Crisol: Theater of Idols aims to blend Bioshock with Resident Evil-style gameplay in a horror FPS influenced by classical Spanish folklore. I crawled through abandoned streets, popping zombie-like enemies with guns that used my blood for bullets, ducking in and out of derelict storefronts looking for the ever-reliable genre staple bolt cutters, and dodging powerful enemies along the way. While Crisol showed more to set itself apart from stalwarts in the genre during my hands-on demo, its weapon designs and distinct aesthetic in particular left me interested to see more.
Exploring a horrific, reimagined version of Spain called Hispania, Crisol’s world and character designs blew me away – especially the guns. Here, your blood is your health and your ammo, so reloading each gun triggers a spine-tingling reaction like when your handgun’s handle bristles with little needles, drawing blood from your hand, or when needles stick out of the base of your double-barrelled shotgun’s barrel, waiting to trade health for survival.
This push-and-pull forces you to keep tabs on both to keep yourself from wasting either and landing yourself in a sticky situation. You can pick up healing syringes to help restore ammo, but Crisol also encourages you to drain the blood from dead bystanders, killed by your mysterious foes, to heal and reload.
The gun designs themselves are cool too; gilded with red accents, they add a gothic pop of color that stands out, but doesn’t clash with the environments I saw in my short demo. The environments, on the other hand, didn’t have nearly as much character to them. While the trailer promises some pretty cool-looking set pieces, the dark streets of Hispania I wandered didn’t offer much deviation from the norm. That’s surprising considering just how well-designed the enemies and guns are.
Crisol doesn’t waste any time throwing you into the action. Within seconds of picking up the controller, lurching, puppet-like enemies stumbled towards me. Low light revealed unsettling details in their mask-like faces as they approached, eventually collapsing under my gunfire. Each enemy I encountered (or at least each one I was able to kill) reacted based on which part of their body I shot; crawling headless after I kneecapped them, and popped their heads. Both of the blood-soaked firearms I tried have an older feel to them, more like the oomph of the original BioShock than the punchy crack of the guns found in most contemporary shooters, though Crisol’s trailer (and weapon wheel) promise a seemingly diverse arsenal of sanguine shooters.
After making my way through a few city blocks, absorbing blood from dead bodies and popping zombie-like critters blocking my path, I came across a locked gate with a winch. Locked by a padlock with a chain – classic! Like clockwork, I set out looking for the bolt cutters I’d found in half a dozen survival horror games before. But before I could start looking, some kind of gigantic, arcane cyborg – a towering mass of blood-soaked bones and clanking machinery with a mask of a woman’s face crying blood – picked me up and tossed me around.
The beast chased me down the street to the window (conveniently) of the hardware store, but couldn’t touch me once I dove in. Safe for now, I grabbed the bolt cutters from the back storeroom and every coin in the cash register and set out to snip the chains that kept me from safety. But the beast was back at my heels practically the moment my feet hit the dirt road, hurling threats my way as it hunted me down.
Crouching to minimize the noise I made, I found a shortcut through a fish store, making a bunch of noise at one end before cutting through the store, snipping the chains, and cranking away at the winch to open the gate in front of me. I heard the creature thudding towards me, and just pushed away in the quick-time event faster, hoping I could squeeze through instead of running back to cover. The gate opened with just enough time to spare; I rushed out of the courtyard to safety, the gate snapping shut before my assailant could catch me.
This puzzle-like stealth section, though very simple, added a lot to my demo. I can see the ways this could evolve into a tense blend of stealth and shooting if I eventually need to dodge bigger enemies at the same time as popping the smaller, stoppable ones with my sanguine arsenal. I hope Crisol doubles down on these two different kinds of survival horror to produce layers of tension between the blood-for-bullets combat and high-stakes stealth in the full release.
While I enjoyed my demo well enough, I felt like I hadn’t seen anything new beyond the Bloodborne-like, health-for-ammo trade-off and some really cool weapon and enemy designs. I’m sure puzzles and progression will begin to differentiate themselves from Resident Evil as the game gets more complex. But I didn’t get to see much of that in this demo, which was clearly very early in the campaign. Still, I have a feeling Crisol: Theater of Idols will be worth checking out for its distinct take on survival horror with a Spanish flair.
