• Crystal City
  

  11 hours playtime

  6 of 6 achievements

Crystal City is a kinetic adult visual novel, meaning that there is a fixed story with no choices but many sex scenes.

I enjoyed the art, with new and appropriate (if low detail) backgrounds and very nice character models.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this based on the writing. I appreciated that the novel tried to create a new and unusual world, with some interesting sci-fi trappings, but it never did anything interesting with the setting or really explored it, and seemed to trip over itself at the end in the rush to reach a conclusion and throw out some surprises as the structure and logic seemed to collapse under the burden. It felt like it was written by a teenage boy.

I actively disliked the main character, initially presented as a nerd stereotype, who was unsympathetic throughout and whose actions often seemed to come out of nowhere. Every female is presented as the eroge cliche of being there solely to be saved by the main character (and for sex), but without anything interesting to show for it or your interactions (as you might find in a better VN such as Katawa Shoujo).

This VN was also filled with spelling and grammatical errors that greatly increased as the novel went on, such that by the end almost every line contained some kind of error.

There is also a brief room-escape scene, which involves (mostly) randomly clicking on parts of the background in hopes of clicking on something useful, then combining the few inventory objects to then click those on the background. I didn’t feel it added anything to the VN.