In Crisol: Theater of Idols, you fire bullets of your own blood at frenzied wooden puppets while exploring an island saturated with unpleasant Spanish folklore. As elevator pitches go, I like the immediacy of this one’s trade-offs. Blood? But I need that stuff inside my body to convey oxygen and vital nutrients to my trigger fingers. Surely there are other fluids I can fill the bullets with. I get that it would prompt the less sexy kind of revulsion, but Norman Reedus did get away with lobbing cannisters of piss and dribble in Death Stranding.
Crisol has a demo on Steam as part of this week’s Steam Nexus Festering. Being a fan of hideous marionettes and foetid folkliquorice, I was about to download it. But then my powerful journalistic brain kicked into gear, and I realised that I’d already tried Crisol at this year’s Summer Game Fest. My belated verdict from back then: the doomy circus setting and scarlet-gold aesthetics are appetising, but the controls are tanky in a way that is sometimes more annoying than thrilling. It’s also a bit creaky and forced in terms of scenario design.
Here is one such scenario, which also appears in the below trailer: at one point I had to pass through a tumbledown high street area patrolled by a colossal and unkillable jugger-puppet. This objective saw me alternating between crouch-walking through the mud and ducking into shops along the route to scoop up some consumables. Then I came to a gate I had to raise by laboriously turning a crank for a moment or two. Doing this locked me in place, unable to keep an eye on the street behind. You get the idea.
It took me three attempts, with the jugger-puppet chasing me back indoors each time. While hiding inside shops, I had the pleasure of staring absently at the creature’s crotch while it bellowed hoarse threats through windows that were surely large enough to admit its frame. After 20 seconds of this, the roided-up Guignol would go back to its patrol. I guess this kind of ponderous scripting makes sense when you’re actually held together by strings.
Cristol’s overall tone veers a bit uncertainly between Guillermo del Torrid art-housiness and House of the Dead. Still, I quite like the wincing restraint imposed by the literal plasma gun gimmick, and the associated pressure to delve around in the crannies for sources of blood besides yourself. I like the webbed and brassy lustre of the vampiric weapons, especially the shotgun, with its double-barrelled syringes. And I quite enjoy the puppets, even though they are functionally Resident Evil 4‘s villagers in their plodding relentlessness and susceptibility to limbshots. Find the demo here.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
