I love a good blended visual novel experience – the kind of game like Ace Attorney where basic story segments are broken up by fun investigation scenes, or something like 13 Sentinels where the dialogue-heavy story is kept fresh by the varied ways it gets presented to you. A story-heavy, dialogue-filled game can be rewarding and endlessly engaging if the presentation keeps things varied enough to grab your attention throughout. I had hoped CRYMACHINA would do that and fall into one of those categories, with it’s major focus on sci-fi storytelling and rich character designs. Unfortunately, it ends up being more of an action RPG with an identity crisis.
CRYMACHINA begins in the modern day, but we aren’t there for long. After seeing a young stylish girl in a hospital room succumb to a deadly disease called Centrifugal Syndrome, we flash forward thousands of years to Eden, an endlessly expanding space station created after the extinction of humanity that houses eight self-evolving machines called Dei ex Machina, with the shared goal of figuring out how to restore humanity. One of those machines, a young girl named Enoa, has decided to use her mastery over the virtual world to create special beings called E.V.E. – reconstructed versions of long-dead humans using Personality Data to restore their memories and feelings, while also equipping them to be super-powerful fighting machines. One of those E.V.E.’s is the girl we saw at the beginning of the game – Leben.
You would expect a dense, multi-layered, heavy sci-fi setting like this to be laid out for you slowly and smoothly, but CRYMACHINA hits you like a freight train – our opening scene in modern times lasts for barely a minute before we’re thrown into the deep end of humanity’s extinction, rogue Dei ex Machina AI, virtual sub-worlds, and the ultimate goal of gathering enough ExP (yes, literally just ExP) to become real humans. It’s hard to feel any kind of investment in Leben’s story or the world as a whole when it’s all thrown at you so haphazardly. The opening hours of the game feel a lot like a mobile gacha game trying to rush you through the world-building so you can get to the part where you spend money on random characters as quickly as possible.
Of course, CRYMACHINA doesn’t have any random gacha mechanics like that. You’ve got three playable characters: amnesiac protagonist Leben, gentle caretaker Ami, and obscure movie-fan tomboy Mikoto. For all the faults of the game’s early world-building, the intimate character moments can be really fun and well-written, like when Mikoto casually name-drops The Matrix and The 6th Day. Between character conversations at your base camp, you’ll pick a character to play as and dive into short, linear levels that progress the story and unlock more dialogue scenes. These levels aren’t very complex, and aren’t very long either, as almost all of them involve fighting a handful of enemies and navigating a few rooms before ending with a fight against either a beefy sub-boss or a proper main boss from the story.
It’s a bit of a Furi style boss-rush game in terms of the pacing of each level, but the boss fights themselves don’t earn that comparison at all. In combat, you can use either melee attacks or over-the-shoulder shooting attacks to fight your foes. It’s an interesting idea that the game doesn’t even try to balance evenly – combat is so geared toward fast-dodging and frantic melee attacks that you’ll rarely find an opportunity to use your guns. There are collectible auxiliary weapons, though, which are shoulder-mounted mini-weapons you can fire off during your melee combos.
Combat is fluid and incredibly flashy on the side of the player, but enemies rarely do much to keep things fresh or engaging. There really isn’t much to boss battles beyond whittling down a massive health bar and dodging hard to read attack animations to trigger parry bonuses. It’s all just barely rewarding enough to keep you moving to the next story scene, but then that scene is loaded with more obtuse world-building that just makes the whole experience feel like a chore.
CRYMACHINA does eventually have some interesting things to say, and the characters do have a lot of really interesting moments of development and revelation. If the way these beats were presented was a little more dynamic, it might not have all felt like such a slog, but despite gorgeous 3D character models, sharp environments, and fluid combat animations, almost every story scene is a flat visual-novel segment with talking character portraits. CRYMACHINA has the tools to be a really gripping, story-first sci-fi experience, but it puts the cart before the horse by trying to cram so much world-building in at the start, and too little gameplay polish to make it worth going on that journey.
