Crisol is the Spanish word for Crucible, a word we all know from reading Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem Witch Trials in seventh-grade English. I believe Webste🐬r’s dictionary defines crucible as “some really messed up stuff that happ൲ened a long time ago”, which is a nice segue into Crisol: Theater of Idols’ dark fairytale world that blends Spanish history, folklore, and religion into a delightfully macabre survival horror.
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My hands-on preview of Crisol took me through the winding abandoned streets of Tormentosa, an island in the fictional country of Hispania where b♚loodthirsty living statues lurk around every corner. Lucky for Gabriel, a soldier on a holy mission from a divine sun god, his own blood is the perfect weapon against the monsters of this world.
Beware The Bullet-Shaped Blood
Crisol’s blood mechanic is at the core of both its story and combat. Blood is the most valuable resource in Crisol. In fact, other than the money you’ll use to buy items and upgrades, blood is the only resource in Crisol. It represents both life and death🧸: the ability to heal, and the ability to kill.
The trailer spells it out pretty clearly, but if you haven’t seen it. Here’s how it works: when you reload any weapon, be it a pistol, shotgun, or bolt ꧒action rifle, you load the gun with your own blood, which then coalesces into bullets. Instead of consuming ammo to reload, you consume chunks of your own health bar. In a 🍸sense, every bullet you fire hurts you, and managing that self-harm tight rope is what Crisol is all about, both thematically and mechanically.
It’s a rather ingenious way to reimagine a shooter, not only because it creates a whole new dynamic between the player and their health bar, but also because it helps to streamline a lot of the common pain points in survival 😼shooters by keeping you immersed in the action rather than managing menus and ☂inventory space. A single vial of blood is both a health pack and a magazine for your gun, and you can use it however you see fit with just a simple button press.
It’s also just extremely cool. Blood in Crisol has this living quality to it, almost like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Venom’s symbiote. You can absorb blood from corpses, which f🐻lows off their body and into yours. Blood can be used to change and reshape things, including your weapons, which all have a unique reload animation that involves draining the blood from your arm into their chamber. This is absolutely not a game for anyone afraid of needles, but if you’re not squeamish, these are some of the coolest reload animati♊ons you’ll ever see.
You Got Your Bioshock In My Resident Evil
Crisol has a pretty high concept premise that I wasn’t fully able to unpack during the short demo. It seems there is a pantheon of living gods in this world, as a divine soldier for the sun god, you’re on a mission to cleanse Tormentosa and deal with a rival god who’s gotten a little too big for their britches. I think of it kind of like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Moon Knight, but instead o🀅f getting eternal life from Khonshu, you get blood bullets that make bad guys explode with holy fire when you shoot them.
For the most part, gameplay is standard survival horror, which isn’t a complaint at all. I explored the dilapidated streets of Tormentosa, taking out every department store mannequin that made a move at me while carefully managing my health, until I inevitably hit a dead end. Sometimes it was a closed gate that needed a crank to open it, sometimes it was a door with a chain wrapped around it. Diving into the side streets and shops in search of key items is exactly what I expect from a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil-like, and I was glad to see Cris🎶ol coloring inside the lines🔯 here when it has so many other big new ideas.
I eventually found bolt cutters that let me remove the chains, and a crank that let m🙈e open the gates. This provided me with both new places to explore, and new routes connected to previously-explored sections of the city. Towards the end of the demo, I found myself being pursued by a horrible monster made of fle♕sh, statue, and machine, who either had a crush on me or wanted to kill me, or both. I had to jump through windows and hide under desks to avoid the creature, then run off in the other direction when it had its back turned. Again, classic Resident Evil cat-and-mouse stuff here, but it worked.
Crisol is an impressive looking game made in one of my favorite genres, but its biggest appeal, much like Bioshock before it, is learning about its strange and beautiful world. What’s the deal with all these statues? Where have all the people gone? Why are there vials of mermaid blood everywhere? Did I mention the mermaids? Spanish deve🙈loper Vermila Studios has a strong vision for its dark fantasy worl🀅d that I’m dying to explore - even if it's going to cost me some of my own blood to see it.
Crisol: Theater of Idols
- Developer(s)
- Verm𝔍ila💦 Studios
- Publisher(s)
- 🌜 Blumhouse Games
