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Crystal Clearly Superior

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 66 / 71
Date: February 06, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Pros:

1. Beautiful, immersive, atmospheric worlds. Monumental architecture. Eerie music. Breathtaking cut-scenes. Ugly, creepy arch-villain.

2. For the most part, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to solve the puzzles.

3. Great high-tech tools to use, impressive vehicles to drive and fly, creative use of everyday objects. When you pick items up, they zoom off the screen into your inventory with a whooshing sound. The inventory feature is exceptionally easy to use.

Cons:

1. Some locations are too dark and murky. I suggest that for the very dark places, you might want to adjust the brightness/contrast on your monitor to make it easier to locate the hidden goodies.

2. Some mechanical levers/controls respond correctly only if you move the mouse VERY slowly.

3. The game crashed a couple of times, and I never was able to get autoplay to work.

Bottom line: A superior, very entertaining adventure marred slightly by minor glitches.

Good First Attempt

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 16
Date: May 04, 2000
Author: Amazon User

It's been a while since I have picked up a Myst clone that has kept me interested. (Riven was the last, and it was also by Cyan.) While the game is sometimes slow and unintuitive, Dreamcatcher Interactive shows promise in this genre of games. Many of the bugs mentioned by afore reviewers have been ironed out, and some limited keyboard commands have been added for saving and quitting. The puzzels range from simple to confounding, and the worlds are well rendered. The only element that is missing is a sense of culture and identity to these worlds, but someone may not necessarily miss that in a game. It's only twenty bucks SRP, and worth the ride if you are a persistant and patient gamer. Diehard fans of 3D shooters may loose their patience, but people who love to delve into unexplored worlds should find The Crystal Key a satisfying experience.

does not warrant the bad reviews

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: March 31, 2001
Author: Amazon User

lets start by saying im far too old for computer games, but riven and deus ex are my favorites and the standards by which i compare others. i bought crystal key (ck} months ago because of the box but didnt do it until recently because the reviews indicated it was a waste of time. this was wrong. i have an imac and the game never crashed or had "mechanical" problems, never was too dim to find objects, did not necessitate boosting brightness, was not slow or buggy. although the graphics were grainy at times, the pictures were pretty and the puzzles were engrossing, though a couple were far fetched. people complained of a stupid ending, but the disposition of ozgar was quite logical and clever. incidentally myst and riven had stupid endings too, but they are still great games. the point is getting through ck, not the ending. its the satisfaction you get from seeing a clue finally pay off. ck was not short; myst and riven took 3 days and one week respectively, and ck was in line. in summary, ck is all about puzzles and working through to the conclusion. the game runs well and the visuals are fine. its also cheap, so if you like myst types, give it a try.

Get it straight.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: July 25, 2000
Author: Amazon User

For all you people who have played Myst and Riven you cannot compair this or any other game to them, because they are in a league of their own. Never-the-less this game would be a great introduction game to more complex games like Riven. I suggest that if this game did'nt meet your expectations, but you liked the graphics and the puzzles, try Myst. Then go on to Riven and you will not be disapointed at all, and if you are then games like this are not for you. There are some things about this game that could be better, like when you are walking the lighting is fine, but when you stop it gets dark. That is all I have found so far that I don't like about this game.

A spectacular romp!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: September 16, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I thought this was a georgous game, the graphics splendid, the storyline logical, and the puzzles not so impossible that one must have a walk-thru always at hand. The game's ending was a mixed bag, on one hand it seemed as if the developers were facing some sort of deadline and just cut the story off and closed out, the congratulatory message was an unsatisfactory ending. On the other hand, the final disposition of Ozgar, the villain of the piece, is a deft touch.

I have read a good deal of commentary on how this game is buggy, crashes often, and in general is difficult to run. I have a mid-level machine, a Compaq Presario 1692, a Lap-Top, and while I got the feeling it was all the machine could do to keep the game running, I had only one actual problem, in putting some books on a bookcase early on in the game. Even so, on the next try I was able do do what I needed to, and proceed. Some of the transitions from one scene to the next would hang up for a few seconds, but there were no crashes or real difficulties; I never had to download any patches or anything of this sort.

Antoinetta

A Good Puzzle Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: January 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

There will always be games with gameplays similar to Myst's.Some of these "Myst Clones" are terrible, but The Crystal Key is one of the better ones.
In the Game, Earth has intercepted a message from an alien race (the Arkonians) that an evil being called Ozgar has been defeated(but not destroyed). This being appears in Earth's skies several days later, and wreacks havoc with sattelites that disturb Earth's infrastructure. You are sent in a ship to the place where the message came from.
The story is not the best, but pretty good, although its a bit hard to trace in some places. Most of the puzzles are well done and possible to solve but some can be so difficult that it may take a long time to solve them. Many are inventory based, and these are handled well.
The worlds featured in the game are beutiful and fun to explore. The graphics are good (but a little fuzzy in some places). The backround music and sound effects fit with the mood well, the music is lonely sounding, beutiful and mournful, although in a few places there is none at all. The navigation is done by point-and-clicking to puzzles and hotspots. There is almost no character interaction aside from holograms, attacks by Ozgar's guards and shots of Ozgar. However, the diologue in the holograms helps you understand the story and makes you feel for the people. All of the worlds have an abandoned feel to them.
There are a few cons, the ending is a little abrubt and doesnt answer any unanswered questions, the disc switching is annoying and there are some annoying dead ends you can come to. But on the whole it is a well done game.
Graphics:4/5 Interface:3/5 Gameplay:4/5 Intelligence:4/5 Sound effects:3/5 Music:4/5 Characters and Voice Acting:3/5 Overall:4/5

The Crystal Key! (well Done)

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: April 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I really liked the game. The puzzles are hard, but thats the reason why we buy the games. To let are minds work! But the game Puzzles might be to hard on some people, so i think you should give out HINTS or maybe some cheats for people not to get frustrated, and maybe they'll buy more of your games.

Crystal Key

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: December 11, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Pretty good game. I would probably even play it again. I do usually cheat by getting walkthroughs for any pc games I play, but even with the walkthroughs, it still had some tough, challenging spots.

An Absorbing, Cohesive Experience

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: September 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

A colony has suddenly evacuated its cities in order to avoid the wrath of an angry Ozgar. The player's object is to locate Ozgar and stop him before he destroys this planet. The colonists have developed a remarkable technology for hypertravel from one world to another. Through the course of the game, the player gains control of this technology in order to find and defeat Ozgar.

By virtue of this narrative, the player is afforded the opportunity to jump freely (after gaining the technology) from any of four worlds. The worlds are quite disparate and very beautifully rendered. It does take some time and effort to obtain the technology, but the process of doing so is engaging, interesting, logical, and rewarding.

There are very few non-player character interactions. In fact, in most cases an encounter with another character usually means trouble--some encounters result in a sudden "game over". This game, consequently, is a very solitary experience, with very little dialogue and with most clues being found intuitively and through exploration. I enjoyed this aspect of the game very much. Some reviewers have felt that the sudden "game over" encounters were unnecessary and distracting. Perhaps, but if you save often (as you should anyway), you can easily return to the gameplay, and the game makes it fairly clear fairly quickly that you should avoid ALL beings. Once the first serious encounter is made, the player is fairly well clued in that nothing about these worlds is particularly friendly.

The scenery is just splendid. The worlds are very different--one lush and green, one arid and dry, one partially submerged underwater (and in which the player enters one building and goes several floors down beneath the surface of the water outside). The player's progress is extremely linear--most things must be done in a particular order, and in some cases the player may be significantly hindered if she has missed some element. However, the ease with which the player may jump from world to world more than makes up for the linearity. Exploration is multidimensional in this regard.

Toward the end, I did find it necessary to go to a walkthrough online. The puzzles became to some degree inhibitive rather than contributing to the game experience. Once solved (by cheating a little), the storyline and graphics were rewarding enough for me to forgive myself my indiscretion. The final puzzle, I must agree with other reviewers, is unnecessarily convoluted and the end is rather seriously truncated. In this way, I was a little disappointed.

I give this game four stars for its creative way of mitigating the problem of linearity by giving the player free rein (after gaining the technology) to explore several beautiful worlds; for its inventive artwork in rendering the worlds; for its pensive, solitary feel; and for its science fictional (as opposed to fantasy) concept. I give this game no more than four stars because I sense that it was cut short, because the linearity sometimes interferes with how much exploration the player may engage in each world, and because I felt it necessary to turn to walkthroughs in order to complete the game. All in all, I come away from The Crystal Key feeling mainly that I spent my time well in these worlds.

Falls Short

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 26 / 28
Date: March 14, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game, in the tradition of Myst and Riven, has appealing environments, reasonably challenging puzzles and a solid storyline, and is ultimately fun to play. Unlike Myst and Riven, Crystal Key offers a 3-D environment to navigate via Quicktime movies rather than clicking through two-dimensional snapshots. There are some disappointments, however. Graphics quality is uneven, and while I avoided serious difficulties the software does seem to contain some bugs. The soundtrack has some pleasing snippets of music, but clearly the producers didn't bother putting together much of a musical score. The interface, while easy to use, reveals some solutions through its highlighting of "hot spots" on the screen. The end of the game lacks the payoff sequence you'd hope to see after spending all those hours working through the puzzles and saving the world. Ultimately, one has some sense that this is basically an unfinished product, but at the price offered, its not a bad value.

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