An open-world, lofi first person RPG with a definitive aesthetic, a macabre style, and some gruesome enemy designs is just what I wanted to see today and I have found it. Dread Delusion is an in-development RPG that takes a set of distinctively otherworld, occult stylings and an early-2000s PSX graphics set to the extreme, making a world of sprawling, weird magic and bustling towns to explore.
It's like something of a love child between Daggerfall and Dark Souls predecessors King's Field. One that grew up poring over an old, moldering Latin copy of The Lesser Key of Solomon. Its primary selling point is a smaller, but directly hand-crafted, open-world experience with both a central quest to follow and side quests to explore. Developers Lovely Hellplace promise that fighting will never be the only option, saying that "With a varied skill system, there’s always an alternative to combat. Charm people, pick locks or use secret knowledge."
"At the edge of the world lies the citadel of the Clockwork God, where state-approved magic is regulated by strange machines," says the game description, to which I say yes, absolutely, give me more, and then it says "The Clockwork God has calculated that a saviour will emerge. But even God has been known to malfunction, of late."
You can play a (quite old, now) demo of Dread Delusion on the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc, scope it out on developer Lovely Hellplace's web page, and find Dread Delusion on Steam and itch.io.
