The Kristal

 Amiga 1500, The Kristal (1989) game

One of those many titles I was never able to complete as a child. I've since come to believe that any game I dedicate sufficient time and effort to, with the addition of an adult brain, I can conquer. This was the first game that made me doubt such a belief. It's just too vague and unfair. You have to ask exactly the right question at exactly the right time, if you miss something there's no going back. You can die at any moment without warning, simply by walking towards an area you've never been before. Not only can I see why I never completed it back in the day, I gave up on it in the present, something I hate to do and very rarely happens. But I was fed up with wandering around not knowing what to do to the point where it was either refer to a walkthrough or pack it in. I thought I'd just read one bit and that would hopefully jog me along and I could work out the rest for myself, but no. I realised I'd probably need to follow the entire thing and this was the point I had to call it quits, because that's not playing a game. If you need someone to lead you then you may as well go and play something else. Over the years I've had many frustrations (often in 'Zelda' games where I finally got to the point where I had to get a solution to a problem or puzzle otherwise I was never going to get any further), but I'm generally well versed enough now that I can work out the kind of solution its going to be from the kind of problem it is. But in this case the margin for error was far too wide, so I abandoned the game.

Taken outside of its utter frustration I quite liked it, on the whole. It looks nice, with a point-and-click adventure style of presentation, except it's all controlled by the Joystick. There isn't much sound or music, being a product of the late 80s, but it was otherwise rather accessible. It combines an interface of chatting to characters and finding items that may be of use, to space travel on your ship (a literal pirate ship with sails, cannons, etc!), to side-on sword-fighting to build up your stats. It's colourful, in characters as well as in visuals, and it has a voiceover from the great Patrick Moore who was in no way averse to getting involved in state-of-the-art popular culture (he was also the face of the Games Master in that TV show of the 90s). Just the fact there's a chunk of digitised speech in the opening was impressive for its time, but there's also an exciting sense of being able to travel to other planets and have that kind of freedom that had otherwise only been dreamed of. So I can see why I kept hold of it all these years. And why I was happy to finally go back to it now the Amiga 1500 is out of the loft and kicking up steam again. The frustrations, however, come early: it doesn't recognise the second disk drive so there's a lot of disk-swapping (four game disks and one save disk). The sword-fights are arduous and take a while to get the hang of. There's no way to gauge progress, being what appears to be nonlinear in nature: you can visit any of the planets, but several of them kill you instantly. Others feature a succession of sword-fights and the finding of a treasure.

There are really only two places you can actually visit properly and converse with the inhabitants, but this interaction is so frustrating - so many things you say are fobbed off (ask anything about where they're going and they say they go with the flow; ask about something and they'll question what 'it' is or 'that,' there isn't a good sense of a conversation). It just seems to be a mental dead end where you have to get the exact question that will unlock something in them - like Gloop, for example, I just happened to ask the right question so I got an invitation to the Kring's palace, but otherwise you'd be wandering for hours not knowing what to do or where to go. Worse, they refuse to repeat themselves, so if you've forgotten what was said it's no good going back later and asking again! In the days of text adventures where the imagination was all, this would have stood out as a bold new direction for gaming and I can imagine how revolutionary it would seem. But I suspect the game is a lot shallower and shorter than it at first seems, based on keeping you guessing rather than engaging you in the story and action which is extremely off-putting, even to a retrogamer of many years such as myself. Text-based games were before even my time, the only one I ever remember playing was 'The Hobbit' on the Commodore 64 and even then I could barely get out of the Hobbit hole. Text just leaves things too open, too much a case of repetitive trial and error, and while no doubt plenty of people enjoyed the literary challenge, someone raised on largely 90s games onwards isn't sufficiently excited to be drawn in.

It's good that you can save your progress, but even in that regard it's very basic: you only have one file per disk so there's no way to save multiple points and go back to earlier saves (unless you have multiple save disks), so there's a good chance you'll end up having to start at the beginning again if you miss something, not very satisfying when you've already beefed up your character's attributes through fighting or collecting/buying items to enhance your abilities. It comes across as pernickety and restrictive which doesn't fit the overriding comedic tone. Games tended not to be taken seriously in those days and I'm all for comedy, but then adding in instant death makes you feel the game is laughing at you rather than being something for you to laugh at! I may sound whiny and weak, no doubt every gaming generation thinks the succeeding ones are weedy and ineffectual for having so many developments that make games easier as time goes on, but a game is there to win you over, not push you away, and with this one I found myself really unhappy playing it. When you do master swordsmanship and win your first duel it does of course give you a sense of achievement, but it also doesn't seem to add anything to the game - it increases your stats when you win, but what good does that do?

Obviously I'm writing from the perspective of someone that hasn't finished the game, something I wouldn't normally do, but it's a game that has loomed long in the memory, and when I've gone back and conquered so many old games from the Amiga over recent years, coming to one I couldn't crack has been a sore experience. As I've said, it looks very nice for its age, colourful, detailed backgrounds, fun character design (Hoota, Gloop, and a host of varied people), and a good impression of a unique universe. It seems to promise so much only to take it away at a moment's notice. I thought I had the patience, the endurance to take on most games, but this one beat me into submission, and not in a challenging way, in a frustrating way that discouraged and resigned me to non-completion simply because it wasn't fun. Will I go back and have another go? I'm undecided, but there are so many other good Amiga games to revisit (not to mention those of so many other systems), there's no particular urgency to keep going with this, even on a rainy day.

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