The Crystal Key

by Dreamcatcher

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00002EIZN
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: November 26, 1999
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,425 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Crystal Key is a first-person science fiction adventure of alternate worlds, holographic communication, and planetary survival. Gameplay is similar to Myst, with lush graphics and challenging puzzles.

Your planet, whose origins are never specified, has intercepted a space-radio transmission warning of the impending arrival of an alien master of evil: Ozgar. The transmission reveals that the only people to have ever thwarted Ozgar's fiendish advances live on the mysterious planet Arkonia. Soon after your planet decodes the message, Ozgar arrives and starts doing his evil overlord thing, disrupting the ecosystem, changing the tides, and throwing the planet into tectonic upheaval with superpowerful magnetic satellites. The only way you can save your world is by finding the Arkonians.

Your search leads you through various worlds, reachable by use of a Crystal Key artifact and mysterious Arkonian Portal Technology. Finely detailed puzzles and limited character interaction drive the adventure forward, climaxing in the inevitable battle-of-wits encounter with the malevolent Ozgar.

Crystal Key's puzzles are inventive, but the sparse QuickTime video sequences are buggy, as is the game in general--be sure to save often. Gameplay is often incredibly slow, a result of sluggish load times and random lockups. But if you can tolerate these technical annoyances, you'll discover Crystal Key unlocks an engaging adventure. --Madeleine Miller

Pros:

• Myst-like gameplay
• Cool space-rover rides
• Challenging puzzles

Cons:

• Nonreliable software and graphics
• Simplistic story line

Product Description

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Crystal Clearly Superior, February 5, 2000

By 

rw9 (Stony Brook, New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crystal Key (CD-ROM)

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.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Falls Short, March 14, 2000

By 

Richard P. Blessen (Wayne, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crystal Key (CD-ROM)

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.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not nearly what I was hoping for, August 11, 2000

By 

Al Keidis (Columbia City, IN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crystal Key (CD-ROM)

Because the box showed shots that made it look a lot like Myst or Riven, I thought, "Hey, this looks cool!".

Unfortunately, I forgot the adage "Don't judge a book by its cover".

Even though the graphics we quite nice, and the game utilized the 360-degree environment which was pioneered by Presto Studios in "The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy Of Time", this game really lacked in a plot and story.

Sure, there's puzzles that require a lot of thought. By the time you get to the end, though, your first thought is "That's IT?!?!!? Boy, that wasn't worth it!". A very disappointing ending.

I played this game on a fairly up-to-date PC, and it never made the computer crash, but I did have to go to Dreamcatcher's website twice to download two programs that are important in the playing. Kinda stupid...as other reviewers noted, they shouldn't have released a game with so many bugs.