Kristala Review

[Silverwing]

Hello there! I want to start off by saying, I've been following this game for many years. I had met one of the founders of Astral Clocktower Studios during a games expo back in 2019, and instantly fell in love with the game and her ideas. Later I had joined the discord server, and eventually became a team member in regards to both marketing, as well as playtesting. However, due to a variety of things, I had left the team entirely, but still held a deep respect for the developers of this game, and an excitement for the game I so eagerly awaited. I am one of the original fans of this game, hailing back to the days the game was in it's infantcy. However, with all this in mind, this review will be as transparent as possible. So let's dive in, shall we?

Kristala is an action RPG whose inspiration is greatly derived from the team's love for the games that Fromsoft have made. These games include, Dark Souls, Sekiro, and Bloodborne. The mechanics are a combination of all of these games, and then some, taking liberties to make them unique to Kristala.

The game is in, as you can see, early access. As such it is currently undergoing active development. You pay for the game once, then you can access all content that is in the game until it's completion, as it releases. It's going for an episodic release structure, where every so often they will update the game in little episodes. Future ones you never have to pay for once you've bought the game. This is great for you because it's pay once keep forever. And great for the devs because it builds trust and confidence in their players. With every episode a new biome, clan, and/or various other things will be added in. For this review we are going to be exploring chapter 1 mostly. Currently, chapter 2 is out with chapter 3 being slated to drop sometime in June as per the roadmap. But this doesn't mean this is update number 2. No in fact we are on update number 5, with chapter 3 being 6.

The world is that of dark fantasy. You play as a Raksakan, a warrior chosen to achieve some great purpose. The people of Kristala are that of anthropomorphic animals, the majority of which are felines. You play as one of these felines, with you main foe being that of rats.

Now before anyone says anything, yes I'm in the furry fandom. However, I can 100% confirm that the developers are not part of that fandom, nor is that fandom the ispiration behind the game's character design. They simply really love their cats. As a group of cat moms and dads, the founders especially, they wanted to make a game that heavily focuses on the cat and mouse dynamic, but with a twist. I love this idea and it's one of the many ideas which sold me on the game all those years ago when I first met the founder of ACS, Allie.

With all that being said, the game isn't without it's flaws sadly.

First off, while the game runs relatively fine on my system, in the game's current build. However, I have noticed that even on an SSD, the game has rather longh loading times. I also experience an issue where the world, save for a few assets, pretty much unload, and take a while to reload. I'm unsure what causes this problem. My PC specs are as follows.

Os: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12GB VRAM Overclock Edition
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core 3.7ghz
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Storage: 1 TB m.2 SSD

As you can see, it meets the recommended system specs. Other than this loading issue, I'd say it runs just fine on my setup. I can even stream the game via discord with little issue.

Now I'm not going to go into the nitty gritty of my play by play here. I'm just going to list out the things below that just really stuck out to me. Both the good and the bad, in no particular order. This isn't a pros vs cons style of review. It's a broad overview of the things that the game has presented to me that just made the biggest impacts, as well as some suggestions to the developers. I don't expect these suggestions to taken to heart, they are just my insights with the game, and my many years of playing similar style games. They are purely suggestions, not expectations.

Upon starting the game, you are greeted by an NPC. They tell you that you have to go and meet with scout or something at large tree because they haven't shown up yet. This sets you off into the game's first location, a corrupted forest of sorts.

Moving past the NPC, you encounter the game's version of Bonfires from Dark souls called Elarial Fonts. You also get a tutorial pop up telling you about these. I want to note, that for every single tutorial window there's supposed to be a little video or image showing an example of the points explained in the text. These never actually worked for me, and showed only a white window. Back to the Fonts though.

These fonts allow you to rest and recover, use your experience, called Kris, to level up, and use other resources to learn skills. We'll speak more on the level up process and stats later.

The idle animations, while cute and thoughtful, happen way too often. They should be spaced further apart, and also take longer to initiate when standing idle. Luckily, these are disabled when talking to NPCs, in a conversation that locks you in place, such as one where you make responses. However, conversations where you can still move your chartacter still allow the playback of these idle animations. This creates an issue, because your character can make little cat sounds, which overlaps with the NPCs voices.

The animations for movement such as walking, climbing, jumping, ect are sublime. I'm very impressed with them so far. They really make you feel like an acrobatic cat with how swift and precise they are. I do love the fact that the world is also designed around this with many different paths to take towards your goal. The attacking animations are also fairly well done from what I can see. Even the enemy animations are really fluid. Some enemy animations, like the "husk" enemies the player first encounters as nothing more than traning dummies, have pretty fluid animations with their claw swipes. However, I have noticed that when crouching and then doing a backstep with your weapons sheathed, it will draw the weapons, but then attach them to the contact points in a very unnatural way. Simply attacking fixes this, but it was just something I noticed.

Speaking of stealth, the steath options are great as well. Though I have noticed that sometimes enemies will still detect you even when crouched and out of their line of site. I'm not sure what is triggering detection, but that's really my only issue. It feels great to sneak up behind a foe and slash their throat open with your claws. It also feels great to land an aerial stealth move impaling your sword through them.

As for the controls, they are very similar to other games of a similar nature. Though... I have one issue. The sprint button is mapped to toggle on the left stick and the crouch button is mapped to holding down the B button. Which you can have sprint set to hold or toggle, I've yet to find a way to remap it to holding down the B button. Simply adding sprint to B and setting it to hold causes me to quckstep first then sprint. Not a huge fan of this personally. But once actually getting used to the controls, they feel good. They are responsive, and I like that you have weapon skills as well as spells mapped to different locations.

The menus in the game are actually pretty nice. When accessing the inventory menu for example, the game does pause, which is really nice. In these menus, you can find your gear, items, info logs, ect. I do have somewhat of an issue regarding how stat changes are displayed though. Highlighing different armor or weapon types doesn't really make it easy to know what the different benefits of each individual item are. Sure there are green and red numbers on the item's description, but these aren't reflected at all in the character stats unless the item is actually equipped. I also can't seem to find a way to examine my stats to learn what they do in the pause menu, and doing so in character creation simply didn't function.

Speaking of character creation, it's a mixed bag really. You can choose between your class, which determines your starting stats, and gear, and your clan of cat, which determines your starting spell tree. The classes for consist of Warrior, Shaman, Knight, Battlemage, Assassin, and Spellblade. I'm not about to explain what each one does though. The button for inspecting stats doesn't seem to function at all though, sadly. Which makes it very hard to figure out what each stat does, especially when you have stats with unusual names.

As for what is available in terms of customization, you can currently choose from three different clans of cats. The forest dwelling Nisargans, the dark and battle hardened Myrtunan, and the northern ice hunters Tandaran. All three of which are pretty similar in their design sadly. The only real differnce is the eye color, which is a bright green for the Nisargan, deep purple for Myrtunan, and light blue for Tandaran. Though I didn't play around with the Nisargan or Myrtunan, I did with the Tandaran. The color options for the all three are based off real life cat color pattarns from, simple black ranging all the way to calico and russian blue. It's pretty neat. As much as I do like this however, I wish that there were more options to play with. There's no way to change body shape aside from "type a" (female) and "type b" (male). There aren't any traditonal hair options as one would think, and instead a setting to change fur length between long and short. There is no inbetween.

As much as I personally find the designs interesting, I do feel that there should be more options at some point. Things like having the option to have hair, or alter body shape, or eye color would be nice. I know that down the line more clans are going to be introduced but these are more flavor rather than style at this point without any major differences, aside from what spells you start with. Also, this is purely a minor nitpick on my end, but the tails are placed far too low on the body. They should be at the base of the lower back just above were the buttocks start. Where they are currently placed is pretty much in the center of their buttcheeks.

Let's talk about leveling now. The leveling process is like a combination of the Dark Souls games and Sekiro. As you kill enemies, you gain Kris, which is purely experience. When you reach a certain threshold you level up. Then you may spend this level at the Fonts to increse one of your various stat attributes. These attributes are Vitality, Willpower, Endurance, Stregnth, Finesse, Eminence, and Malediction. I'll break them down below.

Vitality is what is says. It increases your health.

Willpower increases your total mana.

Enurance increases your balance and equip load.

Strength increases your damage with strength based weapons like greatswords and sword & shield.

Finesse increases your damage with finesse based weapons like claws.

Eminence increases the effectiveness of eminence magic.

Malediction increases the effectiveness of malediction magic and your overall spellpower.

Now, while these are all interesting, as mentioned above, the menus don't really give you the information you need. I don't know what Eminence or Malediction magic is, or how to tell them apart from each other. But I'm guessing based off a pure hunch, Eminence are indirect spells like buffs or healing, and Maleditction are things that are more direct, like dealing damage or debuffs. This is purely based of the name however.

When you put a level into these attributes various things happen. Your total level increases, as well as the different stats associated with the attribute you increased. For example if you point a point in Vitality, your health will increase by an ammount, but so do other more minor stats like mana. However, if you place a point into willpower your mana will increase by a good bit, and your health will only increase by a small amount. This system is similar to other games like Nioh, where placing a point in one attribute will increase various stats minorly, but one specific stat majorly.

I will also say that the equip load feature doesn't work in the current build. It'll never update properly, and it doesn't seem to affect you in any way if it's heavy, light or so on. I tested this on a few different classes which start off with different weights, and none of them showed any difference. It always seems like you're treated as light weight. This is also being addressed internally and will be fixed later on.

All of this is pretty neat. My only problems stem from the lack of information needed to really make an informed decision with some things like what types of magic are what. This type of information is crucial to know with this type of game where you actually have to build your character.

Let's discuss the experience points now. As mentioned above, Kris are your experience points. When they reach a certain threshold you level up. Once you level up, should you die, you keep that level, but lose all remaining Kris. Much like games like Dark Souls this is supposed to drop for you to go back and retrieve, which it does. Your "soul" for lack of a better word, is actually pretty neat. It looks like your character model. Which I like.

In addition to leveling up and using weapons, there is also magic as mentioned before. However, to learn magic you have to find items called Kris Pearls, which can be consumed at a Font to learn spells. The kind of spells you can learn are entirely based upon the clan of cat you chose during character creation. The one I chose, Tandaran, seems to focus on more ice magic, like Ice Punch and Crystal Bow. I like this, but... it creates a possible issue as well. Having spells locked behind a specific clan that you can not change without starting over again is limiting. This sorta ties into character builds, and not understanding what does what, as the spells don't say what they scale off of. I'm not sure if they have a way to learn spells from other clans, but if not, it would be cool if they did so. Something like finding a spell tutor for each clan would be cool, or as a quest reward of some kind like a spell book.

During my exploration of the game, I did encounter a small issue that has prevented a side quest from being completed in the current build. At some point you meet a woman who asks you to get some scrolls for her from a nearby flooded village. To access some of these scrolls you have to climb some vines to get into the attic of a building to clear away some corruption. Sadly in the current build, you fall off the vines as you near the top and can't actually get inside the attic. This is being addressed as soon as possible, but I figured I'd mention it.

I have encountered a single boss during my playthrough for this review, and I have to say, the boss fight was actually a load of fun. It took the form of a walking fishman and used a combination of magic attacks, and swings from it's staff. I felt like it was definitely a decent test of my affinity for the parry system, as well as being able to nimbly dodge spell attacks. Definitely a winner in my book.

While there is much more to chapter 1, I do think this about covers enough about the game to be informative.

Over all, this game as been a charm to play through. Once you get passed the roughness of some of the game's issues, it's a really fun romp. Definitely something you should give your time to. It's pretty enjoyable, a load of fun, and just really pretty to look at, despite the darkness of the color palette. This game definitely gets my recommendation, and I look forward to watching Kristala and the lovely people of Astral Clocktower Studios grow.

[DoAGenerator]

Phew, this is a lot to read. Appreciate the very in depth review