I've been replying to some valid comments in this thread, so check that out for more.

Crystal Project is one of the best games I've ever seriously considered refunding. It has a super fun chassis but has some damning flaws that need to be addressed. I again find myself wishing steam had an "I sort of recommend this" option.

Full disclosure: I was gifted this game by my best friend, not the developer. I was not paid to say anything here.


Crystal Project is both one of the best and one of the worst turn-based strategy titles I've ever played; I've played a lot.

To say Crystal Project is a TBS game is a bit of a misnomer. It's chiefly a platformer with Final Fantasy Tactics shoved inside it. If you do not like platforming, you will not like this game. General time allotment at 40 hours has been about 70% platforming, 20% theory crafting, and 10% actual combat. Make of that what you will.

The jumping puzzles aren't that complicated in and of themselves, but the "difficulty" comes from how combat encounters are implemented. All encounters are "flames," sprites on the map that will try to run at you, and if they touch the player avatar you enter combat. Typically this means you are given the choice between redoing jumping puzzles to juke a flame or just fighting it.

This is a problem. Flames are easy to dodge when, and only when, you have a relatively wide flat space to do so in. This is to say almost any jumping puzzle, piece of terrain, or some big building/tree/cliff/whatever obscuring your screen will necessitate a combat encounter.

Exploration is a huge element of this game. It's one of the only true open world style games in this genre, and the game is better for it. The dev really nailed the "go anywhere, be anything" feeling. The entire game has that feeling Pokemon Red/Blue has just after you get out of Rock Tunnel and can go to basically anywhere on the map.

That said, the game has major issues in backtracking and direction. God help you if you need to go back somewhere you've been, because you'll be doing the jumping puzzle to get back there.

All of it. Every time.

At 40 hours in I've spent maybe 5-6 hours hopelessly lost with no real idea of where I should go to progress. The "fun of exploration" wears off after you do the same jumping puzzle six times in two hours because you can't figure out where progression is. A walkthrough is almost necessary in its current state; the player absolutely needs some direction.


Combat in the mid game is challenging but really, really fun, but as the game progresses to the top end of the level curve its "challenge" comes from putting the player in situations they can't counter.

That's not a tactical encounter and it's not fun.

Tactics are the outcome of devising plays and counterplays to an opponent's moveset. When the opponent's moveset consists of:

* Cheap, spammable instant KO for your tank unit
* Cheap, spammable mana burn that sets mana to zero. There is no base mana regen in this game.
* Innate counter ability that punishes physical units for attacking
* AOE that hits the entire party, which the dev expects to party wipe or close to it if you haven't debuffed the enemy

...then you are left with no viable options. Discussion forums all point to the jungle area as the point where the game's difficulty spikes-- that is true, but it's not because the tactical threshold has raised. The jungle sucks dookey because the enemy has tools to invalidate every build type in almost every encounter.

From the Jungle onward the game feels less like designing your party and more like figuring out how the dev intended you to design your party.


The game is balanced around the enemy being constantly debuffed. Dev's words, not mine.

This is to say: you can not tank, spank, and support in this game. The archetype simply does not function.

That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but the above-mentioned movesets just create a new trinity, not remove it. You absolutely must run at least two debuffers, a dedicated debuff purger, and a mana goon that recharges everyone's extremely limited, and easily burned, mana. Late game boss fights are almost all battles of attrition to see if you can get their HP to zero before you run out of mana.

This severely limits your party composition. A class without relevant debuffs is essentially unusable in the majority of encounters.

The dev's proposed solution to this difficulty is that you're not supposed to fight everything.

>To those who dislike the difficulty of standard encounters, I have a feeling it might be because you prefer to fight every available mob by choice. Is this true?

Again, dev's words, not mine.

You can not reliably avoid flames. They're frequently hidden offscreen, placed near jumping puzzles where you can't avoid them, or obscured by terrain. I get that this is probably easier to do after 100 hours, but it is not fun spending 100 hours playing an obligate game of chicken in a turn-based strategy title to learn that muscle memory.

The dev's proposed solution to combat tuning is to simply not play the turn-based strategy portion of this turn-based strategy game.


This game has an incredibly fun, engaging, enchanting core that's ruined by balance decisions that favor enemy movesets that the player can not counter at the tactical or strategic layer.

The "problem" with the game is that the dev has balanced combat encounters around the player not participating in them. Late-game combat is not "the game." It's the failure state you enter when you fail the real game-- which is playing frogger with flames on the overworld map.

Difficulty is a symptom, not an issue. Game design choices are the problem.


Crystal Project has ignited my passion and scratched the FFT/FFTA itch like no game has in two decades. It's everything I wished Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark could have been but wasn't. Yes, the game has its issues, but it also has a dev that's taking feedback and clearly put a lot of soul into the game.

I don't write a short thesis on games I don't like. Well done, Andrew.

If you're a TBS fan you absolutely must play this title. It's charming, engaging, and will give you the party comp tetris dreams you've been looking after...if you can get past the infuriating back tracking, terrible end-game design choices, and can handle being lost for 15% of your time in-game. Absolutely a hidden gem.

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Seriously though, buyer beware the issues as they stand as of 5 May 2022. You will walk away from this game in a fury, at least twice, because after wandering aimlessly hoping to find any sense of progression, you backtracked for an hour and fell off a ledge trying to avoid a flame you couldn't see behind terrain, got caught by the enemy you were trying to avoid, then lost a fight to a group of enemies that used two instant KOs on a party of four, set your healer's mana to zero on turn 1, and have a passive counter for more damage than you can do in a turn.

And at the time of writing the dev thinks the way to not have that happen is to ignore the turn-based strategy section of his platformer title whenever possible :)

To his credit he's taking feedback and seems genuinely pleasant, so benefit of the doubt where it's due. I look forward to where this game is in six months, but right now it's..."unfinished" is probably a good word.

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It's my favorite game I've ever seriously considered refunding.