Mute Crimson DC Releases for Sega Dreamcast – Play It Now for Free!

 

Well, this was a nice surprise! To mark the 26th anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast’s North American launch (the iconic 9.9.99), two-person indie studio Iced Lizard Games has released a Dreamcast port of their stylish ninja platformer Mute Crimson DX, fittingly renamed Mute Crimson DC. And the best part: it's totally free to play!

Mute Crimson can already be found on all the usual modern platforms (Steam, Xbox, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch) — so to see the Dreamcast being added to a lineup like that is wild. The Dreamcast's weak copy-protection may have been one of many factors that hindered its commercial success, but it's also the reason the console gets to live on more than two decades later, continuing to receive a steady stream of new indie titles and homebrew constantly.

So, what's Mute Crimson DC like? Well, it's a lot of fun! It's a one-hit death kind of platformer (like Super Meat Boy, Celeste, that kind of thing). You know, the kind with instant respawns and no fear of running out of lives, but a focus on timing precise jumps to reach the next platform. Miss a beat and you’ll be spectacularly splatted, but a second later you're back into the action. I’m also happy to report that the controls are tight and responsive as you slash, double jump and wall-climb through the game's various levels. If the challenge does prove to be slightly too much for you though, there's always an easy mode with more checkpoints. Oh, and there's also a save system.

The retro-inspired monochrome graphics, with their accents of crimson look lovely on the Dreamcast, and the game runs fast, flawlessly, and with surprisingly little compromise. To achieve this level of performance, however, the developers did have to scale back a few things: particle effects were reduced, audio bitrate was lowered, rumble support was removed, and the modern versions’ rewind system was cut. These are all relatively minor concessions, however, and they do nothing to diminish the gameplay experience — especially if, like me, this Dreamcast version is your first time playing Mute Crimson.

Oh, and the cutscenes are charming and well illustrated, too.

If you want to play Mute Crimson DC, simply head over to the game's itch.io page and download the available .cdi file for play on your ODE (such as GDEMU or MODE), or for burning onto a CD-R.

Hopefully we will see more from Iced Lizard Games on the Dreamcast in the future, but it you enjoy what you've played of Mute Crimson DC, they have other games available, including one planned for release in 2026.