Crisol Theatre of Idols

[DANGERMAN]

Apparently I didn't start a thread for this, I was sure I did. I finished it last week and it sounds like the studio may have closed down, so a bit late.

 

Crisol is easy to describe but hard to accurately describe. It's like slow Bioshock, only incredibly Catholic and without plasmids. You're Gabriel and you've arrived at a place that seems Spanish infused in the names of the characters, if not their performances. You're a soldier who worships the sun god and you're there to put an end to the sea god. As you go through more and more of the story opens up, it's quite interesting at points, if easy to lose the thread of. In terms of structure you're actually leaving a hub area to go and assassinate one of the 4 key people of the area, collect their blade, or their blood that becomes a blade, I honestly can't remember, but this will let you kill the god.

 

As an FPS it's very slow, you move slowly, you fire slowly, the only time it's frantic is when enemies get close and you can parry them with your knife. To reload you have to use your own blood to make bullets, so your health. Healing items swing from abundant to scarce, so maybe you aren't supposed to kill everything but I did. The enemies are wooden statues come to life, they creak and stagger, and it's possible to shoot off parts of them and have them still come at you

 

The slow pace means it doesn't feel like a shooter, nor is it constantly throwing enemies at you. There's a few puzzles, not loads and loads but usually something in each area. These are usually pretty meaty, but suffer from a couple of them not explaining what's expected of you. There's one I've solved, watched a couple of videos about, and edited my own gameplay video where I solved it, and I still don't understand it .

 

The other big gameplay element is the hunted scenes. At various points a giant statue/mannequin thing called Delores starts hunting you. Initially this is really tense, you can't hurt her, and at points all you can do is run and hope for the best. When it's like that it's great. When you get stuck in an area with her it kind of neuters her, or the waiting around for her to move on gets really boring.

 

All in all I enjoyed Crisol, it's not what I was expecting, but it's a solid game. My main complaints were things like the spot effects of the sounds being all over the place, leaking through rooms and sounding closer than they were. The other that there's a lot of nooks and corners in the game that have nothing in them. It's a shame there wasn't more reason to explore, or at least more interesting things to find than money