Crystal Heroes

I just read a postmortem on 50+ games from a developer's last four years of work. One of the games was Crystal Heroes. I downloaded the game and tried to play it. The thing complained that a DLL was missing. That's when I paid more attention and saw that you need to have the RMVX RTP installed.

Well I never heard of that acronym. Figured it might be some type of game maker engine or something. Guess I was on the right tracker. I googled around and got to the RPG Maker download page. There were a few options there. I clicked the first one.

To make a long story short, I did not want RPG Maker VX Ace. I needed RPG Maker. Or at least I needed the runtime for that development environment. Once I downloaded and installed it, I could play the game.

There was a lot of dialog that I had to get through. Got a bit tired of pressing the space bar. Then I finally got to the game. After all the dialog, I decided to skip the tutorial. You seem to control one player that has three others follow. I did not seem good at killing monsters. My followers were better at that.

I got through a few screens. Then I arrived at a screen with no visible exit. I did see a shovel on the ground. Figured I needed to pick the thing up. But I did not know how to do that. Darn. I wish I used the tutorial.

This game seemed nice, especially given that it was made with some game maker software. Graphics seemed good enough. It did not hurt that the download was free. Looks like there are many other games to try out from this developer.