Let me just get this out of the way right at the very beginning. The
Crystal Key is my cup of tea. In fact, I’d like to coin a new term that dim-witted
shooter fanatics who have no concept of what an adventure game comprises can start
calling the games I love (so they can avoid having to go there and think for a
change) … “Riven clone.” I guess this sort of articulates where
I stand as far as my allegiance to the graphic interface adventures popularized
in the last five years. This is just a good, old-fashioned, inventory-based adventure
game, with some really pleasing and appealing graphics. The farther I went into
the game, the more I enjoyed it.

The story itself is a very straight science
fiction story, similar to MGM’s Stargate series, except that you won’t
find any Earth cultures such as the Egyptians, Atlanteans, Anistazi, et al., cluttering
up the narrative–this is not sci fi, it’s Science Fiction, to paraphrase Harlan
Ellison.

The survival of Earth is threatened by an alien race led by a being
known only as Ozgar. A transmission is intercepted by Earth from a race of people
called the Arkonians telling of their fight against Ozgar. You are the test pilot
of Earth’s first hypership sent to the origin point of the Arkonians’ signal,
to find out what’s out there and stop this menace. The game itself follows a linear
path, which is self-evident, but you can explore around all you like.

The
interface is nicely controlled via Apple’s Quicktime VR, giving the player unlimited
movement in looking around. Travel occurs via movies that transport you to the
next point you want to go to, so no million clicks/steps to arrive at any destination,
and the travel itself is fun, like being on a mini-roller coaster. Cursor changes
to show hotspots, so no pixel hunting.

Inventory is kept in a bag below
the game screen, and inventory items are simple, not too many, and all get used,
and there’s no scrolling to see what’s in the bag. Captured inventory items float
into your bag once clicked on, and to use the item, click once, then click on
the desired area of the game, and the item floats itself into use.

The
look of some of the gameplay areas is very similar to graphics from the Journeyman
Project series. There was an alien vessel definitely reminiscent of portions
of these games. The one-click cursor keeps gameplay very immersive. A desert world
gives the player the feeling of being on Lucas’s Tatoonie, and there is an excellent
recreation of a jungle. There are smoothly polished marble floors to glide across.
But the graphical high point is definitely the Arkonian city on the water, which
includes some absolutely phenomenal design and movie sequences that are so pretty,
they are worth playing the game for. Riven comes to mind. There is also
some very Riven-esque tunnel work that’s well-designed. The graphics of
a rock hitting the water of a pond was just simply visually stunning.

The
music and ambient sound are very similar to Jewels of the Oracle, and Jewels
did pleasantly come to mind during gameplay, although The Crystal Key is
not a straight puzzle-based game by any means. There are, oddly, portions where
whole sections go by with no music or sound at all (either that or it cut out,
but nevertheless, it was not there). Some sound effects that would have logically
been present were not, such as the sound of a freight car you are traveling in,
and it is simply just missing a number of ambient sounds it should have.

An
interesting thing included is a mapping feature that only goes for the very first
portion of the game, handy for a learning curve overall and designed well in that
it would serve an expert as well as a novice, and it is a subtle but strong entrance
point in the game in that respect.

As far as puzzles go, there are very
few areas in the game that even remotely resemble a straight puzzle; these are
also built in a very immersive fashion, all are sequential, all follow and forward
the story, rather than looking like the third ear on a pig’s head (after all,
I always keep a big fat slider puzzle to access my bedroom door at home,
etc., know what I mean?)–there’s just none of that here.

The inventory
is extremely well-designed, there are no red herring pieces, which I hate,
all items are used and discarded once used, so no redundant, unnecessary clicking
through an inventory scroll to get what you need. There is none of that assembling
inventory items to make something you can use, and the items are cleverly used
themselves, keeping the game interesting enough for an expert but simple enough
for a novice. The design of the inventory is exceptionally pretty; each item is
lit as though there were a spotlight on it–select one and the light pulsates
lightly, letting you know it’s available for use. There is no holding the mouse
down and dragging to use an item, which is just ducky with me. The only design
drawback in this area is that when interacting with environmental items, such
as pulling a handle, these must be executed very slowly to work.

There
is a lot of serious equipment here to hunker down and get working–generators,
freight cars, spaceships (the grungy Han Solo/Star Wars kind, not the Kubrick/2001
kind), a diving bell, etc. One of my favorite designs in the game involves
an Arkonian shuttle that looks eerily like a floating version of one of those
Airstream travel trailers seen all over the American landscape, eternally ’50s,
smooth chrome metal land beasts.

I had some initial freeze problems that
were solved by uninstalling the Quicktime on my computer and installing the Quicktime
from the game disk. I also had a memory freeze, although I was well within system
requirements, that I solved by allocating a heap o’ memory to the game. There
were some problems throughout the game using the save feature, and I had to work
around these. There’s a fair bit of waiting after each travel movie that I didn’t
like–left me tapping my foot. There were also some points in the game where the
movies would lock up and then skip to the end of the sequence; at one point I
had an inventory item jump to just suddenly appear in the inventory bag. The game
inexplicably dumped out in the middle of a hologram sequence. I’d rather have
to double-click on everything than have all the bugs I encountered, given a choice.

There’s
a lot of worlds and environments to explore that have been well-compacted onto
two disks (no FMV, hallelujah!). The only problem in this was there was a fair
amount of disk swapping that occurred with increasing frequency as the game progressed.
There are 10 save game slots, which I found to be plenty, and to be fair regarding
all the crashes, not once did a saved game get dumped out, as in other games;
it always saved everything I wanted (once I got it to save).

This is a
game novice and expert alike can enjoy, well written and thought out, simple but
not simple minded. If you are looking for a beautiful, immersive world mixed with
classic Science Fiction, The Crystal Key is quite a find.

Grade (note
that the system bugs/crashes reduced the scores. If the novice is also a novice
at computers in general (well, okay, Macs–I played it on a Mac…), then it will
be a tough go for him/her to work around the bugs and learn adventure gaming at
the same time. The game however, is a classic to give to a novice to enlighten
on the joys of adventure gaming):

Novice gamer: A-
Intermediate gamer:
B+
Expert gamer: B+

System Requirements

PC:
Windows 98/95
Pentium 133 MHz
32 MB
RAM
Minimum 70 MB hard disk space
8X CD-ROM drive

Mac:

PowerPC 120 MHz
Mac OS System 7.5 or higher
32 MB RAM
Minimum 70 MB
hard disk space
8X CD-ROM drive