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The Crystal Key  Released: 1999 Manufacturer: Dreamcatcher In Brief: Annoying Riven clone with not much to recommend it.
Dreamcatcher seems to be in a bit of a rut. First they put out the Myst clone Lightbringer, in which you fly in a spaceship to a strange planet where you try to figure out things, and now there's The Crystal Key, in which you do exactly the same thing. Dreamcatcher's first order of business should be to get a new storyline.
A lot of people hate Riven: The Sequel to Myst and Myst, two games that I love, and playing The Crystal Key makes me see clearly the objections to these slideshow-with-puzzles games. Riven works because it did everything well, but this game style is unforgiving: If not done well, it's just kind of boring.
Like Comer, The Crystal Key is so much a clone that it is perfectly fair to do a straight comparison with the games that inspired it, so let's compare The Crystal Key with Riven.
This game is not as pretty as Riven. This may be in part a result of using Quicktime so we can view a scene in any direction. Perhaps it's easier to make a series of pretty pictures than create an entire pretty landscape. But the colors are muted and the entire game is very dark: If you have no windows in your room you'll get a better gaming experience than I did.
The sound is also not as good. Riven and Myst were painstaking with sound, and while The Crystal Key has the requisite wind howling over the desert and birds singing in the trees, it does not bring you into the game.
(Just to make sure I wasn't being unfair, I installed Riven and played it for five minutes, and it was as good as I recalled.)
As for the puzzles, well, they aggravated me. I was often stuck because I missed something, and this was either because the view was so dark that something important was barely visible (something that happened a couple of times in Riven, but much more often here) or because an important object was in an out of the way location where it was easy to overlook (some items were at the very bottom of the screen and barely visible). Few of the puzzles were genuinely difficult, and yet I got stuck several times because I just couldn't see something or couldn't find something. Unlike Riven, many of The Crystal Key's puzzles are inventory based, and few were really ingenious.
The Crystal Key is a short game, I was startled when I suddenly got a message telling me I'd finished the game (there is no big final cut scene). I said "that's it?" out loud. There seems to be only about half a game there.
This is not to say that The Crystal Key is a terrible game. There are a few interesting puzzles and one fun surprise, and the visuals do have some charm, and would probably be more charming if I could have turned up the gamma level. But it's not really much of a game. -- Charles Herold -1999 Glitches:If you go to the main menu to save, the only way to get back to your game is to then reload it!
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