Crystal Key II: The Far Realm
Gorgeous tedium.
Tags: Crystal Key II: The Far Realm Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Mark "MadMup" Zwolanek on Apr 19th, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Crystal Key II: The Far Realm (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Adventure | No | ||
When I was younger and just starting out with computer games, the term “adventure game” meant text games, usually from Infocom, like Zork and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Gamers were treated to text descriptions and were limited to typing in simple text commands to play the game. Later, when PCs became more prevalent, Sierra came along and gave gamers “Graphic adventures” that mixed text adventures with actual on-screen pictures and then full-on graphic adventures that didn’t require any typing at all, only pointing and clicking the mouse.
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And then came Myst. Everybody played this game. Everybody bought it. It was just around the time that CD-ROM drives were becoming popular, and Myst’s beautiful scenery and music were considered a perfect showcase. I hated Myst. The slow pacing and puzzles that required more chance than logic combined to make me uninstall that game in a hurry.
Which brings me to Crystal Key 2.
You play the role of a young man named Call who lives on the planet of Evany. Something strange has been happening to the people of his planet – they’ve slowly been becoming listless with no sparks of life or evidences of desires or emotions – kind of like zombies, but without the rotting skin, desire for brains, and gore. A visitor from another planet tells Call that her home planet has had the same thing happen and other planets have as well. Since Call seems unaffected by the malady, she begs him to find the reason and a cure. She is then dragged off through an inter-world portal. Call jumps in after her and starts his quest.
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Let me start with what I liked about this game. I thought the scenery was beautiful. There are some weird visual things that happen when you’re scrolling through your environment, kind of a “tearing along the seams” thing that actually had me taking a break occasionally so as to avoid motion sickness. But the scenery really is beautiful, and a few of the environments show moments of inspired creativity. Each location in this game is handled like a Quicktime VR movie: you can rotate 360 degrees and look up and down 180 degrees. And you better get used to it, because to solve this game, you’ll have to look at everything.
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That’s actually one of my biggest gripes. Since this is a point-and-click adventure, your cursor is blue until it passes over something you can interact with, at which point it turns green. A lot of your time will be spent cursoring over everything, trying to find whatever it is you need to advance the story a little and give you some clue as to where you need to go next. And you’ll get very familiar with the few areas in the game because the puzzles will have you backtracking all the time. Getting from one location to another involves a short cinema most of the time, and when I discovered that the space bar could be pressed to fast forward through the cinemas, I got a lot happier.
This game suffers a lot from one of the things I feel is wrong with adventure games in general: logic isn’t as important as learning the “rules” of the particular game. In real life, you could use logic to figure out how to fix one thing or another, but logic doesn’t apply much to figuring out that the die used in a child’s board game will help you figure out a problem four hours later in a completely different environment.
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This game is beautiful but tedious. Getting from place to another takes three clicks where it should only take one. If you’re getting into an elevator, it makes sense that you’re going to want to go up or down, right? Do we really need to click once to get up the steps, another time to get in, another time to select the control panel, and one more time to determine which direction? It seems that a lot of these kinds of things were thrown into the game to artificially inflate the amount of playing time.
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There is no sense of danger at any time in the whole game. At no point is your life in danger, and everyone you meet is friendly and willing to help. There is one character who speaks gruffly, but he ends up warning you about dangerous eels, so even he is helpful. By the end of the game you’ve seen a total of three “bad guys” and one other bad “thing,” but you are never in danger from any of them, either.
The voice actors are … okay. Nothing incredible here, but nothing incredible is required for this run-of-the-mill slow-paced title. The voice of Call sounds a little like a younger Matthew Broderick, and it is kind of fun to think of Ferris Bueller slumming and doing voicework for this game, but it’s not enough fun to make you want to play the whole game.
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To be fair, if you liked Myst, there’s a good chance you’ll like this game. I felt it was too slow with pointless puzzles, but it might just be the perfect game for a younger gamer just getting his or her feet wet in the world of adventure games. Older gamers expecting King’s Quest or Full Throttle should look elsewhere.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Beautiful scenery + Good for younger/newer gamers + Space bar lets you skip over repeating cinemas |
6.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Boring - No sense of danger - Story is not compelling at all |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| If you liked Myst, you'll probably like this. If you're a parent/grandparent looking for a nonoffensive game for little Timmy or Daisy Sue, this might make a good choice. | |
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Tags: Crystal Key II: The Far Realm
Posted by Mark "MadMup" Zwolanek on Apr 19th, 2004 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
