. Dread Delusion, which just released in early access, is no different. It is a game that is obsessed with the early-3D RPGs of the late-90s, namely The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and King’s Field—from its extremely simple combat, defined by slow animations, to its strange geography (not since Morrowind has a game so dearly loved mushrooms) and willingness to be broken.

The game is set on a series of sky islands, known as the Oneiric Isles, centuries after an apocalypse which left the earth below blighted and uninhabitable. Now, the descendants of survivors make their home under the rule of the Apostatic Union—an empire which has totally banned the worship of the isles’ many gods, fearing the power such belief may grant them. Neighboring islands, one of which is yet to be released, are even more strange: a kingdom of clockwork, obsessed with magical study, and a city of the dead, with a slowly waking god-king beneath the earth. It is a brilliantly released and haunting setting, one that I spend my hours outside the game thinking about.

Your story begins in a prison, where you awake after picking one of many possible pasts. I, for one, was a former urchin who pulled herself from destitution by stealing, and then fencing, rare tomes, which she eventually used to become a self-taught spellcaster, one whose experiments with teleportation magic ended up transporting her directly into an Apostatic Union prison. There, she was set to be executed before being given a chance at life in exchange for the capture of a sky pirate. That quest, however, is not fully implemented yet as the game just entered early access. Instead, I spend my time wandering the islands taking quests, learning spells, and meeting several, fugitive gods.

However, this introduction undersells what Dread Delusion is. It is not a game about hunting sky pirates or completing as many quests as you can or even defeating a lot of enemies. It is a game about vibes. The art is gorgeously crunchy. 3D objects shake as they move, their low resolution textures grinding and breaking as they do. Distant objects look like jagged scars on the horizon, and everything is bathed in the sickly red light of a neuron star. The finest mushrooms bloom from cursed corpses, masked goblins roam the landscape, and distant sky islands loom menacingly, marked by crypt cities and clockwork kingdoms. Everything looks beautiful and terrible.

Even the game’s writing is more vibes-based than anything else. When you ask the attendants of an undead empire what they’ve seen in their many century life, they will tell you things like: “I saw library whales pulled apart slowly by iron hooks, and the butcher-archivist scrabbling in its guts for forgotten tomes…” And then never mention ‘library whales' or ‘butcher-archivists’ ever again. In these moments, Dread Delusion is unconcerned with logic or narrative cohesion—it only cares about whether or not the phrase you’ve just read makes you feel something.

This same approach extends to the game’s combat, which is slow and weird. Swinging your sword takes time, so swinging as you approach an enemy, only to then quickly backpedal away from their own swing is the standard. Melee combat is pretty dreadful (and easy), but fighting against ranged enemies leads to some entertaining projectile dodging. However, the actual content of the combat does not matter as much as the mood it puts you in. This slow sort of violence feels deeply strange, like the air you’re cutting through is wet and dense. Its floatiness is part of what makes Dread Delusion feel like a waking nightmare, although the game’s aesthetic does most of that work.

Some have argued that the recent trends of PS1-styled demakes of popular games, like Bloodborne, and low-poly horror are the products of nostalgia for late 90s 3D, but I think this undersells the real strength of the aesthetic. Games like Dread Delusion exemplify the ability of video games to create dream spaces, which operate on logics that feel alien to the majority of people—this aesthetic is part of that. 

Low-resolution 3D feels both oddly detailed, on account of the amount of clearly visible pixels and component parts of textures, and designed to obfuscate meaning. You know that something is there, but you can never be sure about what. It is an unsettling, powerful aesthetic—one that immediately lends itself to horror. Distant trees, further pixelated by the vastness of space, look like jagged tears in the world. A two story home stands in the distance, and you approach it hopefully, only for the details to slowly slide into view—the broken walls in the attic, its half missing door, and the crack in the rear wall (like a wound) that narrows at its base and widens (up and up) until it blooms into open air. Everything feels like it could be anything, until you approach and find the terrible truth.

These feelings of terror, and beauty, and possibility are what drives Dread Delusion. Yes, the game is mechanically simple. Yes, I have spent the majority of my time casting the speed spell so I can sprint around the islands ignoring the combat. But, none of that matters because one day I was walking up the side of a mountain, when a two story creature noticed me. Its legs, too thin and too long, let it catch up to me quickly. The sword in its hand was unsettlingly small compared to the creature, like it was wielding a toy. And so I ran up the mountain, and into the home of a man living at the summit. I felt relief. And then I looked up to see the creature’s masked face clipping through the wall—pressing into the world in an impossible way. In any other game this would’ve been goofy—a failure of collision meshes—but here, it was a moment of genuine nightmare-logic. The creature’s head emerging from the wall, and the man in the chair sitting still and silently—waiting for me to speak. Both looked hungry.