Hey look, a blog post! Yeah, I got rained out of my snowboarding trip, which is a huge bummer, but at least I get to play more DigiPen games. Let's see what's in store for me today.
Crystal Nebula is one of those games with big ideas and little results. You can definitely tell that the creators of this game were trying to be revolutionary and certainly could have been if they carried on until the game was done. I get the sense that somewhere along the line, someone said "screw it, it's good enough." I know this feeling all too well. When you start a project, there's this little glimmer in your eye...a glimmer of hope and joy that slowly fades into darkness as your beloved project takes its toll on your sanity...
*ahem* right, back to the game.
In Crystal Nebula, you play as a little yellow circle whose objective is to get all the stars around him to stop pestering him. You do that by blowing them to smithereens. Your primary weapon is asteroids that are strewn about the levels. If a star and an asteroid are in the same vicinity, you use LMB to suck the asteroid into orbit and launch it at the star. The game then tells you to suck up the star's remains in order to grow stronger (hey, this is starting to remind me of Critical Mass...). Of course, the game never tells you how to do that. I had Critical Mass on the brain, so I tried RMB to no avail. It was only after madly pounding randomly on my keyboard that I discovered that the magical button is SPACE. Why was it okay to tell us how to shoot asteroids but not okay to tell us how to suck up star essence? Whatever...
This game's main flaw is how unfinished it seems. At first, I thought the game consisted of only the tutorial level because the prophesied teleporter that was supposed to take me to the next level never came. It was only after thoroughly scouring the level that I found a blue octagon that looked a bit like a deformed star. Out of sheer curiosity, I touched it and was zapped to the next level. Even past that, there are a lot of aspects about the game that don't seem to make sense. Until the third level, I was under the impression that enemies couldn't damage you. Then I got to level 3 and was almost immediately greeted by a "you lose" screen. I still have no idea what I did wrong, but I have a perfect idea of what this game did wrong. Nothing is conveyed properly.
The big, revolutionary idea that the creators were trying to support through all this bad game design isn't even a very good one. Attacking with the environment only works if the environment is generous enough with ammo. Remember the gravity gun from Half-Life 2? Remember how fun that was? That's because everywhere you looked, there was a saw blade or an exploding barrel to throw. In Crystal Nebula, there's no variety: only asteroids; the asteroids are not as common as they should be, leading to many cases where you are sure to find yourself trying to escape an onslaught of enemy fire, desperately searching for an asteroid that you'll probably waste anyway because of how poor the aim assist is.
All in all, I didn't have fun with Crystal Nebula. I say give it a miss, but that's just me. Until next time, stay functional.
Links
Crystal Methbula: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=1647
