Dread Delusion is more than the retro Skyrim comparisons, it's a deep, dark, and nauseatingly good RPG

The first thing you’ll likely notice about Dread Delusion is that it’s hideous, albeit artfully so; a queasy nightmare of blocky textures and shimmering, lurching geometry that builds its world around the low-poly constraints of 90s and early 2000s gaming – Bethesda’s Morrowind being an obvious touchstone – to woozily disorientating effect. Its oppressive sky is the colour of a bruise, its grass the colour vomit, and its assorted flora, quivering like muscle spasms, all shades of effluvia. The next thing you’ll probably notice about Dread Delusion, after you’ve spent a bit of time getting your bearings, is that it’s really, really good.

Dread DelusionDeveloper: Lovely HellplacePublisher: DreadXPPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 14th May on PC (Steam)

Dread Delusion is the work of UK animator, artist, and developer James Wragg’s Lovely Hellscape studio, with DreadXP – known for its lo-fi horror anthology series Dread X – on publishing duties. And while Dread Delusion undoubtedly shares a similar aesthetic outlook to the other retro throwbacks on the publisher’s books, it’s far richer and wildly more ambitious – a fully formed open-world RPG set across a dazzlingly weird fantasy archipelago – than its wilfully rudimentary presentation might suggest.

And it doesn’t take long for hints of Dread Delusion’s depths to emerge; almost immediately, as the lights come up on the squalid prison cell that marks the start of your adventure, you’re asked to work through a sequence of evocative story branches to define your character’s history and early stats. Decide to be a paranoid fixer born on the streets, for instance, and you’ll have an agile spring in your step, a propensity for lock picking, and enough charm to talk your way through the trickiest of situations. I’m only eight hours in at the moment, but even so, it feels like these choices matter in a world that’s rich with possibilities.

Dread Delusion unfolds across the quivering, lurid expanse of the Oneiric Isles – a series of floating, shifting islands that, once upon a time, had a bit of a god problem until the inhabitants decided to rise up and murder them all. And while there’s ample horror to be found in Dread Delusion – its bloated, pustulous god-emissaries and flesh-fused clockwork contraptions made all the more unnerving by an intentionally primitive art style that never quite resolves – horror is just a single strand in its richly realised world.