Recent reviews by PlaceHolder

maze gameplay

There is no story beyond that.

tl;dr, Good game. Play the 8 hour demo for an indicator of how much you'll enjoy Crystal Project.

It took me 90 hours on Hard to do everything I wanted, and outside of the times I looked at a guide to figure out where a specific NPC was, it was time well spent.

The Combat gives you every piece of information you need, from what the enemy can do, who they're doing it to, what they plan on doing, when they're gonna do it, or how hard the doing is. It's up to you to figure out a plan to undo the doing.
There are plenty of bosses that are tough, and you will need to find a good combination of Jobs and Equipment to get through them. The Template function found in the Save Locations are helpful in this regard.
The penalties for dying/giving up in battle will range from nothing, to negligible, to even beneficial, since it just warps you to your last Save Location at full health, with a paltry amount of money lost.

The Exploration is vast. Completing the demo feels like completing the Tutorial island in Breath of the Wild. Filling out the map for the rest of the world is like unlocking the continents in Elden Ring and saying, "Surely the map can't get any bigger than this?". Fast travel is very limited at first, but eventually, you'll unlock enough options to get where you need to in a short time. As a tip, learn to use map markers, and use them often for save locations, places to check out later, etc.

The Music ranges from serviceable to boppin', and they are recognizable enough to make you say, "Yeah, that's this area". Most or all of the music is royalty-free, and there is a helpful Archive ingame that tells you who made what track.
If, for whatever reason, you can't find a specific song on the internet, you can open a 380 MB .dat file located in Crystal Project\Content\Audio\bgm.dat and manually find the song within using Audacity.

If any part of the game is too hard or too tedious, you can change a specific setting in Assist Options to make the game more bearable for you.
As the game is advertised, there are no missables (with the exception of setting the difficulty to easier levels only, but even that can be changed with Assist Options).

My only serious complaint with this game is that some of the maps are hard to find. For instance, I've completed a lategame dungeon, only to find that the map was in a completely different area.

The developer is quick to address bugs, and he pushes out hotfixes very frequently. This is a sign that he cares very much about his work, and this game isn't going to become abandonware anytime soon.