Crystal Goddess Review

Introduction

Crystal Goddess is a side-scrolling platformer that was developed by Otterside Games and published by Gamuzumi. It was released in October 2022.

*Disclaimer: A code was provided by the publisher for the sake of this review. This in no way affects the review as my thoughts are mine and mine alone.

Review

One nice relaxing day, you decide to take a nice warm bath. As you’re stepping into the tub, Violent Vixen, your arch nemesis bursts into your house and steals all five of your power crystals. This will not stand! So you have to put your bath on hold, get your clothes back on, and give chase to get back what is rightfully yours!

The story is non-existent. There’s no dialogue anywhere, no lore to add to the world, no silly cutscenes after you fight the boss. Nothing. The most you get for text in the game are the signs that feed you the tutorial. Even after I beat the last boss, there was maybe 30 seconds of it.

The entire game consists of five levels. As you work your way to the end of each level to defeat Violet Vixen’s comrades, you have to jump and float and fight your way there. Though the levels are very straight forward, there are a few side paths you can take during them. Some lead you to cards that give you a still image of a nude woman, while others might send you to a lady in need of help. Usually they’re tied up by vines or being harassed by monsters….unless you’re playing on PC, in which case…well it’s usually a bit more risque, and once I saw a screenshot of it I’m not sure how I felt. Either way these usually give you healing items or a heart container to grow your health.

Another thing you find in the levels are stars. These stars are then used to upgrade your crystals. If you find both stars in every level, you’ll have every crystal maxed out, giving you more fire power. Each one also has its own style of attack. One is a straight forward shot, while another might be a lob shit and the projectile bounces around for a bit before it either hits an enemy, or disappears entirely. My favourite was from the green crystal where it has a multi shot. If you got close enough to enemies, they’d usually die immediately. Each crystal also helps with platforming in its own way. Whether it’s to let you briefly float in the air to get over chasms, or make a platform to jump up higher. These were only ever useful though in the level after you got them. So the green crystal for platforming felt useless later on after level three.

The levels themselves are brutal the further you get into them and the checkpoints are so far apart. If you die, you end up going back to the checkpoint, which makes sense. It really helps you learn the levels. But when you have so much coming at you over and over again, it becomes an issue. This doesn’t help with my biggest issue in the game either. If you fall down a hole in a section of a level, that ENTIRE section RESTARTS. All those dead enemies? Alive again. You better remember where they were so they don’t kill you like they did last time. Sure you don’t lose health when you fall down a bit, but I’d rather that than the eniea respawning and you being at the start.

The only bug I really had in the game is the crystal selection not working right. When you get more than one, you hit the triggers on the controller to swap between them. But for some reason, I had a bug where no matter which one I hit, it only swapped between two, when I had all five available to me. This was fixed simply restarting the game, but when it hit out of nowhere it really screwed up my progress.

Rating

Pros:

• Fun Platforming
• Crystals All Have Different Attacks

Cons:

• Areas Restart When You Fall In A Pit
• Crystals Feel Useless Eventually

Summary

For a platformer, this game is pretty fun and challenging at the end of the day. But it has so many things wrong with it, and no silly story so there’s no motivation to what you’re doing. Sure there’s nudity, but what does that really bring to the table when the rest of the game falls so flat? I’d say wait for a sale and you won’t be too disappointed.

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Game & Developer Information

Developer Website: Otterside Games
Developer Socials: Twitter
Publisher Website: Gamuzumi
Publisher Socials: Twitter