it's kinda funny, cuz about a week ago I asked in the thread do you have it and was going to give you a key, but you never answered, so I assumed you do.
Ah, I must have missed it. Oftentimes I just scan through the posts rather than reading each one. Probably would have been better as a PM. That said...
Some impressions for
Crystals in Time (you know it's an early hidden object game cause they hadn't put colons in the title yet! ....Oh wait, as I discovered, it's NOT early! It just feels that way!)
The story: You play Ashley Ford, a moderately attractive thief. She describes it as a "hobby," but she never explains if she actually has another job, or if she subscribes to the Alan Wake idea that "stealing can be a hobby or a job!" Her father, Francis Ford
Coppola, is an adventurer and "collector" - again, she's already pointed out she's a thief, why is she being coy about her father's profession? - who's been missing for ten years and Ashley finds a clue and a crystal going through her father's stuff. So off you go to Three Oak Mansion, to find daddy and ... not steal anything from the mansion. Hunh.
Making Ashley's father a thief makes sense - it's why he'd be purloining a crystal and breaking into an abandoned mansion - but making Ashley a thief messes up the story. "I need a key to open that door." Bitch, you're a thief, you can't pick the lock? "I need something to cut that glass." Bitch, you're a thief, you don't own a glass cutter? You find rubies, sapphires, and a diamond ring, but you stick them into doors and the thought doesn't enter your head to take the gems back after you've opened the door? Worst. Thief. Ever. So...yeah that's the story. The ending is super abrupt, which I suppose is the only way you can make an ending when there are zero cutscenes.
The gameplay and puzzles: Dated. There are rotating disc puzzles, but you don't actually rotate them: you click and they move a set amount There's no "close enough" re-adjustment, it's just trial-and-error clicking. Oh, and if you overshoot it by one click? Better click a shit-ton more since you can only move it in one direction. There's little to no animation, which really hurts the game: you cut wires and remove a fuse from a fusebox, but when you exit the minigame, the streetlight it's attached to stays on. You cut boards out of a dock, but the dock is perfectly intact after you do that. If you had told me this game came out in 2007, I could let some of this slide...but it came out in 2013! That's just unacceptable.
The hidden-object scenes are easy enough, but they made a weird design decision where, once you find an object, its name in the list disappears and the ones after it get moved up, rather than the name greying out and all the other words stay put. It's pretty off-putting to see the list words changing positions.
There's a neat little gimmick where you click the time crystal to go back in time and see an area as it used to be. Which is cool and all (and has been done in other games like the Time Mysteries trilogy) but you only do it in two or three rooms, and it doesn't seem to affect anything in the present - it's just another step. It should have been explored more.
The graphics: Things LOOK okay, but there's a lot of missing context. Take this room for example:
Okay, I need to solve a puzzle to go to that first door on the left, the boarded-up door never gets opened (even though I own a crobar and an axe,) the end of the hall has a window...so far so good. But did you notice that there's actually a passage to the right of the window? I sure as fuck didn't. I clicked the hint button to figure out what to do next and got a picture of a room I'd never seen before. Didn't tell me how to get there. I actually had to find a walkthrough to know where to go. Wouldn't have figured that out in a million years. They could have made it clearer. And that's just one example. There are others, like a lantern bracket that doesn't tell you what it is when you click on it...you're just supposed to know that you can hang a lantern there, I guess.
The audio: There's no voice acting, so get that out of your head right now. The music is alright. The sound effects are jarring at times. The "pencil scratching" noise once spooked me after I was working on one of those rotating disc puzzles. No pleasant chime or visual effect, just a fade to black with a pencil scratch and I was like "what did I do?!" Also, by far the worst in the audio thing, whenever you click a hidden object correctly, there's a chime, followed by an odd clicking/tapping sound in the left ear. I kept thinking the tower was making the sound, but nope, just an audio glitch. It got annoying real fast.
The dialogue: Very little to speak of, since you don't see anybody else in the game. But boy howdy, spelling and grammar errors EVERYWHERE. Go to the kitchen for a "carot," or get a "saphire" for the door. My favourite, however, is the "Gardensheed trophy." I'm not sure if it should go under dialogue or story, or even puzzles, but there was a cipher puzzle that revealed the location of the green crystal. You go to that location, and you're rewarded with...the pink crystal. Seriously? The dude went to all that trouble to encode his message and he didn't even know the correct colour of the crystal he had hidden?
The length: 2.5 hours. I did it on easy mode, but even with that it was convoluted and I needed to lean on the hint button to figure out where to go next. I don't recommend hard mode.
The verdict: As I said, feels years older than it is. The very definition of shovelware. It's not the worst HOG I've ever played but it's DAMN close. Avoid.