Crystal Quest – Patrick Buckland/Casady & Greene - 1987 - First time playing?: Yes!

Crystal Quest seems to have quite the reputation among vintage Mac fans. One of the early original breakout hits for the earliest versions of Mac OS, the first game on the platform to be in full colour, widely enjoyed for its unique, fast-paced and easy to pick up and play retro arcade style gameplay, and capable of running on basically anything from System 1 to Mac OS 9.2.2. I thought for sure, given the age of this game, that Crystal Quest was going to require me to break out Mini vMac yet again. Much to my surprise, it works perfectly on Mac OS 9.2.2, even on a 1.25ghz G4 processor. Getting colour working took a bit of figuring out, requiring holding the option key while the game starts up to bring up an extra options menu, but once you've done that you're good to go. Usually something breaks when you play Mac games this old on 9.2.2, usually the sound, but no such issues with Crystal Quest.

What do you do in Crystal Quest? Well, you move a circular ship around the screen with the mouse and collect crystals while avoiding mines and enemies. Collect all the crystals and then the exit portal at the bottom of the screen opens up to allow you to progress to the next level and… that's kind of it. Don't touch the mines or the enemies or else you'll die. Don't touch the walls either, that’ll also make you die. You can shoot in the direction your ship is moving in by clicking, or you can use one of your finite screen-clearing smart bombs by pressing the space key. Very, very simple, at least in concept.

Movement is a bit tricky to get the hang of, as the ship you're controlling doesn't move 1-to-1 with your mouse movements like a cursor would. Your mouse simply steers the ship in the direction you move it, and as a result there's quite a bit of inertia to your movements to get a feel for before the controls really click. Your ship needs to decelerate to come to a stop before it can start flying 180 degrees in the opposite direction, that kind of thing. In general the acceleration feels slightly off, with building up speed having a strangely stilted and jittery feel to it. Starting out, simply exiting the level is the hardest challenge the early stages have to throw at you, as the exit portal is narrow and touching the walls of the gate kills you instantly, requiring some needle threading that can be tough without some practice.

There's another classic arcade styled Mac game this reminds me of by the name of battle-girl, which in addition to just being a banger of a game in general that I need to do a review of at some point (if I can manage to beat it, game’s tough), also uses mouse-based steering for moving your ship, similar to Crystal Quest. Personally I think battle-girl feels a lot smoother, but it's hardly a fair comparison considering Crystal Quest is over a decade older than battle-girl. Crystal Quest does fine with its movement controls, especially for the time period it came out in. With a little practice, it starts feeling natural enough and you’ll be slipping through the exit portal effortlessly. It's easy to forget just how much of a novelty it was to be able to control a game with a mouse in 1987, back when mice were only just starting to get widespread usage, and Crystal Quest is an early demonstration of the wider and more precise range of movements a mouse can offer over a keyboard or d-pad.

So movement is fine, but I feel less positively about shooting controls. You can only shoot in the direction that you are currently moving in, and it feels imprecise. You don’t have a crosshair to get an idea of where you’re aiming, nor does your ship rotate in any way to indicate which direction the guns are facing visually. You instead simply have to go off of the direction the ship is moving, which due to the inertia and steering controls mentioned before, results in you often shooting in a slightly different direction to the direction you’re currently moving the mouse in. The small projectiles you fire also have small hitboxes that mean you need to be extremely accurate to land your shots, all the while enemies are erratically zipping around the screen with such speed and intensity that it often feels better to just avoid them and focus on getting all the crystals and bailing before too many of them spawn in. The game is designed for this speedy playstyle anyway, granting the player extra points if the stage is finished under a certain time.

I'll be honest however; when it comes to gameplay, I don't find Crystal Quest particularly compelling for more than a few short bursts. I think it's fine for what it is, I wouldn’t call it bad, but it just doesn't really hook me personally the same way other simple arcade-style games on Mac such as Apeiron, battle-girl or Pipe Dream did. The core gameplay loop is very simple, as outlined earlier, so the way Crystal Quest ramps up its difficulty level is by simply increasing the number of enemies and mines on screen more and more each round until the game becomes unplayably chaotic and fast, at which point my interest starts to fizzle out. Difficulty by acceleration is the tradition of the classic arcade games that Crystal Quest is clearly inspired by, yet in games like Pac-Man and Galaxian, in spite of the difficulty increasing to brutal heights until you either game over or hit the kill screen, those games still have some rhyme and reason to the way the enemy AI behaves and can be manipulated by the player, which prevents the game from descending into a completely unpredictable mess of RNG, keeping the game fair while still being hard. Crystal Quest meanwhile ramps up the difficulty by randomly spawning in randomly moving enemies that can also randomly spawn in bouncing balls that ricochet off walls, never go away and are completely invulnerable to anything except your own bombs, and this has the potential to happen either once every ten seconds or ten times in a single second all depending on the whims of the RNG.

Each level in Crystal Quest has a set of parameters that determine how many crystals and mines will be randomly placed across the screen for you to collect and avoid, as well as what enemies can spawn in from the left and right gates. As for what happens within those parameters? That’s entirely up to RNG. The positions of the crystals and bombs are placed randomly, how often enemies spawn in is also random (to an extent; the enemy spawning rate does increase on higher levels, but it’s still RNG dependent), what enemy will spawn in is random unless you’re on a level that only has a single enemy type, whether that enemy will spawn in from the left or the right is also random, and many of the erratic patterns that some enemies move in also seem to be some degree of random as well. The end result is that how hard a level is ends up being more or less up to chance. Sometimes crystals will be wedged in between a cluster of mines that makes them near impossible to get without something blowing up. Sometimes a crystal will spawn right next to one of the enemy portals, at which point it’s a total coin toss as to if you’ll be able to pick it up easily or if a swarm of enemies pour out of the portal right as you try to approach it, killing you instantly. Sometimes the game is just plain unfair, but sometimes it just hands you a victory, with even higher levels occasionally having barely any enemies spawn in simply because you got lucky with the RNG.

What doesn’t help is just how annoying the enemies in question are. Aside from their erratic movements, they also fill the screen with even more chaos with rapid fire shots, place even more mines, fire infinitely bouncing projectiles and fill the screen with laser beams. I like these enemy ideas on paper, but they don’t really suit the game in question, and the randomness doesn’t help matters either. When the screen is filled with dozens of different fast, unpredictable enemies with complex attack patterns, I start to find the game impossible to keep track of or parse, and I say this as someone who enjoys bullet hell games. Atempting to fight back is generally a lost cause, thanks to the previously mentioned shooting control issues. The enemies are fast and can kill you with contact damage, while you need a few seconds to line up and fire a slow moving projectile that your target will have already done laps around by the time you finally shoot it in the right direction. The fact that you can only shoot in the direction you’re moving in means that in order to aim at enemies you have to fly directly into them, which gets all the more annoying when the Parasites are introduced, as they actively chase you and hunt you down, giving you very little of a window of opportunity to get shots in, especially in the midst of all the other chaos going on on-screen at the same time. Besides, in the time it takes you to kill a single enemy, the portals likely will have already spawned in five more to replace it.

To be clear, the game being hard isn’t the problem, as much as its lack of balancing is the issue. It doesn't feel like much thought was put into how the different enemies play off one another and the challenges they present the player with when combined, instead leaving that kind of design up to RNG to decide. This is the kind of game that showers you in dozens of extra lives to make up for the fact that losing them becomes near unavoidable as the game progresses. It prevents the game from feeling too punishing at the very least, making it viable for the average player to get far enough to see all the different enemies and mechanics that are introduced as you progress, such as the moving goal portal that’s introduced later on. There’s also genuine satisfaction in managing to rack up a ton of lives, seeing your lives count go higher and higher with repeated attempts, allowing you to push a little further through the chaotic late stages. Furthermore, those moments when you do manage to swerve through every hazard gracefully and speedily are genuinely satisfying. Your hand-eye coordination really gets put to the test here.

You know what else this game has? The sound of a woman orgasming every single time you finish a level. I thought it was so weird and quirky when Apeiron also used an orgasm sound effect, but now I see what an unoriginal hack of a game it truly is since Crystal Quest beat Apeiron to this claim to fame by eight years. It sure makes threading through the small opening of the exit portal feel a hell of a lot more Freudian. Much like Apeiron, there is also quite a bit of humour not just in its sound effects, but also in its bestiary and instructions. I think Apeiron is much funnier however. Maybe it's just that Apeiron’s cast are actual characters with silly personalities, while Crystal Quest’s rogue's gallery consists of a wide selection of abstract shapes that almost kind of look like something that could kill you. Again, however, an unfair comparison considering the eight-year gap between the two games. I could complain that the abstractness and small size of the sprites makes the different enemy types difficult to tell apart at a glance, especially when they’re moving around so fast, but Crystal Quest is also literally the first colour game released on Mac, so the fact that they have colours at all is impressive for the time. Plus, the multicoloured glowing crystal effect is honestly kind of mesmerising.

I guess in general, that “it's an unfair comparison” sentiment is how I feel about Crystal Quest in general. I can see how this could have been addicting for the time, with the novel control scheme and its fast-paced unique arcade action that averts the usual trap of just doing a one-to-one clone of an existing more popular arcade game. For me however, it just doesn't quite have the lasting appeal of its inspirations or much later successors. If you're on Mac OS 9, I’d sooner recommend battle-girl. If you're exclusively a user of classic Motorola 68000 Macintoshes however? Then Crystal Quest is a solid option.

And if you’re into the gameplay of Crystal Quest? Then you also have access to the Critter Editor. This is an extra little application included with Crystal Quest which is essentially a debug mode of sorts. Here, you can edit the parameters of the game such as what enemies spawn in which levels, how aggressive individual enemies are, tweak the controls, speed and acceleration of your ship, edit the sprites, reposition the portals and so on. This is also where I discovered that Crystal Quest actually has a finite amount of levels. There’s only 40 individual “waves” present in the Critter Editor, so if you can make it to level 40, that’s the end of the game. As a result, I got determined to see what happens after level 40 in Crystal Quest. Is there an ending? Does anything happen at all? Now that I know there’s an end, I have to know.

And in my quest to reach level 40, I discovered what a game breaker the save function is.

At any time during gameplay you can press the command+S key combination to save your progress. I figured that this would simply save what level you are currently at, but as it turns out, it’s far more powerful than that. Your save file keeps track of how many points you have, how many lives and bombs you have and even how many of the crystals in the current level you’ve collected. This means if you collect half of the crystals in a level, save, quit the game and then reload your save, those crystals will still be collected. It’s not just a save state however, because every time you reload a save it also despawns all of the enemies, effectively working as an infinite-use bomb with no penalty. This is an odd addition for this kind of game, honestly. For such an arcadey score attack focused game, I’d expect something like this to disqualify you from the leaderboards (like the previously reviewed Glider Pro), but nope, savescum all you want and you’ll be able to submit your final score to the high score table. This also made me realise just how RNG-dependent the enemy spawns are, since reloading a save of the exact same level can still result in vastly different amounts of enemies spawning in. Either way this allowed me to beat level 40 with, um, 49 lives and 45 bombs. Okay, maybe I didn’t need to savescum that hard in retrospect. But either way, that’s the final level of Crystal Quest completed! What lies beyond that?

Oh, uh, it just keeps looping level 40 infinitely, turns out.

Which as it turns out, if I just clicked the help button on the Critter Editor, I would have already known.

Hey, I’ve still probably got the only site on Neocities with a screenshot of level 41 of Crystal Quest, at least.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 23rd October 2025