In a recent interview, the director of The Elder Scrolls Online said that if you made Morrowind today, it would struggle to find an audience. "If you play that right now," he said, "there is no compass, no map, literally the quests are like 'go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west'... And if you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it." Well sir, have you heard of a little open world RPG called Dread Delusion? It's pretty good. And what's more, it has just added a whole new area with - let me see - a giant floating squid creature with an entire town of citizens living inside its shell.

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In a recent interview, the director of The Elder Scrolls Online said that if you made Morrowind today, it would struggle to find an audience. "If you play that right now," he said, "there is no compass, no map, literally the quests are like 'go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west'... And if you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it." Well sir, have you heard of a little open world RPG called Dread Delusion? It's pretty good. And what's more, it has just added a whole new area with - let me see - a giant floating squid creature with an entire town of citizens living inside its shell.

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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 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.

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I first played the retro-inspired RPG Dread Delusion nearly two years ago in the first days of its early access period. I liked what I played in the handful of hours I put into it thanks to the throwback Morrowind-esque world and mechanics, as well as the hint of cosmic horror. But as someone who has a tendency to get …

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I booted up Dread Delusion and fell 30 feet to my death. This throwback first-person RPG is hazardous, and not only due to the dreamlike islands floating in the sky. My leg-snappin' plummet may be down to early access changes, causing the ground to be updated from right under my feet. Far from being a nuisance, meta-jank like this only endears me further to Dread Delusion. It is an RPG from the other side of some attic mirror, an Elder Scrolls from a parallel 2002. It has, somehow, slipped into our reality and is seeing its full release today. There are gods you can thank for this, but we dare not speak their names.

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One of the most compelling RPG games to launch so far this year is the final version of Dread Delusion. Inspired by earlier, pre Oblivion and Skyrim entries to The Elder Scrolls series, like 1996's Daggerfall and 2002's Morrowind, Dread Delusion offers audiences a fantasy world that avoids the typical elves and wizards, Western European medieval aesthetics to provide something truly, well, fantastic instead. Since it left Early Access on Steam earlier this week, the game's enjoyed a positive reception. Unfortunately, though, its player count has struggled to reach the same heights as its reviews so far.

Dread Delusion is a creepo-tastic open world RPG that positively reeks of King's Field and the Elder Scrolls of yore. Created by Lovely Hellplace and published by horror anthology specialists DreadXP, it's so far up my alley it's probably been mugged by some kind of hideous clockwork cutthroat - and yet somehow, I've never played the thing. I'll be rectifying that on 14th May, when Dread Delusion leaves early access.

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