It is a pleasure to encounter games that make me remember my youth, and Crisol: Theater of Idols is the kind of game that makes me fondly remember the 90s. In a world of constantly-launching and failing live service games, forced multiplayer, battle passes, and other ways to milk the player dry, this is a single player game that you can play on your computer by yourself, which feels like a damn miracle to begin with. It’s also weird in the way that big titles aren’t allowed to be anymore, because they’re trying to be Lifestyle Products With A Subscription rather than video games you play and enjoy and then move on from.
Crisol: Theater of Idols
Developer: Vermila Studios
Price: $17.99
Platform: PC (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
Crisol: Theater of Idols is set in a very-alt Spain where there’s a god of the sun and a god of the sea and, of course, there’s a little bit of conflict there, but it still feels very Catholic, and as a cultural Catholic, I am a sucker for statues and dramatic art and cathedral, so it’s hitting all the right buttons for me. Your character is a loyal follower of The Sun going in to handle some business in the cathedral of The Sea, and by “handle some business,” I mean you have a pistol. And a knife. To start.
What follows is a very 90s-weird kinda shooter kinda survival game where you’re exploring alt-Catholic-basically-Spain. You’re relatively slow moving even with sprint on, which gives combat a much more plodding feel than the wall-jumping parkour-bouncing Looney Tunes-dodge rolling combat of the past several generations of shooters. And, oh, by the way, your pistol is powered by your own blood. If you run out of ammo, you have to drain blood from your body into the pistol. Of course, the enemies are also trying to get the blood out of your body, so that makes for quite the conundrum. That’s where “survival” comes in.
The enemies, oh, that’s another pretty weird thing about it. Most of them are animated wooden statues that kinda clunk-thunk towards you slowly, which doesn’t sound that ominous until you round a dark corner and there’s three of them with creepy painted faces clunk-thunking towards you. They hit really hard (there goes that blood/ammo) when they get close, and it also takes a fair few hits to put them down because, you see, being wooden constructs, they don’t have organs or anything, so shooting off their head just kinda slows them down.
Also, they relentlessly keep coming until you blast them to splinters, so imagine shooting the head and arms and torsos off the damn thing, and then it just starts kicking the hell out of you because it is a statue full of hate. Also, they can grab you and hurt you. And while there’s not a lot of variety to them, sometimes they do manage a new trick, such as, “Oh, what the fuck, now they’ve got crossbows?!” They are also creepy, with unsettling painted faces in the shadows and firelight of the game, so not only are you being murdered by a creepy statue, they’re weird looking.
Getting the shotgun makes it a little easier to clear them out, but still, the relentless, slow-grind horror of being trapped in a room with two partly-dismembered statues trying to murder you while you debate whether you drain more blood into your gun or just flail at them with your knife, that’s what this is all about. Weird shit.
But the “shooter” label is a misnomer because while there is shooting and survival, there’s also a lot of exploring in the levels, which are usually dark and mazelike, so rather than jumpscare horror, this is more “poking around a city where something terrible has happened, trying to piece together what that was, while occasionally some animated statues try to murder you, you are berated by God, and also there’s a Big Lady that would very much like to murder you as well.” (Yes, Big Lady fanciers, there is a Big Lady…of sorts).
So we can talk about the skill system where you trade in crow skulls and the power of slain statues to a cigarette smoking witch. We can talk about the voice acting, which ranges from pretty good to terrible. We can talk about the 90s-style protagonist, who never speaks in contractions and always says the extremely obvious things like “I have seen a battlefield, but never without corpses. Something is amiss here.” (You don’t say?).
Is Crisol: Theater of Idols Worth Playing?
But this is a game about aesthetics: giant cathedrals, statues, using your literal blood to fight the rival god, and figuring out what in the hell they are smoking over in Spain and where can I get some. (I actually suggest this writeup from Moises Taveras on Kotaku about just how Spanish it is and some of the storytelling influences). It’s a very 90s game: no microtransactions, no Live Service, just the kind of weird thing you used to pick up in the discount bin at Electronics Boutique and go “what the fuccccck”.
The Final Word
Play it for the aesthetics, the story, or to experience a world without Live Service Games.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
