Crisol: Theater of Idols Review

For a is a cheap game that was shadow dropped out of nowhere, made by a newly formed dev team that seems to have the very least double AA production values, Crisol is rather impressive for what it is. There are some major issues that prevent from being a I would highly recommend instead of midly but for what's on offer here, it's impressive.

To sum up Crisol simpily, it's a horror game leaning towards the action side where you use your health as ammo for your guns. It's like if Resident Evil 4 and Village combined together. It's an interesting concept but due to the early game hell that is at the start, this is more of a hinderance rather than something you can use reliably or strategically. This could be due to me playing on controller but enemies on normal take way too many shots to die. Your shots in the early game do little damage and I was in many situations where I was either out of ammo or was too low on it due to enemies taking away a large chunk of health when hitting you. Syringes were also very scarce and the knife also inflicts very little stun on top of the parry being unreliable. The final nail in the coffin is that enemies can do a scripted attack when you are at critical health but it's hard to tell how low does your hp have to be for the scripted attack to happen.

Add to how slow paced combat feels and because of how infrequent checkpointing can feel because of this, I lowered to easy. It is still strange how you can't lower the difficulty once you start the game even though the game also allows for custom difficulty but how I can use it effectively if I can't do it while playing the game?

Once I got to easy combat started to get more enjoyable, enemies took much less shots to die, the knife felt more reliable to use and I had more HP to draw blood for ammo for the firearms. Guns also feel very nice and punchy and enemies also have location based damage like both various of Resident Evil. I started to get into the groove of combat more.

There are some annoying parts like traversing parts of levels with a stalker monster coming after you. Reaching it's lowest point in Chapter 2 where you need to sneak past her, kill flying enemies and archers WHILE she can hit you while also being blindsighted by mines when running away.

It also doesn't help that audio cues for mines and cameras are minimal leading to plenty of surprise out of nowhere attacks. Dead Space 2 did it far better when it's explosive alien husks.

After all that, the game gets noticeably easier with so many syringes, healing and ammo that it hard to feel geniunely threatened by anything. The final level can feel long and tedious due to how many puzzles and combat encounters you have to get to before fighting the final boss.

There is also too much of that infamous yellow paint. I try not to complain about it but Crisol has a bad habbit in putting them in obvious spots where by the time you interact with the level, you'll already know that's the only places you can go. The levels are not super open nor is there any platforming to warrant this.

To give some praise, the story is rather decent. Not amazing but the main character has a decent amount of personality and he does slowly change and learn humlity throughout the game despite being hostile towards everyone at first. Not amazing but it's solid. The story doesn't rely on notes as much as other horror games do.

Overall, decent game considering the price and the devs who made it even if I had a lot of issues with it.