Crystal Key 2

Review by Jen
April 2004

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men ...

You know how sometimes you'll cook up a scheme inside your head and it's a beautiful thing? Flawless, totally cohesive, every part perfectly in synch with every other part? And then you pull it out of your head and try to put it into action and not only does it not work how you thought it would, but nobody understands what the hell you are trying to do because your synapses don't show? Mm-hmm. That's what we have here with Crystal Key 2.

Confession Time

Though it pains me to admit it, I sort of liked the original Crystal Key. It'll never rank among my favorites, but had I been the reviewer I would've probably given it the thumb up, same as Orb. It was a B game that was fun to play. It was also, and continues to be, wildly (and unaccountably) successful in terms of sales. Hoping to birth and capitalize on a shiny new franchise, Dreamcatcher commissioned a followup. I don't know wherefrom the developer Kheops arose; most of the personnel in the closing credits are still listed under "Earthlight," developers of the original; I have a sneaking suspicion that Kheops is the landing place of some of now-defunct Cryo's ex-employees.

The original Crystal Key held together a lot better—all of its parts were in the right place, there was sufficient clueage for the puzzles, and the graphics were nice, for their time, anyway. Not so with the sequel. Mostly it's like trying to swim through a mudbath—you can't see where you're going.

These Boots Were Made for Walking ...

Maybe the mudbath is not the best analogy. You can see where you're going ... over and over again. Most of your gaming time will be spent traveling from location to location. Probably three-quarters of the game screens have absolutely nothing to do or see in them. Ever. And the way the game's laid out, you start out with one hub that serves as the launchpad to three or four other locations that in turn serve as the jumping-off point for another set of locations, etc. And getting from one hub to another involves three or four screens of travel each, plus one or more traveling cutscenes, long ones, too. One of these hub areas in particular is extremely dark and confusingly mazelike, and I rued every time that I had to go back in there again. Luckily, you can skip the cutscenes with a tap of the spacebar, but unfortunately you can't bypass any of the repetitive trekking. This could have been better handled by forcing you to find each location once but then making it available ever after via a single map-click (with no attendant cutscene).

You Just Can't See Where the Game Is Going

Where the mudbath analogy does apply is to the puzzles. The designers did a great job in placing the puzzles within the events and environment such that they don't seem at all out of context; however, the solutions to some of these puzzles are as clear as ... mud! For example, one puzzle requires you to make note of hard-to-spot symbols in three different, completely unrelated, locations and then use them appropriately in yet another completely unrelated location that's twenty-five screens away from any of the three clues. To be fair, when you see the puzzles to which the symbols are the clue, you immediately understand what to do. But if you missed any of the clues the first time around, good luck! At least one of them is nearly impossible to find unless, at exactly the right node, you happen to fall out of your chair while holding the mouse, thereby setting the scenery to spinning wildly, and then the mouse stops over the hint as you right yourself and say, "Hey! I might need to know that later!"

And other of the puzzles either have no clues at all or require the type of logical leaping that's simply not possible unless you're able to drill a psychic tap into the minds of the designers and see those synapses at work. You are left with the choice between revisiting every one of the multitudinous and hard-to-reach locations in the game and trying every inventory item on every hotspot and at the same time hoping you already have the item you need so you don't have to do this all over again in fifteen minutes when you get a new item and all the while closely inspecting your surroundings in the hope of uncovering a heretofore overlooked hint (whew!), or frequent use of a walkthrough. The first option is frustrating; the second, unsatisfying. Either way, you, the player, are the loser in the gaming-good-time lottery.

WTF?

I'm not even going to talk about the story here. I'm not sure what it was. Here's what little I was able to glean: The events of the sequel take place some 20 years after the end of the original game; you play in the first-person as a youth named Call, son of the hero of The Crystal Key. While the interplanetary-megalomaniacal Ozgar had been defeated in the first game, his war machine lives on. The Balial, as the bad guys are called, have unleashed some kind of biological warfare that turns people into worker zombies who will build and amass weapons to sate the invaders' appetite for destruction, unless you can find a way to stop them in time. You are one of a very few left standing, and only you can save the universe. Creative premise, huh?

Illusory Interactivity

One thing the designers did right in Crystal Key 2 is ditching the tired ol' conventional conversation tree. Branching dialogues are typically included in games even when you have to select every option anyway and your choices have no bearing on the outcome—"illusory interactivity," I like to call it. Well, I was never tricked, and I have often wished these types of conversations would play out automatically without my having to click-propel them. Crystal Key 2 does it that way, and I appreciate it.

On the Nature of Glass

The graphics are positively crapalicious. There are gigantic compression artifacts all over the place, and there is some kind of weird wavy distortion, like watching traffic through a thick antique window, when mousing around certain areas. Many of the screens are aesthetically pleasing, if rather run of the mill, but others are too dark. I can't tell if they're 3D or not; at times they look prerendered but then every once in a while a 3D-style incomplete-render seam will pop up, or the painting-on-a-sheet-of-glass dimensionlessness that sometimes occurs in old-school 3D games is visible. In any event, movement and panning are inside-a-sphere node-based, so those aspects at least do not take advantage of any 3D-ness there might be.

A Question for the Ages: Does Size Matter?

I solved most of the puzzles on my own while making liberal use of a walkthrough for those continual where-do-I-go-next pickles. The game lasted about six hours. I am an experienced adventure game player. I can envision an inexperienced player (or one who is not willing to cheat) getting 30 or more hours out of the game. I can also feature that selfsame inexperienced player never buying another adventure game if she comes away with the idea that this is representative of the usual quality of the genre.

Things I Want to Say That Don't Warrant a Whole Paragraph

• The voice acting isn't bad, but the music can be summed up in one word: Cheesy.
• You could die in The Crystal Key; there is none of that in the sequel.
• There is no Mac version this time around.
• I got super-tired of hunting all those consarn pixels.
• The game is subtitled for the hearing-impaired, but then there's a music tone puzzle that would be impossible for the deaf.
• There is one really fine puzzle that involves putting together several clues from disparate locations, in a way that intrinsically makes sense. If only the whole game had been like that ...
• There are lots and lots of loose ends that never get tied up, including some puzzles you must solve for no apparent reason whatsoever.
• The people all stand in the same place for the entire game. Except one guy who moves to a different place once at the beginning and then stays there for the rest of the game.
• Save early and save often. Aside from the occasional hard hang, dump to desktop, or spontaneous restart, there is at least one reported dead end.

By the Skin of its Teeth ...

I really wanted to give Crystal Key 2 the cornpoop, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. True, it is not at all fun to play and doesn't have much else to recommend it. But it's obvious that the designers put a lot of heart into it. I get the feeling they did their best; unfortunately, their best isn't good enough. I have to give them some small credit for trying, though. 

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Earthlight/Kheops
Publisher: Dreamcatcher
Release Date: March 2004

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System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
600 MHz PIII or equivalent
64 MB RAM
16X CD-ROM drive (24X recommended)
32 MB DirectX compatible video card
DirectX 8 compatible sound card
Keyboard, mouse, speakers

Where to Find It

Amazon.com 19.99

Prices/links current as of 04/19/04
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