"A pleasant, innocuous movie distilled into a commendable technical effort"

Dark Crystal, a graphic/text adventure by Sierra based somewhat rigidly on Jim Henson's animated movie of the same name, is a very solid effort, albeit more a technical than a creative success. The game reined in the excesses of its predecessor Time Zone(four disk sides to Time Zone's twelve) yet still managed to provide enough images and action. The plot is that you, as Jen the Gelfling, must bring back the shard to the main part of the Dark Crystal and make it whole to remove the Skeksis' power over the land. It will not be easy, as the Skeksis know the prophecy that a Gelfling will defeat them and are still paranoid even after having purged many Gelflings. Along the way to the Skeksis' castle where the crystal is held, you have a test with the wise Aughra to determine which of several stones is the Dark Crystal, you discover Kira, a female Gelfling, and her pet Fizzgig, and you must continually outmaneuver the Garthim, slow but powerful attack drones of the Skeksis. I found the movie to be a bit tame with the occasional burst of inspiration(perhaps after seeing promotional previews for every single Muppet movie on the rental tape I got, anything would be a downer,) but the game seemed to draw on the inspired parts rather well and put forth a strong effort that negated the slightly too movie-based puzzles and linear game flow. All the puzzles require the use of magic or something creative(a two pronged flute or a lily pad or a sceptre, which is not in the movie) and the cut-scenes where you talk to your master or Aughra are really quite nice.

Game control is far beyond that of Mission:Asteroid although there is some awkward disk-switching; given how the game progresses linearly, some scenes don't seem as logically broken up as they could be, and you'll need to change from disk 1b to 2a and back a few times to get through the game, although the one-way trip into the castle(disk 2b) is well planned. However, the parser has finally distinguished GET/TAKE, you can actually be sure what the items you need to take are, and graphics do not get as much in the way of the small text boxes as much as in previous hi-res adventures.

The graphics are the strong point of the game. While previous Sierra games had slightly caricatured drawings of backgrounds, and people were either smiling stick figures regardless of intent to kill you or, being dead, they had X's for eyes, everything is more serious here. The main character actually appears as well; Jen is probably slightly ugly by human standards, but he is very realistically drawn for black/white(contrasting nicely with the very colorful backgrounds) and his presence in every scene adds a reality; you'll frequently see him falling, running or ducking or looking quizzical(i.e. you have a puzzle to solve.) Kira, Aughra, the Skeksis and Garthim are featured as well in various poses. The graphics can thus convey more urgency than a text message saying ''You need to hurry or you'll get killed!'' and the need to scroll to see the rest of the text. The scenes of the odd land Jen inhabits are also nice to look at, and frequently locations will change their appearance as a result of NPC's arriving; that change may give you a visual hint as to how to proceed. There are even situations where the game dispenses with graphics; during a long speech, the graphics clear, you see a body of text at once, and only when you return do you see a nice graphic. This is a simple but effective innovation.

It's interesting that Sierra needed a game based on a children-oriented movie to produce a mature product. Although the game doesn't feature killer puzzles, you sense that the graphics were given serious time, and Sierra had made a less spastic multi-disk game than Time Zone. Not that the old stick figures aren't charming but I suppose if they had never experimented they'd never have gone on to better things. Dark Crystal did that even if it lost a bit of spontaneity along the way, the exception being the puzzle with the sceptre at the end. The spontaneity reappeared with King's Quest, which had more sophisticated graphics. Well, relatively.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/30/01, Updated 10/30/01