The Crystal Key

By: Kirk Hiner

Genre: Adventure

Format: 2 CDs

Developer: Earthlight

Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive

Minimum Requirements: 120 MHz PowerPC, System 7.5, 70MB hard disk space, 32MB RAM, 8X CD-ROM, 13" monitor capable of supporting 256 colors

Network Feature: No

3Dfx Support: No

Retail Price: $19.99

Availability: Out Now

Know what I'm tired of? Musicians with ridiculous last names. I can remember a time when artists with dorky names like Mellancamp would change them to supercool rock 'n' roll conducive names such as Cougar. I mean, even the immortal Farookh Bulsara knew, to achieve immortality, he'd have to change his name to Freddie Mercury. Yet these days we've got Christina Aguluralairaiar going by Christina Aguluralairaiar. Come on, sweetheart. What a girl wants...no, what a girl needs is a name that at least 10% of the population can pronounce.

Know what I'm not tired of? Adventure games. To my last breath I will crusade to bring the adventure game back to its rightful status at the top of the computer gaming industry. Well, unless another sequel to Myst comes out. I can't suffer through another game as horrendously dull as Riven. I'd just as soon go to a Christina Agarliraiuurau concert.

And this is why I wasn't really looking forward to playing DreamCatcher Interactive's The Crystal Key. After all, it's just Myst, isn't it? It's just one character walking around abandoned worlds trying to find clues as to what happened there while also searching for the way back home. That's certainly how The Crystal Key starts out, and that's certainly how it ends. But in between...in between it gives us a little something different.

The Crystal Key begins with the interception of a coded message from space. Although not meant for Earthling ears, we were able to decipher its warning. Seems that the Arkonians defeated the evil Ozgar, but not in time to prevent his escape, and not in time to save Suralon. A few days later, a giant spaceship appeared over the Earth, launching satellites that disrupted our weather patterns and shifted our gravitational forces. In a desperate attempt to save the Earth, a lone pilot is launched to the source of the message...Arkonia. If they defeated Ozgar once, they can do it again. Why these missions always involve just one person, I'll never know. Guess that's just easier to code.

Next thing you know, your ship has crash landed on Arkonia and the quest is underway. Finding the Crystal Key is actually one of the first things you do, as it's with this key that you're able to travel to the other worlds. Sound familiar? Well hold on, because the game gets a little more interesting.

You see, as I started to explore the desert world, I wasn't enjoying myself at all. It was all pretty much, "click, move, look, click, move, look, use, click, move look." Not my idea of a good time. But then I got shot. Yep, that's right. Actual interaction with actual living creatures. It caught me so completely off guard that I almost restored a saved game for fear that I'd lost. But no, heaven forbid an adventure game these days could result in your demise. Instead, the weapon was apparently set on stun. Upon waking up in a prison cell, I suddenly cared much more about what was going on around me. Funny thing, that...when you get shot, you want to know why.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that violence is a necessary element in games, but it sure beats simply walking around and looking at stuff. The element of danger and the interaction with other characters add an urgency to this game that's missing from other adventures of the this type. If you're going to make me solve your puzzles, at least give me a reason to do so.

But now I'm back to things I don't understand. Why is it that every adventure game made has to utilize a unique interface? If only game companies would spend as much time worrying about what happens on screen as they do the way users make it happen. A man can dream, can't he? In The Crystal Key, items that you'll need for later use are automatically added to your inventory when you click on them. To use them, you click on the item from your inventory, causing the lighting around the object to throb (shades of Aqua...everyone hide). You then click on the screen where you want to use the item. This is all well and good, but because the cursor doesn't change, it's easy to miss which item is selected in the inventory. What's hard is figuring out what to do with most of the items. It seemed at points as if the programmers had rock graphics lying around, so they threw them into the game without knowing where to use them. But more on that later. For now, let's stick with the interface and discuss movement.

As with DreamCatcher's The Forgotten: It Begins..., you can scan your environment with full 360 degree movement. Holding the button while moving the mouse slightly to the left or right allows you to spin in that direction rather than to simply jump 45 degrees or so to a different picture. To a lesser extent, you can also look up and down and zoom in and out. This feature is exceptionally well implemented, and helps pull you into the world...you don't feel so much like you're just in a museum looking at paintings. A nice touch is that, even when scanning the environment in this fashion, your cursor will change to the action icon when you come across an item that can be manipulated. However, the 360 degree scanning did cause some jerky animation. If you click on a hallway to walk down, the screen jumps back to the view from which the animation is supposed to start, of course, which was sometimes discombobulating.

What's especially odd about the game is that in most instances the Quicktime movies actually looked better than the rendered graphics. This speaks well of the movies, but not so much of the graphics. I mean, the worlds were beautifully designed--easily some of the best I've ever seen in an adventure game--but the implementation of these designs was blotchy, especially in darker scenes. Is this the price we must pay for 360 degree movement?

The sound effects and music in The Crystal Key were...well, I'm not sure what they were. It seemed that the creators opted against using either, replacing them with a subtle, yet bizarre combination of the two. I'm big on music, and I feel that some good themes for the different worlds would've added more character to each. Luckily, the graphics handled that job pretty well, so long as you were standing still or were in a Quicktime movie.

And now to the puzzles, sorry for keeping you waiting. Although most kept the story moving along, some seemed completely arbitrary; puzzles for puzzles' sake. Others made no sense, almost as if they were designed to be solved by trial and error. And have you ever played a game where your success in completing a task depended not only on flipping the right levers, but also on how quickly you flip them? Who needs that aggravation?

Apparently, I do. Despite its faults and my preconceptions, The Crystal Key became one of those games that kept me up well past my bedtime. The puzzles (the ones that made sense, anyway) were intriguing enough to keep me at them, and the worlds were so attractively designed that before I quit the game I always had to explore just beyond those trees. Now inside that cave. Now over by that building.

The Crystal Key may be formulaic on the surface, but inside it has enough unique elements to help it break out of the shadow of its predecessors. It may not be enough to herald the revival of the adventure game, but it's a solid start. I'll be closely watching DreamCatcher Interactive to see which of the many games slated for release this year finally pushes them to the top of genre. I'm betting on "Christina Gualamaharia: The Quest for A Name." Say, how about Christina Arkonia, or even Christina Ozgar? Just some friendly advice from a concerned citizen.

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September 09, 2010