The bleak and poignant open world sidequest design of Dread Delusion

talking to the "Inquisitor" at the beginning of the game

Dread Delusion (2024) by Lovely Hellplace is a retro-style indie first person RPG about exploring strange floating islands and talking to the NPCs who live there. It takes about 15-20 hours to complete.

inventory screen

Many compare it to The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, with its emphasis on charming low poly 3D world design and worldbuilding. It also shares Morrowind's weightless combat -- but it's not as bad as failed dice rolls to stab a rat. It just treats combat with the contempt it deserves; there's no real benefit to killing stuff, no XP to grind. Pacifist builds are not only viable but very OP. (In the last dungeon, I just ran past everything at 50 MPH.)

So I want to focus on Dread Delusion's great strengths, specifically its world region / quest design. I've tried to write this for a general gamer audience to unpack what the game does. Consider this your last SPOILER WARNING: I'm going to talk about what happens in this game and what you do in it.

endgame world map

(Lots of info and images from this very good sidequests Steam guide, which is much more comprehensive than the now-deleted subreddit and very unfinished wiki.)

There are 4 main regions:

• Pwyll: grassy starting area
• Hallowshire: central grasslands
• Endless Realm: pale graveyards
• Clockwork Kingdom: snowy steampunk gulag

Each area has a central town and a "major side quest" that settles the region's central conflict / affects the ending, and that's the focus of my post here. Technically they're not required, but they definitely feel important.

You also need to factor in this project's dev cycle: it started as an Early Access demo in 2022, added main quest and dungeons for Hallowshire and Endless Realm in 2023, added the entire Clockwork Kingdom region in January 2024, and then launched the 1.0 release + Pwyll (redesigned starting area) in May 2024. 

This is why I don't focus on the "main quests": Hallowshire and Endless Realm were designed without main quests!... so you'd expect Clockwork Kingdom and Pwyll to be the best parts, designed with the benefit of all the feedback and template-setting from the first 2/3 of dev time? And indeed, I think that's the case.

the big mushroom tree dungeon at the end of "Secrets and Spores"

cute mushroom inn

Here's the flow for the major side quest "Secrets and Spores" in Pwyll, a mushroom farming village, the starting area of the game:

1. On the way in, talk to the mayor's son, who intros Pwyll.
2. In town, talk to the weighmaster, who says to investigate the inn for cultists.
3. Talk to inn NPCs, who say to sleep at the inn to advance to night time.
4. At night, follow a masked cultist to a secret cave under the village with a dead god! (Twist!)
5. Talk to the weighmaster again, get a key to the big mushroom tree to stop the cult ritual.
6. At the top of the tree dungeon, you find the cultist / mayor's son (twist!) sacrificing himself to the dead god to try to save the town's mushroom harvests. Choose whether to let him sacrifice himself and maybe save the town, or to force him to live yet definitely doom the town.

This quest does a lot. It teases cultist / anti-cultist factions, and also worldbuilds how gods work. The plot takes some twists and turns, and the final dilemma evokes a compelling bleakness. It also tutorializes the day / night system, inns / sleeping, as well as dungeon and questing expectations.

the (disappointing) royal crypt you visit repeatedly in "All Good Things" in undead zone

In comparison, the major side quest "All Good Things" in Endless Realm (the undead zone) is relatively flat:

1. On the way in, talk to a zombie who intros the earthquakes and the dead king.
2. In town, talk to the queen, get a key to enter the king's crypt to talk to the dead king.
3. At the crypt there's (another) locked gate inside. Talk to either faction leader (mage or duke) for another key to unlock the inner crypt.
4. At the crypt, talk to the dead king: actually the queen's soul (twist!) who refuses to stop earthquaking.
5. In town, talk to the queen again to get her sad necklace, talk to the mage to get a happy vial.
6. Talk to the queen's ghost again, choose whether to give her sad necklace to guilt her or the happy vial to drug her. (Twist?)

This questline does less than Pwyll. You walk back and forth to talk to NPCs, get 2 keys, with no fun gimmicks or systems use or location discovery. Although I liked the concept of drugging a ghost.

The main twist (it's not the king's ghost, but the queen's ghost) has no real stakes. Who cares which ghost it is? You can ask the queen, "why didn't you tell me it was your ghost, why did you trick me?" Her bored lampshade answer: something like, "I dunno, I'm depressed or something." (Some zombie queens will do anything to avoid therapy!!)

getting kidnapped at the beginning of "Madness of the King" in the clockwork city

Now here's the strongest part of the entire game, "Madness of the King" in the Clockwork Kingdom (snowy steampunk gulag) -- it's also a very long quest:

1. On the way in, talk to a smuggler who warns you to trust no one.
2. In town, some guards kidnap you without warning. (Twist!)
3. Talk to the Clockwork King, a decaying steampunk robot god who talks in weird symbols.
4. Get a note to talk to a whistleblower at night to get a key.
5. In town at the old house, read about the king? (I don't remember)
6. Talk to the whistleblower at night again, get a junkyard badge (key).
7. At the junkyard, listen for haunted phone booths and talk to them.
8. Talk to the whistleblower yet again, who says to get an implant to translate the Clockwork King's language.
9. At the lab, talk to the doctor to get an implant (key).
10. Talk to the whistleblower (for the 4th time!) to get a radio music disc (key).
11. At the radio tower, talk via radio to... the smuggler?! (twist!) who says to find the saboteur and don't trust the whistleblower.
12. Talk to the saboteur to get a punchcard.
13. Talk to the whistleblower (for the 5th time!) to get another punchcard.
14. Talk to the Clockwork King, choose a punchcard to sabotage or to fix him. (Or betray both of them.)

the Clockwork King

Previously I condemned "All Good Things" repetitive talk, but here I think it works well. Maybe it's less about what you do, and more about how you do it:

• Framing: talking to the whistleblower 5+ times is OK because she's investigating a complex mystery, and you're her Watson
• Key skins: it helps when keys don't look like keys (radio music disc), it's even better when keys are framed as upgrades (badge, implant) so you can share a key to unlock multiple situations
• Outgoing keys: keys unlock new places to explore, not just rooms in the same place
• Pacing variety: some unique beats (kidnapping, junkyard listening) for variety
• Callback to trailhead: bringing back the smuggler (when you're expecting a radio god) is funny

(Interestingly, the Clockwork Kingdom basically abandons the game's faction system. There are no formal factions or faction points, even though this 3-way end dilemma implies 3 factions. I suspect the devs discovered that faction systems just aren't that interesting, and always end up being a bit boring and flat to use, much like fire propagation or other game dev darlings that sound cool at first.)

the noticeboard shrine for the start of "Missing Persons" in the clockwork city

Many players confuse this quest with another called "Missing Persons":

1. In town, read a poster about a missing child at a (very prominent) noticeboard.
2. (If you haven't been kidnapped already, you'll get kidnapped on the way to the dad.)
3. Meet the dad who gives you a locket (key) to show at the library.
4. At the banned library, meet the librarian, read about child and a secret project, learn about a camp.
5. At the camp, meet the child-mutant (twist!) and show the locket, but you can't understand their language?
6. At the lab, talk to the doctor (if you haven't already) to get an implant.
7. At the camp, talk to the child-mutant again with the language implant... find out they have the same name as the whistleblower (TWIST!) so the child is the "original" in a secret cloning  project! Choose whether to give the dad's locket to the child-mutant.
8. Talk to the dad, who gives you a candle to leave at the noticeboard in memory of the original child.
9. (optional, if you did both quests) Tell the whistleblower they're a clone created by the Clockwork King. She reaffirms her belief in fixing the King instead of destroying it.
10. (optional, if you did both quests) Talk to the Clockwork King, learn how the clones were created to fix the King itself. But is the output of a failed machine doomed to fail too?

Aphra (whistleblower)

Players confuse the quests because these A and B questlines / storylines converge so well. It also requires an open world structure to work best; both quests are hours long, require multiple trips back and forth, and even share the same midpoint gating (the implant). When you experience them simultaneously, it's like a detective story where two seemingly unrelated cases resolve each other at just the right time.

I also enjoyed the optional extra "coda" dialogues. Previously I wrote about the Skyrim mod The Forgotten City which creates a "bushy" structure with lots of optional branching -- except here, instead of being bushy in the middle, these parallel quests are a bit bushy more at the end, to reward your engagement and address dangling implications.

(My only nitpick: cloning isn't intrinsic to the steampunk trope, so it feels a bit weird for this quest to suddenly rely on it, without laying prior groundwork for it? Maybe the initial farming area could've had a short cloning-related quest.)

***

Some overall side quest design lessons:

• Make trailheads memorable
• Longer and fewer side quests are better than shorter and many-er side quests?... More marinating, more simultaneity, more opportunity to share gates and systems
• Parallel side quests that converge are very cool
• Your quest giver should probably care a lot about their own quest
• Make keys that don't look like keys, or even cast them as player upgrades and unlock multiple situations with the same "key"
• Most keys should take you to new places, not to the same place
• Multiple quest codas are cool
• Callback to your trailhead

the legally-distinct-evangelion uber-god "angel" at the very end of Dread Delusion

Lastly I want to address a "controversial" topic among Dread Delusion fans: the "good" ending. 

It's basically the same dilemma as always: banish a god and live with the miserable decay of the status quo... or take a cosmic risk to merge with the god to try to fix the universe, but also probably destroy the universe. This speaks to the "delusion" in Dread Delusion: anyone with delusions of good intentions can easily fuck up everything even worse, and indeed this is what happened in Pwyll, Hallowshire, Endless Realm, and Clockwork Kingdom, and also the ancients who meddled with the universe. History suggests that a better world isn't possible. The centrists are right.

Although I had promised all the NPCs that I'd banish the god, I suddenly decided to take a risk and merge with the god. And the result was literally a "perfect" ending? (TWIST!) For once, you don't fuck it up. You rescue and fix everyone. You save the universe. An infinitely better world is realized by your hand. All is forgiven. Good things can still happen. It's hilarious and it works perfectly.

I think what a lot of the ending-haters miss is that this final dilemma hinges on you, the player character. In all the prior dilemmas, you're choosing whether to help an NPC use godlike power for flawed reasons. 

But now this one is on you. Do you have the "hubris" to think you can learn from them, and become a better person? Maybe the real "delusion" was all the learned helplessness we gained along the way. Truly a game for our times.

YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY: my quest design review of "Diamond City Blues" in Fallout 4, or my design review of indie open world-ish farm sim Before the Green Moon