Crystal Catacombs

My first few runs in Crystal Catacombs told me everything about who this game is for. You drop into a procedurally generated room, sword in hand, a countdown hourglass already bleeding out in the corner, and no one explains a single thing to you. There is no tutorial. The game just stares at you and waits. If that sentence made you lean forward instead of backward, you're probably the target audience. Developed by Levels or Lives and published by Crescent Moon Games, Crystal Catacombs is a 2D roguelike platformer that stitches together influences from Mega Man, Castlevania, and Metroid into something that calls itself a "Megavanian." You play as Captain Vasil Ravencraft, a swashbuckling explorer venturing through five distinct Crystal Realms: the gothic Keepenstein, the humid Lost Jungle, the frozen Ice Fortress, the volcanic Pitt, and the deeply unsettling Deep Darkness. Each realm has its own enemy roster, visual identity, and boss waiting at the end. In Normal mode you pick your realm order and carry five lives. Step up to Hero or Rogue mode and you're down to three lives or one, with Rogue randomly shuffling your world order for good measure. A Survival mode rounds things out if you just want to see how long you last. The pixel art is the part of this game that nobody argues about. It's handcrafted, colourful without being garish, and the monsters have real personality to them. Zombies and spike walls in the castle feel genuinely different from the alien terrors of Deep Darkness, and that aesthetic range is one of the things Crystal Catacombs does best. The chiptune OST by MaskedEpsilon is pleasant company, functional and fitting even if it doesn't lodge itself into your memory the way a Shovel Knight track would. Where the craftsmanship starts to wobble is in the mechanics. Items like a whip (a Belmont nod so obvious it barely counts as a wink), a fireball, and a Wave Beam do genuinely alter how you approach a room, but the total pool of weapons and consumables is thin. You'll have seen most of what the game offers within your first handful of runs, and the RPG layer of XP, skill points, and gold rarely communicates what it's actually doing for you. The levelling feels decorative more than strategic. The controls are the conversation Crystal Catacombs has been having with itself since its Kickstarter beta days, and the community still hasn't reached a consensus. Momentum-based jumping that locks your arc mid-air, wall-jumping that feels inconsistent under pressure, and a starter sword that chews through your health bar more than the enemies do: these are not quirks you learn to love, they're friction that compounds with the existing roguelike pressure. A gamepad helps, noticeably, and the game is clearly designed with one in mind. Negative player feedback around controls is the single most consistent thread across reviews. Boss fights carry their own complications: some bosses feature one-hit-kill attacks in a game that also gives you an HP bar, which creates an odd dissonance between the design's promises and its execution. And yet. There is something honest and handmade about Crystal Catacombs that I find genuinely affecting. The roguelike structure is more considered than many games that bolt the word onto their store page as an afterthought. The five worlds are diverse enough that clearing Keepenstein really does leave you unprepared for the Pitt. The boss fights, when they're not springing insta-kills, are legitimately tense set-pieces. The pixel art alone is the kind of painstaking solo-craftwork I will always respect. This is a game made by people who love the classics and wanted to build something in that tradition, and that love is legible in every screen. It's just sitting in a chassis that doesn't fully deliver on the heart inside it. Approach it as a curio from a passionate small team, not as a polished genre entry, and you may find more to enjoy than the mixed reception suggests.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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