Crystal Key 2
Ages: Everyone

This game wastes no time in getting into the action. A portal opens, a woman tries to speak to you and is grabbed back into the portal leaving a diary. Our hero, Call, reading her diary finds out that the zombie-type sickness that is pervading his world has also struck other worlds. Looking for a solution he pursues her through the portal Call's adventure will take him to various outposts to find a race of called Merari who hold the secret to and perhaps the solution to halt this destruction. Meribah he interacts with different people to get information, plays a couple of games, checks out the market stalls and finally gets a jetpack to travel further out into the desert. There are many puzzles to solve -- more ecological than mechanical before he reaches the conclusion of his quest. The final scenes with the Merari are some of the most beautiful I have seen. Does he save the worlds and find the girl -- of course.

Reviewed by: Editor - 06/05

From the title of the game, I can only assume that there was an original Crystal Key. However, since I have never played it, I cannot make any comparisons to the original game. When this game started up, I assumed it would be a Myst hack; run around the areas searching for clues that will ultimately lead you to a final puzzle that will determine the fate of whatever world you're playing in. And I wasn't far off the target. However, this game has something more then Myst had; the world has more vividness and color, there are actually people to talk to, and there is actually a plot. It also doesn't have the tension that the original Myst had. While you felt compelled to finish your quest, there wasn't the same sense of urgency. What I did like about the change was that there wasn't that eerie quiet the pervaded Myst. When you first start out the game, you are in an abandoned city. You find a portal that lead to "mysterious places", and the girl that pops out of it warns you of danger before being dragged off by strange aliens. One of the things I didn't like about this game were the graphics for the people. The first man you interact with looks more like a garden gnome then a person, and the other people you meet look very fake and rigid. However, the backgrounds were amazing. I almost gasped out loud when I first saw them. There is a kind of unearthly beauty in these kinds of fantasy lands, and this game carried off the ethereal quality a lot better then some I have seem. Like Myst, this game is a single-player game. There is no option for two players, and even if there was one, there would be no point, since there is only one main character. I would say this game is for everyone, although younger children might have a bit of trouble with the logic aspect of the game. It's a game of mostly puzzles, and small children are, sadly, not very good at those. I did not find any bugs within the game, which is a good sign. Bugs often make or break a game, and this one had none as far as I could tell. I feel that the developers would have done better with the basic plot, but as a whole I found this game entertaining. I would rate it a 7 out of 10. But, at the end of the day, this game was much too like Myst for my liking.

Reviewed by: Vivian B. - 06/05